Guide to Club Level & Concierge Lounges at Disney World

Is Club Level at Walt Disney World worth the money? This guide answers that, with reviews of the best concierge lounges in hotels, VIP services, pros & cons, and more. We also have an update on Club Level, and what the experience is like now. (Updated January 19, 2023.)

Without question, the biggest benefit of Club Level at Walt Disney World is the concierge lounges. We used to have mixed thoughts on these, but have endeavored to stay at every Club Level resort as our recent experiences have been much more favorable. It seems Disney is stepping up its game to better compete with real world luxury hotels. Here are our Club Level Lounge reviews thus far–click each to see lounge & food photos, plus full commentary about each:

• Atrium Club Level in Disney’s Contemporary Resort
• Chronos Club Level in Gran Destino Tower at Coronado Springs Resort
• Kilimanjaro Club Level in Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge
• King Kamehameha Club Level in Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort
• Old Faithful Club Level in Disney’s Wilderness Lodge
• Stone Harbor Club Level in Disney’s Beach Club Resort

These Club Level Lounges each serve coffee, continental breakfast, light afternoon snacks, hors d’oeuvres at dinner time, and dessert & cordials late at night. In our opinion, the lounge is the main reason to book a Club Level resort stay at Walt Disney World, with the food quality and concierge lounge atmosphere being the most important factors to consider. We cover these things in meticulous detail in each of our reviews…

One of the first things to understand about Club Level at Walt Disney World is that it’s not the same as concierge or executive levels at upper echelon chained-brand hotels. If you’re accustomed to the treatment you receive at Park Hyatt, Conrad, Four Seasons, or other real-world luxury hotels that are comparably priced to Disney Deluxes, you’re in for disappointment.

Those brands are renowned for unparalleled attention to detail, guest service, anticipating needs, and going above and beyond to deliver a superlative stay. They’ll book difficult dining reservations, assist with planning, and help make the experience memorable and stress-free. There are myriad ways this is accomplished at real-world hotels, but the salient point is that if you’re expecting Four Seasons or Park Hyatt concierge quality from Disney…don’t.

You really need to use a third-party Authorized Disney Vacation Planner for that type of service and even then, it’s not the same since they’re third party intermediaries. Here’s the Authorized Disney Vacation Planner that we recommend!

For Club Level stays at Walt Disney World, you will usually receive an email from Concierge Resort Cast Members prior to your trip to introduce themselves and assist with an itinerary. Whether you actually receive this correspondence is hit or miss, and it’s often sent out after dining and other reservation windows have already opened–and the most coveted options are booked up.

If you want or need this type of concierge planning assistance, relying upon the Concierge Resort Cast Members at Walt Disney World would not be our recommended course of action. At best, they’re going to spend a couple of hours providing boilerplate advice and perhaps reserve you whatever’s readily available in terms of ADRs at their convenience. They can also help a bit upon arrival at the in-person desk, but by then, it’s usually too late. (These Cast Members do not have priority access to dining reservations or anything else.)

In short, Club Level is not about superlative service or planning prowess at Walt Disney World. To be sure, there are great, long-tenured Cast Members working at the Club Level Lounges. We’ve generally found them to be personable; if you’re looking for friendly faces to greet you in the Club Level Lounges, they are perfect.

The lounges are really where Club Level shines at Walt Disney World, and are the primary selling point of booking Club Level. You’ll get the most bang for your buck out of the stay if you make a point of eating multiple meals per day in the concierge lounge. Most people will take advantage of continental breakfast, but not lunch, dinner, or late night desserts.

Breakfast is almost exclusively cold items, plus oatmeal and maybe one other hot dish. If you’re lucky, you’ll find some nice meats and cheeses that can be made into a sandwich for something substantive. Maybe an exclusive/unique item or two. It’s enough to fill you up and get you through until lunch, but it’s not exactly a luxurious spread.

The light afternoon snacks are exactly that–usually chips, hummus and pita, a variety of vegetables, and various other random things. This definitely should not be considered lunch, as there’s almost no way to make a meal of this service at any of the Club Level Lounges at Walt Disney World.

As a general rule, the evening hors d’oeuvres are the best offering, with numerous small plate dishes that are typically prepared by chefs from Signature Restaurants (Disney’s term for fine dining) located at the resort. These tend to be very good to great, and despite being ‘small plates’ and Disney deliberately avoiding the term dinner to describe this service, you could easily make a meal of them.

The quality of this service varies from resort to resort, but across the board, we think it has improved in the last couple of years. In fact, elevated hors d’oeuvres quality is one of the big reasons we’ve started revisiting all of the Club Level Lounges. If you can take advantage of breakfast (which should be a given) and dinner plus dessert service most nights of your stay, Club Level can be much easier to justify from a value for money perspective.

In addition to access to the Club Lounge, guests staying at each Club Level have access to the Concierge Resort Cast Members between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. These Cast Members are found at desks outside of the lounge or nearby, and can assist with tickets, dining, recreation, transportation, child care, and daily itinerary planning.

These Cast Members cannot get you into restaurants that are fully booked, or score Lightning Lane access for attractions that have run out of their daily allotment. However, if you call or text a Concierge Resort Cast Member while you’re in the parks and ask for help booking an ADR, they might just be able to work some magic. (No promises on that.)

When it comes to what Signature Services does not do, Walt Disney World no longer offers enhanced VIP services for Club Level guests for $50 per person per day. With paid Genie+ replacing free FastPass, it is no longer possible to buy 3 extra FastPass+ entitlements when staying Club Level.

At present, there is no comparable service offered for Genie+ or Lightning Lanes when staying Club Level. That could change, but we’re skeptical given the fundamental differences between FastPass and Genie. In any case, everything you need to know, including ride priorities, strategy for avoiding pitfalls, maximizing your time saved & ride count, and much more is covered in our Guide to Genie+ and Lightning Lanes at Walt Disney World.

Objectively, the cost of staying Club Level ranges from around +$100/night to +$275/night depending on the resort, room tier, and season. For a general rule, the more expensive the hotel and room category, the greater the added cost. However, this isn’t always true.

For instance, adding Club Level at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa would “only” be an additional $228 on New Year’s Eve. That’s Walt Disney World’s most expensive hotel on its most expensive night of the year. The surcharge for Wilderness Lodge on that same night would be $274.

At the other end of the spectrum, the premium for staying in Chronos Club at Gran Destino or Kilimanjaro Club at Animal Kingdom Lodge is less than $100 for many nights. If you book with a room-only, Annual Passholder, or Florida Resident discount in the off-season, the difference can be even lower.

Assuming you cram 4 adults in the Club Level room–because nothing says posh hotel stay like 4 adults in one hotel room–you’re looking at around $25 to $50 per person per night for Club Level. If you do two meals per day (breakfast and dinner) in the Club Level Lounge, or even just breakfast plus dessert and a couple of beers when you return from the park, you’re already getting your money’s worth on the lower end of the pricing premium spectrum.

It should go without saying, but the larger your party and the more meals you eat in the lounge, the better the value proposition. Add the Resort Concierge service to the mix, as well as the views and ambiance in the lounge, and it becomes pretty easy to justify Club Level.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you’re a party of 2 adults and will only do breakfast in the lounge before rope dropping the parks and staying until park closing (thus missing all subsequent food services in the lounge), it’s literally impossible to justify Club Level. In general, this is not something for “park commandos,” it’s for those wanting a more leisurely, luxurious, and pampered Walt Disney World experience.

In scenarios that don’t fall on either end of those extreme spectrums, there’s doing Club Level simply because you want to treat yo self to an excellent, once in a lifetime kind of experience. Maybe you want the best view in the house at Wilderness Lodge, or to strut around the Polynesian wearing your lei like a rockstar—a modern day Jon Bon Jovi. Sometimes it’s fun to splurge on a taste of luxury because it’s just something you flat out want to do.

Everyone makes purchases that would not pass muster if scrutinized from a value for money perspective. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. There’s no reason to feel bad about wanting what you think will be a cool or convenient experience for the sake of that experience. Anyone who claims every decision they make is 100% rational and 0% emotional is lying. If you want to stay Club Level at Walt Disney World for one of these reasons—or some other intrinsic sense of happiness—more power to you. Only you know what will make your vacation special to you!

We are a party of two adults, and we’ve made Club Level work for us. We discuss the specifics in each of those reviews above, but here’s the CliffNotes version of that: we do split stays, with the Club Level portion of our trip for 1-2 nights at the end of a trip.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a split stay, see our How to Do Split Stays at Walt Disney World Hotels. As you can see there, we are huge advocates of split stays for a number of reasons. When it comes to this, we highly recommend doing the Club Level portion at the end of your trip, rather than beginning.

In part, this is because it’s really tough to go from Club Level back to normal accommodations. More importantly, we recommend this because you’ll spend the first portion of your trip racing around the parks doing everything that you want to get done, exhausting yourselves in the progress. Then at the end, you’ll have a Club Level stay to relax, rejuvenate, and actually vacation.

When we stay Club Level at Walt Disney World, we seldom leave the resort. With this in mind, our least favorite is the Atrium Club Level at Contemporary Resort. Chronos Club is normally a great value and something we really enjoy, but we don’t like hanging around Gran Destino all day, so it’s out from this perspective.

Our two favorite Club Levels at Walt Disney World are those at Beach Club and Wilderness Lodge. We love taking advantage of Stone Harbor Club during breaks from floating around the lazy river in Stormalong Bay, or sitting in a comfy overstuffed chair in Old Faithful Club while gazing down at that glorious lobby. We like to unwind and make the most of the luxurious stay while doing Club Level.

For choosing the right Club Level for you–or getting the details right on a split stay, once again Here’s the Authorized Disney Vacation Planner that we recommend. They can help you come up with a split stay “hotel plan” like this that works for your needs. Your interests are going to differ from ours, but they can listen to your family’s interests and priorities and book something customized just for you. (Plus, they get their commission from Disney, so there is no charge to you for them to book your trip and help you plan!)

The math on Club Level only works out if you’re viewing it as a luxury experience or splurge. If you’re singularly value-oriented, Club Level is never going to make sense. You could simply do grocery delivery and have snacks at your leisure in your Walt Disney World hotel room and come out way ahead in terms of savings. Of course, nothing screams “luxury hotel stay” like having groceries delivered and preparing oatmeal in your room.

Not that we’re knocking that. We’ve done grocery delivery several times and Club Level several times. Some trips we want to travel as inexpensively as possible, other times we want to splurge and treat ourselves to luxurious experience. There’s certainly a place for both styles of traveling.

One thing to reiterate here while we’re discussing a luxurious experience, is that this refers almost entirely to the Club Level Lounge, its food and atmosphere. Concierge Resort Cast Members are generally great and helpful with planning questions you might have.

However, concierge service at Walt Disney World is not the same as it is in real world hotel counterparts. We have stayed at Grand Club level at several Hyatt hotels, among other chains, and the difference at luxury hotels is that the service there is truly above and beyond.

Real world concierges can pull strings and make coveted bookings, quickly have tickets delivered to a hotel, etc. Walt Disney World concierges can make the same bookings available in the My Disney Experience app in lieu of you doing it. This can be a nice convenience, but it’s usually nothing you couldn’t do yourself.

Additionally and more importantly, those real world resort concierges go out of their way to make you feel special and pampered. Their service is very attentive and proactive. Disney’s service is much more reactionary; if you need help, it’s there. If not, there’s a decent chance no Concierge Resort Cast Members will interact with you after check-in.

In general, this is a fundamental difference that really must be stressed for Walt Disney World first-timers who are used to real world 5-star hotels. If you pampered service is your paramount concern, you are better off booking the Four Seasons Resort Orlando.

With that said, one thing we should note here is that Disney has been improving by leaps and bounds on this front. Walt Disney World wants this audience of “whale” guests, and has lost market share to luxury hotels that have opened around Orlando. There are plenty of reasons to believe Disney is catering to more affluent guests, and improving Club Level offerings to capture this clientele certainly makes sense.

Overall, we’re generally fans of Club Level at Walt Disney World and, for us, it’s worth the money on some trips. The Club Level experience has improved in quality the last couple of years, which certainly makes it easier to justify, too. The lounge atmosphere and views are important to us, and having the services of the Resort Concierge Cast Members is a nice bonus for us. Still, we like to mix things up. Sometimes we splurge on Club Level and almost no park time; sometimes we focus on parks and simply book a cheap hotel and do quick, inexpensive meals. It varies from trip to trip–and can even vary within trips.

Ultimately, by staying Club Level as part of a split stay during our ‘resort days’, we are able to make the most of our Club Level stays, relaxing in the lounge, eating and drinking as much as we can. From this perspective, we think Club Level works well and is a compelling option. Your vacation plans may vary, in which case the value that Club Level offers to you will differ. Either way, we hope this introduction to Club Level at Walt Disney World has proven helpful for planning your trip, and determining whether the concierge experience is right for you!

Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!

Your Thoughts

If you’ve stayed Club Level at a Walt Disney World hotel, do you agree or disagree with our assessment? Do you think it is worth the money? Which Club Level Lounge is your favorite? Have you considered staying Club Level? Share any questions, tips, or additional thoughts you have in the comments!