First Look Photo Tour of New Rooms at Disney’s Pop Century Resort

Walt Disney World has revealed a first look inside the renovated guest rooms at Pop Century Resort, which are currently in the process of a year-long soft goods refurbishment project. This shares photos of the updated accommodations, progress report, and whether you should avoid staying at Pop Century during the project. (Updated May 3, 2025.)

The guest room renovations at Disney’s Pop Century Resort are one of a few hotel projects in 2025-2026, with several other popular resorts under refurbishment now or in the coming months. Keep an eye on our Walt Disney World Hotel Construction Tracker for further updates.

Let’s start with the official announcement from Walt Disney World about the Pop Century room redo: From late March 2025 to mid-February 2026, guest rooms at Disney’s Pop Century Resort will undergo refurbishment. While all resort amenities will remain available, you may notice construction during daytime hours.

This isn’t the only recent major change at Pop Century. The resort has been in the midst of a lengthy refurbishment of Everything POP Shopping & Dining that has been extended a few times, but is now finally finished. Everything POP has revealed a fresh color scheme and new seating areas to make it more inviting.

This new seating area is nice. The colors, patterns, and textures all work well. It looks clean and has a mid-century flair thanks to the upholstery, flooring, and light fixtures. There’s also a greater variety to the seating, with booths, tables, and chairs adding a more laid back lounge type of vibe.

Walt Disney World announced a New Coffee Shop Coming to Pop Century During Value Resort Refurbishments a couple of months ago. That opened shortly before Easter, offering specialty beverages to perk up guests throughout the day, and is the whole reason why Disney switched up the style of seating around Everything Pop. Speaking of which, here are photos of the finished seating area outside the coffee shop:

Last month, Walt Disney World rolled out Airport Luggage Transfer at the Value Resorts, which was a pilot program that started at Pop Century. Guests staying at these Walt Disney World Resort hotels can drop checked baggage off with Luggage Assistance to be delivered directly to your flight.

A new third-party service, known as BagCheck, will take your luggage directly to the airport for your Southwest Airlines flight. Currently, this pilot service is available at Value Resort hotels for Guests with Southwest Airlines flights departing from Orlando International Airport (MCO).

In addition to this, this summer guests staying at select resorts – Art of Animation Resort, Pop Century Resort, Caribbean Beach Resort and Wilderness Lodge – will be able to enjoy even more Disney-themed activities for “Cool Kid Summer.” These activities will include character visits with set appearance times to help you plan your day and an expanded itinerary of things to do with your family throughout your stay at these four resorts.

All in all, a pretty good slate of “plussings” at Pop Century Resort. Now, the first redone rooms are emerging, and are likewise nice enhancements. Here are photos of the redone rooms, courtesy of Walt Disney World…

For those who are unfamiliar with the old/current guest rooms at Disney’s Pop Century Resort, here’s a rundown of the major changes.

First, the walls have been painted blue. If I had a nickel for every fan who described the previous Pop Century rooms as bland, boring, sterile, hospital-like, antiseptic, bare, or dystopian…I’d have at least $5. Which isn’t a lot of money, but it’s nevertheless a lot of nickels.

Given that, one of our hopes for the 2025-2026 Disney’s Pop Century Resort room refurbishment was that they’d add more color to address guest quibbles with these being bland and boring. We previously wrote that “painting the wall behind the television red or light blue would alone do wonders.”

This isn’t the wall behind the television, it’s the walls around and behind the beds–so even more has been painted light blue. We’ll take it! (For the sake of comparison, a photo of the old rooms is below.)

Other changes are more minor. For example, there appear to be new chairs that accompany the table. These look very similar to the previous chairs, but now have plush backs with a spotted style.

There’s also a new curtain covering the window, which appears to feature Mickey Mouse in a pop art style. Not a huge difference from what was there before, but more distinctly Disney, which is a win–especially given common guest complaints about the lack of personality.

The flooring has also been replaced. It looks slightly darker in the photo, but that could be a matter of lighting or editing. We know the flooring was replaced, though, because we saw the contractor on site and flooring removal happening last month.

Finally and perhaps most notably, there’s a colored accent rug with an eye-catching mid-century modern pattern. This rug should further address complaints about the rooms being bland and boring, while also helping to muffle some sound. That rug really ties the room together!

UPDATE: Upon closer inspection, this may not be an accent rug after all, but rather, a pattern on the flooring itself. This is what a few readers suggested, along with one unsubstantiated report from someone who has seen the new rooms in person. Honestly, this makes a whole lot more sense, as Walt Disney World hasn’t done accent rugs in any Moderate Resorts or even some Deluxes. This would definitely be positioning Pop Century as more upmarket, which we doubt will happen.

We’ll attempt to confirm with Walt Disney World whether this is flooring or a rug next week, but for now, it’s safe to assume that this is flooring. Still a nice pop of color that livens up the space!

As noted above, this is only a soft goods refurbishment. This typically means updating furnishings, including but not limited to wall coverings, flooring, linens, decor, flooring and some furniture.

The definition of a soft goods refurbishment is a bit nebulous, and has included ambitious projects for certain resorts. Some have received soft goods refurbishments in the last few years that included installation of the new pull-down beds. Others have swapped out almost all of the furnishings and furniture, giving totally new looks to the rooms.

Others have simply refreshed the decor and infused more personality into the rooms by adding character art, more color, and little details. These rooms would very much be recognizable in a before vs. after comparison, but were still incremental improvements. As is pretty obvious from the before vs. after comparison, this best describes the Pop Century room refurbishment now that we’ve seen the finished product.

Virtually all of Walt Disney World’s room refurbishment projects in the last several years have improved upon their predecessors. Not all of them have been perfect (far from it), but they’ve been upgrades for the most part. Fans might disagree with this, but we’re often viewing these changes through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. Pop Century’s room renovations continue this trend.

The 2017 reimagining of Pop Century was one of the very first ‘modern’ generation of resort room designs at Walt Disney World. Prior to this, I’d argue that Walt Disney World room redos were heading in the wrong direction with overly generic and homogenized styles and no functional improvements to otherwise justify the bland designs.

Pop Century’s redone rooms offered massive improvements to make them fresh and functional, with a bunch of clever space-saving design features added. While the footprint is still the same, the resulting rooms feel much larger. There’s more storage, one of the beds folds up into the wall to reveal a table, and much more.

For the most part, the new layout has been uncontroversial with Walt Disney World fans. The design improvements have been so well-received among guests that the exact same layout was subsequently adopted at all three of the All Stars. Multiple managers at the Value Resorts, have indicated to us that guest feedback has been almost unanimously positive.

Walt Disney World took a “don’t fix what isn’t broken” approach to Pop Century rooms, leaving the layout unchanged while addressing the biggest criticisms about color, bland and boring designs. This probably still isn’t going to please everyone, but it undeniably addresses common complaints.

From our perspective, these are an incremental upgrade on the previous rooms. We loved them before, and we love them even more now. I could’ve used another piece of art on the wall, but otherwise am very pleased by this. The new flooring design, in particular, is a pleasant surprise.

The 2025-2026 guest room project at Pop Century is being done building-by-building. This is pretty standard, and means that Walt Disney World takes an entire building out of the room inventory, overhauls it all at once, and then reopens that building. Sometimes this happens in halves, meaning that it’s possible to be in a room with active construction occurring–especially common when it’s only a soft goods project.

This is done to minimize the construction impact. This way, no one is getting stuck in a room right next to one that’s under active construction. It’s good for guests and also for Disney, as they don’t have to deal with the inevitable complaints and relocating guests. It’s entirely possible that you could stay at Pop Century and not even realize there’s construction happening if the building being redone is on the other side of the resort.

It’s our understanding that work is currently occurring in the 50s section of Pop Century, starting with Building 1. That was the case last we saw, which was the middle of last month. It’s unclear if, with the release of these photos, Building 1 is now finished and has reopened to guests. In any case, we’d expect work to continue in the 50s before moving to other sections of the resort. Buildings 2-3 will be next up to be redone.

After that, work could proceed to the 60s section, or bounce to the other side of the resort and hit the periphery there with the 90s, 80s, and 70s. That approach is sometimes taken to minimize the guest impact, and avoiding working around the pool. In this case, my guess is that the buildings just go in (more or less) sequential order.

The guest impact of this construction should be minimal. Pop Century having clusters of outlying buildings makes this type of project less impactful than it’d be at many of the other resorts. At this point, we do NOT recommend avoiding Pop Century in 2025 or 2026.

Stated without the double-negative, Pop Century remains one of top resort hotels in all of Walt Disney World for 2025-2026. This is doubly true now that we’ve seen the new rooms, and along with all of the other recent enhancements at Pop Century.

As for room requests, that’s a tad tricky at this point. For one thing, we don’t have boots on the ground at this moment, so it’s unclear to us whether Building 1 has reopened. It’s possible that Walt Disney World is sharing these photos because the first guests are about to check into the new rooms; it’s also possible this is the very first room to be finished, but the building is still under the knife.

Even if Building 1 is done, requesting it is going to put you on the far side of Pop Century and adjacent to Buildings 2-3, which will become active construction zones once work moves to those. So it’s really your call–do you want a new room so badly that you’re willing to be next to one of the buildings that’s a work zone?

That’s the request we’ll be making with our next stay at Pop Century, but to each their own on that. Give it a couple more months, and there should be more of a buffer so you can request a new room without being right next to a building under active construction. (Sign up for our Free Walt Disney World Newsletter for updates on this and other developments. We’ll keep you posted on Pop Century progress.)

Ultimately, we’re pleased with the finished product of the room refurbishment at Disney’s Pop Century Resort. Again, we were fans of the rooms before and this only makes them better. The bones of the room were already good and didn’t need to be addressed, so they focused on addressing criticism about the rooms being overly sterile.

From our perspective, this is an incremental improvement–but a meaningful one. The aesthetics are better, giving the room more of a mid-century style with more personality and pops of color. I’m sure some fans will still be unsatisfied with these rooms, but for a Value Resort, we think these are exceptional. They’re once again best in class, and arguably better than some Moderate and Deluxe Resort rooms. That’s really saying something given the cost differential.

To each their own, but this is absolutely a win for us–gain, don’t fix what isn’t broken. Pop Century does not “need” improvements to nearly the same degree as other resorts and already punches well above its weight. There’s a reason why it’s so high up our Rankings of All Walt Disney World Resorts from Best to Worst!

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Your Thoughts

Are you a fan of Pop Century’s renovated rooms or do you still think these look bland and boring? Are a few pops of color good enough for you, or does Disney need to go back to the drawing board and totally redo these rooms again? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!