Year-Long Disney’s Pop Century Resort Room Refurbishment Project in 2025-2026

Walt Disney World has announced hotel refurbishments & construction projects for 2025 & 2026. One of the most notable is to guest rooms at Pop Century Resort, which were “recently” reimagined but are already due for another refresh. This shares dates & details, plus our commentary about the scope, scale & impacts of the work–and whether you should avoid staying at Pop Century during the project. (Updated March 4, 2025.)

As suggested above, this is the first of a few projects that were just announced, with Port Orleans and Wilderness Lodge also receiving similar bulletins about projects in the pipeline. (More on those very soon in separate posts.) These probably are not the only hotel renovations on the horizon, either–just the ones that have start dates in early 2025. Keep an eye on our Walt Disney World Hotel Construction Tracker for further updates.

The last few years have thrown a monkey wrench into Walt Disney World hotel refresh timelines, with several resort refurbishments being delayed due to the closure and the pent-up demand in its aftermath. The good news is that this hasn’t been as bad on the hotel side as with DVC properties, so Walt Disney World won’t be spending the next few years playing catch-up, but between a few postponed projects and the likelihood of larger-scale reimaginings and new construction, there’s a lot on the horizon.

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.

Now let’s turn to the latest updates, and what you should expect from this room redo…

The latest update as of March 2025 is that Walt Disney World has filed Notice of Commencement permits for this room refurbishment ahead of the project starting later this month. These filings list JCQ Services, Inc. as the contractor, and they have an expiration date of August 28, 2026. This is notable because it’s longer than the default 1-year expiration and exceeds the above-stated timeline that has the project wrapping up in mid-February 2026.

It’s worth noting that although Walt Disney World has distributed the refurbishment dates to travel agents and media, they have not updated the official consumer-facing Pop Century Resort website. Even once they do, it’s been common in the past for room refurbishments to take longer than what’s originally announced. This is often the case when Walt Disney World elects to pause projects for mid-October through early January to have more room inventory for the highest-occupancy stretch of the year.

We wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see that happen here, but we still strongly suspect that the permit has a bit of a buffer built into it even beyond that. It’s hard to believe this will take until August 28, 2026 given the scale and scope of the work. Unless there’s a wildcard at play, such as conversion of rooms into family suites, but that seems doubtful given the lower demand for that type of room inventory.

For those keeping score at home, the “new” rooms at Pop Century debuted in 2017. So not exactly new, hence the air quotes. They still feel recently-redone to me. And in the grand scheme of things, these rooms were “recently” redone relative to Walt Disney World’s opening 50-plus years ago or the dawn of recorded civilization. As I get older, it seems time is flying by, but I also blame the COVID closure…it’s warped my sense of what’s old vs. new. Anyway. 

It’s a near-certainty that the Pop Century guest room refurbishment will be a smaller scale refresh rather than a top-to-bottom reimagining. You’ve probably seen the term “soft goods” refurbishment. This typically means updating furnishings, including but not limited to wall coverings, flooring, linens, decor, 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. Although nothing is official, this is what we’re expecting of the 2025-2026 Pop Century room refurbishment.

In my view, that’s the one commonality–that virtually all of the 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.

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.

As such, I would not expect Walt Disney World to mess with the layout of the rooms at Pop Century. Between this being a soft goods refurbishment and guest response being positive, Disney will likely take a “don’t fix what isn’t broken” approach to the layout of the rooms. In all likelihood, the layout of the circa 2025-2026 Pop Century rooms will basically be what you see here.

The style is a totally different story. If I had a nickel for every fan who described the 2017 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.

While I personally think some of those terms are a bit overly-dramatic (dystopian…really?!) and also require serious sentimentality towards the old rooms, I get the perspective. The current rooms do have a lot of white. They’re kinda like mid-mid-century modern, which is to say that they’re a half-measure for actual mid-century modern design. They could use more pops of color, another piece of art or two, and slightly more stylized furniture. Suffice to say, they’re no Cabana Bay Beach Resort at Universal Orlando.

Given that, there’s room for further incremental improvements with the 2025-2026 Disney’s Pop Century Resort room refurbishment. I’d caution against expecting any sweeping changes, but more color to address guest quibbles with these being bland and boring is certainly within reason. Painting the wall behind the television red or light blue would alone do wonders. This is what other soft goods refurbishments have done, so there’s certainly precedent for it.

It’s also possible that Walt Disney World won’t want to make the Value Resort rooms “too nice” as a means of differentiating the tiers. Beyond that, Disney won’t do anything that increases routine maintenance or upkeep costs. If you have grandiose ideas of elaborate decor that won’t handle wear and tear, you should abandon those.

What this soft goods refurbishment should do is give the rooms a fresh coat of paint, fix ordinary wear and tear, and otherwise refresh them. It’s entirely possible that there aren’t any aesthetic changes at all. That the current rooms are already well-received, and do a pretty good job of handling guest use and abuse.

These rooms do a great job of concealing wear and tear–there are other resorts with redone rooms that are several years newer but already look worse! Disney did a good job of choosing durable materials, and of the last dozen Value Resort rooms I’ve stayed in, only one has looked worse for wear.

This would also explain the lack of a construction notice on Pop Century’s official page–because there won’t be any audible or visible impact to the guest experience. That these soft goods room refurbishments will be more limited in nature, quieter and unnoticeable as a result. We doubt this. Walt Disney World sometimes just “forgets” to put up the construction bulletins. If this project were truly that limited, it wouldn’t be taking until 2026 to complete.

From a practical perspective, it’s likely that the 2025-2026 guest room project at Pop Century will be done building-by-building. This is pretty standard, and has meant that Walt Disney World takes an entire building out of the room inventory, overhauls it all at once, and then reopens that building.

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 next year and not even realize there’s construction happening if the building being redone is on the other side of the resort.

With that said, there have been times when they do multiple buildings at a time and take rooms in one of those offline and bring them back online in two phases. Even in this scenario, you may not notice the work in the other half of the building unless you’re staying on the side close to the construction. But you also might! We’ve had reports from some readers who were close to rooms being worked on and could see or hear it during the daytime hours.

As a general matter, though, construction impact of this project 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.

Once the project kicks into high gear, we’ll have progress updates as to which buildings are being renovated, so you can make room requests accordingly. We’ll do this both so you know which buildings to avoid to steer clear of construction, and what to request to increase your odds of getting a new room. As huge fans of Pop, we’ll try to score one one of the first redone rooms here in late May or early June–sounds like the perfect place to stay for Disney Starlight Night Parade’s debut season!

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Ultimately, we’re looking forward to the room refurbishment at Disney’s Pop Century Resort. My personal view is that this has low upside and downside, and won’t be a revolutionary redesign like the prior Pop room reimagining or even the ‘Under the Sea’ rooms at Caribbean Beach.

In all likelihood, this is just going to be a simple soft goods refurbishment. The bones of the room are already good and don’t need to be addressed, so they probably won’t. Hence the minimal upside. On the other hand, there is room for aesthetic improvement, and making the rooms have a bit more personality and pops of color. Recent precedent at other resorts suggests that the style will likely improve at least slightly, but we wouldn’t expect anything revolutionary. Hence the minimal downside.

To each their own, but that’s good enough for us–again, 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 “recently” reimagined rooms or did you prefer the “old” style? What major changes or incremental improvements would you like to see made during the 2025-2026 soft goods refurbishment? Would a few pops of color and pieces of art be 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!