Room request fax not successful, but happy with room anyway.
Bought standard bunk beds room at AKL. Tried to get one of those partial savanna view rooms using the verbiage provided in the room view page. My fax read as follows:
" Thank you for your efforts to make our stay comfortable and enjoyable. We are most interested in room 3230, but if that room is unavailable we would like a room in Jambo, on Flr 3,W-facing Example: 3230,3228,3232,3226,3234,3236,3281,3282,3283. Bunk beds are our top priority, otherwise 3rd floor near lobby would be perfect".
We got room 2033. When I got the room-ready text I was so deflated. We got 2nd floor, away from lobby, parking lot view. It was like they gave us the very opposite of what we requested.
I was relieved to find the room had bunk beds. We gave them the benefit of the doubt and figured the bunk bed was our top priority so this must be what was available in our booked category with a bunk bed.
Turns out, we have a new favorite room when booking a non-savanna view room. The next best thing would be 2034 which is a pool view across the hall.
This room is fantastic for those using Disney transportation and who want to be near the pool and Mara! Right next door to our room is an exit which puts you at the very end of the path to bus transportation. It requires a room key/magic band for entry and nobody uses it. We thought maybe it would be loud with buses coming and going and people using the path but we rarely heard either and when we did it was brief and did not disrupt us in any way.
Speaking of quiet, this room is at the end of the hallway and we never heard a single person and saw only a few on our floor in our 8 nights. The pool is just one floor down and not more than a few steps away, and the Mara is super close too. Animal viewing is not far either, since the Uzima savanna is just across the pool area. We saw a lot of animals from there and did some night vision goggles there too. It is an ideal location.
Drawbacks to this room? The balcony is basically unusable, unless you want to be on display to those using transportation. It has a weird push-door and not a slider, I am assuming because it is accessible from that path and the push door provides better security than a slider would. The other main drawback is since you are so close to everything you NEED you rarely have reason to go into the lobby, and lets face it the lobby of AKL is ah-mazing.
If we pay for a savanna view in the future we will make other requests, but if we are paying for standard or pool, 2033 or 2034 will be our requests.
So in the end, while I would call this a room request fail - we did get the opposite of everything we asked for except bunk beds - it helped us experience a room type we never would have found appealing “on paper”. So thanks for that 