I was looking at the door to door commuting times using the Disney system for “Animal Kingdom Lodge and Villas” in the 2019 Unofficial Guide book as well as the commuting time for Kidani Village using resort transportation per the website. (The latter can be found at the bottom of this page.) The two do not agree. The book notes an average 19 minute travel time to MK, for example, but the website indicates a 36 minute travel time. That’s a twofold difference! Anyone have an idea of what’s going on here? Are the times in the book not valid for DVC properties?
I do not know what the official answer is but from Kidani you then stop and load at Jambo I believe. Then you would drive to MK. The bus trip to MK, once the bus starts has always been over 20 minutes for me. Although many other resorts that share buses end up taking longer. I always allow at least an hour for the buses but I have loaded an MK bus at 2:20 and met a friend on Main Street at 2:55.
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One has to ask if you’re talking “bus travel time” (i.e. how long is the bus ride station to station), or how long does it take to walk from your room to the bus stop, wait for a bus, ride the bus,and walk to the gate. And then there’s waiting at bag check…
If I need to be in a park at a specific time, I plan on being at the bus stop an hour before that (of course if you have an ADR at the back side of WS, or an FPP at EE or BTMRR, you’ll need to add another 20 min or so to get there from the gate…
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I’m currently comparing travel times from different resorts. (I’m trying to figure out where we want to stay.) Ideally I’d like to look at door to door commuting times, i.e. how long it will take to get from the resort to the bus terminal at the park. This is what the table in the book describes. The rest of it (bag check, go thru tapstiles) won’t vary based on your resort of origin, so I’m not considering that right now.
Specifically, I’m trying to figure out if it will take a lot longer to get to the parks from AKL than it would from POR. If you compare the resorts using the numbers in the book, travel from AKL & Villas is only slightly longer than POR (maybe 5 minutes longer). If you use the numbers on the website for AKL, it’s very different, especially for MK. I might be misinterpreting or missing something, though.
I would not let those times be the deciding factor. The POR buses stop at 4 bus stops before it leaves the resort:
Will you be loading at the 1st or 4th stop? Kidani buses stop once.
In my opinion, having stayed at AKL, not seriously. No matter where you stay, some parks will take longer than others. For actual bus transit time, if you averaged out all the times to different resorts, it would probably come out to be pretty equal no matter where you stay. And for me, an extra 5 or 10 minutes of bus time is one of the last criteria I use in choosing a resort; in the course of an entire day of touring, it really doesn’t come to much.
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Thanks for your input! I think I’ll drop bus time as a factor to consider. I’d still be curious to understand the discrepancy if anyone who knows why the two don’t agree reads this thread, but at this point it’s moreso out of general interest than a need for the info.