Hello everyone! We are trying to plan a trip for August 2019, and are looking at room in the contemporary-garden wing. Anyone stay there and/or have any recommendations or reviews?
I stayed there a few years ago and loved it. It is much quieter than the main building, yet not far to walk. I requested a room close to the main building and ended up about 4 rooms away which was perfect. If you drive your own vehicle to the parks, you can park right outside the entrance which I found very convenient. I loved being able to walk to MK, and would definitely recommend staying there.
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We stayed in the Garden Wing last year and loved it! All the perks of staying at the Contemporary at 1/2 the price. We stayed in room 6123. Corner room with a lake view. Sliding glass door opened up to the “beach” and pool area. It was perfect! We could walk to the pool, dock, and main building in 2 mins.
Stayed there last year and loved it.
I stayed in the garden wing once. The CR is by far my least favorite of the deluxe resorts, and probably my least likely resort in WDW to revisit. Being able to walk to the MK is relatively unimportant to me as I spend less time there than in any other park. The “theming” - if you could even call it that - could best be described as “convention hotel modern”. I don’t really want “quiet”; i want to be right in the middle of things. If i was ever to stay there again it would only be in the main tower, with a park view. But as I’m not likely to ever spend that much on a room, it probably won’t be staying there again.
I find this fascinating as someone who doesn’t sleep well, so quiet is the most important feature of any hotel/resort for me.
Noise is not a problem for me - in fact I need noise to fall asleep (I have two fans in the bedroom, plus music that I fall asleep to). Light is my enemy…
I need noise too, but it has to be noise that sounds the same, so a fan. Not other people walking around, or talking outside the room. Light doesn’t bother me at all, I prefer it dark, but it doesn’t matter too much.
We stayed there for one night the year before last, before moving onto AKL. The room itself was lovely and very spacious in comparison to some. It was also super convenient being close to the monorail. However, we did find the walk to our room from the main building very long, which has put us off staying in the garden wing again! I would also say that the lack of theming in the room/garden wing was a downside for us.
We stayed there last week and my opinion evolved over the course of our stay. First impressions were that there wasn’t any theming at all. It felt like any hotel anywhere else, with a design (at least outwardly) that spoke strongly of 1970s style. However, by the end of the trip my opinion was and still is that the hotel itself is meant to fall away and let the surrounding area be the theming: bay lake, seven seas lagoon, MK, the monorail passing overhead as you walk to the main building and MK. The rooms themselves did indeed feel larger than our normal resort of POFQ. We noticed it particularly because DH and I both use scooters. They were much easier to maneuver inside the larger rooms. Still doable at POFQ, but just easier. We didn’t have to think much about it. The staff at every encounter were wonderful. More professional in style than at POFQ, which isn’t a knock against POFQ, it’s just a different atmosphere. Less down home and more upscale. Both wonderful in their own way.
We now spend most of our time at MK, and now that we’ve stayed at the Contemporary, we both agree that if money isn’t an object, for the convenience alone, not having to ride the buses as much, the extra time we save at night on the way back to our resort and the time we get to sleep in (a little anyway, lol) by being so close to MK, and because if we ever want to visit POFQ (we love driving along the river at night), we can easily ride over to the bus stop at MK and hop over… we will try to stay at the Contemporary ever trip from now on. And for the price difference between the tower and the garden wing, GW is the way to go.
I’m not a fan, I feel like it’s a washed out version of Contemporary which itself is kind of a relic. Maybe we were unlucky with the room but it felt outdated and it was in the very end of the building, which made the walk to MK notably longer.
Don’t get me wrong, I would stay at CR, but not the wing. If you intend on going to MK multiple times, the location of CR is excellent. That said, there are many more interesting hotels.