Disneyland Paris my experience

[Liam]

Hi all I have recently returned from a 5 night stay at the Santa Fe hotel at Disneyland Paris and thought I'd share a few thoughts and see if they can help anyone either going soon or considering a trip.

Pros

• Hyperspace Mountain (Star Wars overlay of Space mountain v2) is amazing and easily the best coaster I've ridden at any Disney Park
• Pirates and Big Thunder are both far better than their Orlando counterparts
• Disneyland Parc is beautiful
• Crush's Coaster is excellent as well but the wait times are ridiculous (90 min average)
• My 4 year old son loved the hotel, it's basically an All Star resort but inside the rooms are better themed.
• They have loads of characters out to meet, far more than WDW

Cons

• The cast members are often rude and sullen, they are nowhere near the level of WDW, Universal or Seaworld.
• Walt Disney Studios is a disaster, easily the worst park I've ever been to (yes worse than Hollywood Studios) they have about 3 rides that belong in a theme park (Tower of Terror, Crush and Ratatouille and they all have massive waits all day, 60 min plus)
• Rock N Rollercoaster is badly needing a refurb, it's extremely rough, the pre show wasn't working and some of the "theming" during the ride had fallen apart
• Ratatouille is a massive disappointment, half themed, poor quality 3d and not very enjoyable, I hope they plus it for Epcot. Having said that the Paris themed area of the park is easily the best themed area of WDS.
• Tower of Terror is only half themed on the outside ( the back of the building has no windows)
• Toy Story Land is almost unbelievably poor, 3 rides that belong at a fair. I honestly couldn't believe that Disney had built such a land, hopefully the land at HS will be better, can't be any worse.
• For some reason almost every ride has most of it's queue as switch backs outside which is especially strange given that Paris is extremely cold for 4/5 months per year.
• There is a lack of rides at the resort, on the Saturday every ride had a wait time of at least 40 mins except It's A Small World which is always a walk on.
• The price of food and drink is even more expensive than WDW, every restaurant at Disney Village charged at least €5 for a drink of soda, Cafe Mickey was €165 for a meal for the 3 of us not including tip
• This may be my own fault but i left my sons jacket in his stroller when we went on Pirates and when we came back someone had stolen it, when I spoke to guest relations they basically said it was all my own fault as I shouldn't have left it. I can see their point but it still annoyed me as it's something everyone does and we've never had an issue in Orlando when we left things in the stroller.
• They do EMH hours for hotel guests in the morning but only open a few rides, this means at WDS even if you get there right at the start of EMH and head straight to Crush by the time you get off the wait time is up to at least 45 mins becasue they only open Crush, Ratatouille and Toy Story Land so when normal guests are allowed in everybody already in the park heads to Tower of Terror casuing that to have massive waits as well.
• Lastly and possibly most controversial, I missed Fastpass+ and the ease of knowing you had and least 3 rides booked and could book more through the app. the way Fastpass works in Paris you can only get 1 at a time or 1 every 2 hours if your first fastpass is more than 2 hours away, this means that if you fastpass Big Thunder and you aren't there right at park open (as the return time soon gets to late afternoon) by the time you make your second Fastpass there are none left for the big rides.

Overall it's a decent resort and I enjoyed it but it's not a patch on WDW at the moment and hopefully the recently announced expansions are only the beginning as it would be great to have a proper Disney resort so close to home but I doubt I'll return at least until Star Wars and Marvel lands are built.

 

[Parkscope Joe]

Thanks for the report and sorry to hear the issues you ran into.