Rob562
Well-Known Member
We stayed at the B resort just before it officially became the B (it was the Royal Plaza beforehand) and found that the buses ran pretty close to right on-schedule. The tricky part was that you had to do a little reading to see just what that schedule was.
For going *to* the parks, the schedule lists the time the bus departs the first hotel on its route (the Hilton in our route's case). The bus then runs its route, stopping at each hotel. And pretty much like clockwork, the bus showed up at our hotel (the 3rd on the route) about 4 or 5 minutes after the published route start time. It made one more stop, then was off the the parks. I seem to recall the departures *to* the parks were on the hour and half-hour all morning, with the two park routes starting about 5 minutes apart.
And you are right about the pairing of the theme parks. MK (TTC) and AK share one route, Epcot and Studios share the other. This means that transit times to Epcot is very good, to MK is also good (as long as you're OK having to monorail or ferry after the bus). But then transit time to Studios was only fair, since the bus had to stop at Epcot first. And the time to AK was abysmal, since it goes alllllll the way up to TTC first, and then allllll the way down and over to AK. We started our AK day at Boma so we Ubered to AKL, but knowing the roundabout nature of the buses we'd take Uber just to the park if needed.
As for going home, that's one point where you got it slightly wrong. At least in the evening each park had its own dedicated bus back to the hotels, they didn't do double-duty like on the way to the parks. But this is where you *really* want to make note of the bus schedules. The bus departures from the parks are scheduled very specifically, like "25 and 55 past the hour".
And they keep to those departure times, which we learned our first night. We were walking out to the bus location at the TTC just before 11pm, thinking we were 4 minutes early, only to see the bus driving away in the distance. At first we were angry because we thought the buses were hour-and-half-hour like the morning and we figured the bus just left early. Later we found that its departure time was 55-after-the-hour.
And that brings me to one final tip in this huge post... Learn which Hotel Plaza Blvd hotel is *across* the street from your hotel (Best Western in our case at the B). If you miss your route's bus, the one for the other route should be along in 10-15 minutes. Then just take it until you get to the hotel across the street and walk over to your hotel. No need to wait until your own bus arrives.
-Rob
