WHERE YOU'RE STAYING
Going back to the hotel mid-afternoon
When going back to rest is worth it, and when it costs more than it gives.
For a group with small children this is one of the decisions that most changes how the trip feels — and one of the least thought about before arriving.
The temptation is to count only the journey: 15 or 20 minutes on foot depending on the hotel, and 8 on the resort bus — the minutes for each are in Staying inside the resort or outside it. With those figures it looks like a small detour. It is not.
The real cost is not the journey, it is everything around it: leaving the park, the journey, getting into the room, the little one actually resting — not just lying down — and going out again, with the mood adjustment that usually follows the end of a mid-afternoon nap. In practice that is between two and a half and three and a half hours, not the 15-20 minutes of travel (our team's judgement, not an official figure). A plan that on paper says "we'll go back to the hotel for an hour" almost never works out that way.
The good part: you can leave the park and come back the same day on the same ticket, as many times as you like. You do not need a new ticket and you do not pay again: just show the same ticket on the way back, and expect to go through security again if you left the site.
When is it worth it? With children up to five or six who still nap, almost always — a child who has not rested shows in the mood of the last hours of the day, which tend to be dinner and, if you stay, the night-time show. When the group is only adults, or older children, the sum changes: those three hours out of the park are three hours without attractions, and for a short trip that can be too many.
This is no longer something we have to guess for you. In your client area you can tell us whether you go back to the hotel mid-afternoon on most days, only if the day is running long, or whether you would rather push through — and your Route is built around that gap in the timetable, instead of proposing a whole afternoon of park that in practice you are not going to do.
If you are staying outside the resort the same logic applies but with a longer, less predictable journey — only do it if the accommodation is genuinely close, or save it for the natural gap after lunch rather than a full round trip.
This part is fixed as soon as your Route is generated, so that the itinerary in your hand and the details it was built from are the same. If you need to change something, write to us: we'll adjust it and generate it again.
