Since as long as I’ve been visiting Walt Disney World, the All Star Resorts have had a bad reputation among some guests. I remember hearing horror stories, some of which strained credulity (one that stands out involves an exploding toilet), even when I was a kid.
When Sarah and I started returning as adults, there were plenty more tales we were told about the overcrowded, dirty, poorly-maintained, low-quality motels. We even had our own unpleasant experiences during youth sporting events back in the day. It’s thus unsurprising that a common question essentially asks whether the All Star Resorts are “good enough” for a family on a tight budget traveling to Walt Disney World?
Yes. That’s the answer to the titular question. Disney’s All Star Resorts are adequate, at bare minimum. I’m not going to bury the lede, make insinuations, or lead you to question whether the All Stars are sufficient, safe, scary, subpar, and so forth. The point of this post is to debunk some of those ‘horror’ stories, and recast Walt Disney World’s “budget motels” in a different light. In other words, we’ll explain why the All Stars aren’t just “good enough,” but rather, are actually good.
We’ve stayed at every single one of the All Stars (Movies, Sports, and Music) multiple times in both the old and new rooms at each of the resorts. This includes multiple stays in the last year, with one reservation on the books for Summer 2026 and probably another this year after that. Bluntly, I would not keep booking a particular hotel if it regularly (or even occasionally) had exploding toilet incidents or other horrors.
With that in mind, let’s take this point by point and discuss the potential problem points that Disney’s All Star Resorts do not actually have, along with the strengths they do possess…
Value for Money
Above is a look at nightly room rates for the All Star Sports in Summer 2026 as part of the Deep Discount on Rooms Starting at $99 Per Night at Walt Disney World. This is an insanely good deal, even if it’s not as deep of a percentage discount as the Cars Family Suites at Art of Animation, which are almost 60% off.
While $99/night rates at the All Stars are not the norm, they’re also not completely unprecedented. This same sale was offered last summer for Disney+ subscribers and again this winter for Disney Visa cardholders. And in both cases, All Star Sports was included in the discount, with $99/night rooms.
All Star Sports is once again $99 per night for many dates this summer, including what’ll likely be the start of the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival and Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party. (I’m already booked!) Here’s a look:
This deal is better than bouncebacks, Annual Passholder discounts, and Florida resident rates. With that said, it’s actually pretty common for All Star Sports to have rates maxing out at 35% off for APs, 30% off for Floridians, and 20-25% off for everyone else. This can put rooms in the $105 to $125 range depending on the date and whether you qualify for an affiliation discount. Still not as good as this deep discount for Summer 2026, though, which makes All Star Sports almost unrivaled.
The comparison where things get trickier for me is the All Star Resorts vs. Pop Century. The price gap between these can vary, but I’ve frequently found it to be about $30 per night after discounts. Other times, such as when Sports has $99/night rooms, the gap is greater.
For a price difference of over $50 per night at a time of year when I wouldn’t book a Skyliner resort, All Star Sports is a no-brainer. Other times, the call is much closer. See the above link for our comprehensive comparison.
All Stars vs. Off-Site Budget Hotels
A scenario we’ve experienced multiple times is finding that comparable off-site hotels cannot compete with the All Stars on all-in cost. In pricing out hotel options, we’ve found the least-expensive hotels in the Flamingo Crossings or Disney Springs areas are $115/night. To be sure, there are cheaper off-site options, but nowhere decent where we’d want to stay.
Even if the average general public promo at the All Stars is closer to $140/night than the deep discounts discussed above, that’s still only a ~$15/night surcharge over the options at Flamingo Crossings or Disney Springs. However, cost is not the same as value for money.
When you stay off-site, you’re probably paying for transportation to and from the parks. That means renting a car and paying for parking (potentially at both your third-party hotel and the parks) or using rideshare. The latter is usually the cheaper option, and we’d be using Uber or Lyft twice per day at an average cost of at least $15 per trip. That alone makes the All Stars more reasonable, and it’s before even accounting for the value of other perks (see below).
On-Site Perks
There are a lot of on-site perks for guests staying in Walt Disney World resort hotels. Everything from the Disney Dining Plan to on-site booking windows for Advance Dining Reservations to free parking and more. We’re not going to run through all of that, as this is already long and we have a separate guide to Staying Off-site vs. On-site at Walt Disney World.
The benefits that we view as most valuable are Airport Luggage Transfer, Early Entry, the Lightning Lane booking window. Let’s start with Airport Luggage Transfer, which as of Spring 2026, is still only available at the Value Resorts. This can be a huge advantage if you don’t want to hassle with handling your own luggage (and it’s now available from both your home airport and MCO).
Then there’s Early Entry, which is the 30 minute head-start before off-site guests can rope drop each of the parks. This is now valuable in all 4 parks, and it’s a good way to knock out headliners without buying Lightning Lanes. As we’ve said before, we think many fans really underestimate the value of Early Entry. I love it, and usually prefer Early Entry plus savvy standby strategy and staying late to paid FastPass.
If you want to supplement Early Entry with Lightning Lanes, you have an extended booking window by virtue of staying on-site. As discussed in Top 10 Tips & Tricks for Lightning Lanes at Walt Disney World, many of the most popular Lightning Lanes are totally gone by the time off-site guests can book them. The bottom line is that biggest perk of staying on-site, including at the All Stars, is saving time waiting in line…and in general.
Reimagined Rooms
We’ve now stayed in the reimagined rooms many times (they’re pretty much the same at all three All Stars), and have zero hesitations to return. (See our Photos & Video: Newly Reimagined Rooms at the All Star Resorts.)
All of these new rooms at the All Stars are a huge upgrade from the previous design, which was more minor leagues than all-star caliber. The functional improvements are tremendous, with a variety of space-saving upgrades that make the rooms feel larger. They also look bright and airy, which is a sharp contrast to the old style.
We’ve found some diehard fans who have complained about the new rooms, and others who call them sterile and hospital-like. Respectfully, we think that’s mostly the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. I chatted with a manager at All Star Sports about the resort refurbishment during a recent stay, and she told me that guest feedback on the new rooms at Sports has been universally positive.
Even though we still view these rooms as “new,” the next round of room refurbishments starts with All Star Movies in Summer 2026 (through January 2027) and is likely to be followed by All Star Music in 2027 and All Star Sports in 2028 or 2029. This will be a soft goods update, which should refresh the rooms and add pops of color, similar to the Pop Century refurbishment last year.
Food Quality
The food courts at the All Stars are nothing special. Suggesting otherwise would strain credulity and cast my credibility into doubt. With that said, they’ve all been refreshed in the last 5 years or so, and generally are more pleasant than they once were.
I cannot speak to breakfast, as it’s been years since I’ve wasted my money on powdered eggs and rubber bacon at a Walt Disney World food court. (Aside from ‘special’ breakfasts, we do grocery delivery and focus on fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods for our morning meal.)
However, I do think dinner has improved. In addition to the stereotypical fare, these food courts also serve up seared salmon, braised beef, pork loin, stir fry, and fried chicken. That’s better than I remember the options being a decade ago, but still hardly the pinnacle of WDW’s dining scene. Failing all of that, there’s the remodeled McDonald’s within walking distance of the All Star Resorts if you need a late night Filet-o-Fish fix.
Transportation
There was a time when we built in the cost of two to three taxi trips with each stay at the All Stars, as bus lines over a certain length meant the waits would be unbearably long. That was about a decade ago–before Uber and Lyft came onto the scene. This was also at a time when shared transportation among all three All Stars was common, even during busier times.
We have not had this issue of late with bus transportation anywhere at Walt Disney World. During our most recent stays at the All Stars, buses were frequent and efficient, and the only reason pickup times were ever inaccurate was when third-party Academy buses were dispatched (those aren’t connected to the wait times system), which was more like a “bonus bus” as opposed to an actual issue.
We’ve had zero problems making Early Entry or waiting in long lines when leaving the parks. Likewise, midday waits have been bearable, with no lengthy gaps or inconsistencies. The only caveat I’d offer here is that we’ve never left during the morning rope drop rush–our trips are always to arrive for Early Entry or later in the morning. Likewise, we never leave during the post-fireworks mass exodus. I’d imagine buses are still packed during those peak times, just like always.
Maintenance & Upkeep
There was a time from the aughts right up until the room overhaul began that the All Stars were in rough shape. Faded decor all around, woefully outdated posters, and details that had not aged well and were in need of outright replacement.
As someone who has actually stayed in shady motels around Orlando and Anaheim, I would stop well short of calling the All Stars that, even at their lowest point. Truly sketchy motels have an unsafe and unsettling quality to them; the All Stars never had that. They just were not up to Disney’s standards.
That has changed in the last 5 or so years. Along with the room overhaul, common areas were refreshed, oversized icons were thoroughly cleaned and given a fresh coat of paint, and everything looks crisper and nicer as a result. There are still elements of the hotels that are dated, but they’re little things–small cues that the hotels were built in a different era, and not major components of the properties.
Maintenance and upkeep are now every bit as good at the All Star Resorts as other hotels at Walt Disney World. There are no noteworthy cleanliness issue, and to the extent that anything is dated, the same type of thing exists pretty much every at Walt Disney World. One person’s dated detail is another’s nostalgia.
The oversized icons, exterior hallways, and general thematic style of the All Stars are certainly not for everyone, but “not to my tastes” is certainly not the same as “poorly maintained.” Upkeep is no better or worse at the All Stars on average than other hotels at Walt Disney World.
Guest “Quality” and Crowds
Few things drive me crazier than guests passing judgment or casting aspersions on their fellow guests at Walt Disney World. There’s a belief among certain people that they are “too good” for a Value Resort or want to stay at a more expensive hotel not for any substantive reasons, but so they aren’t around “lower class” guests.
This type of sentiment or the idea that Walt Disney World should be even more expensive to price out “undesirable” guests (these are all air quotes, by the way) is absolute nonsense at best, and downright offensive at worst. Money does not buy class. Bad behavior transcends income levels, and if anything, there’s a straight line between higher prices and more entitled guests.
Beyond that, whose place is it to pass judgment on the working class family that skimped and saved to afford a rite of passage trip for their kids to Walt Disney World, but could only afford the All Stars? Are they any more or less ‘worthy’ than the middle class parents who maxed out their credit cards to stay at the Grand Floridian?
This whole conversation makes me uncomfortable, but it’s nevertheless worth addressing because I’ve heard plenty of derogatory terms to describe the All Stars and their supposed clientele. It’s all BS. There is no material difference in the nature of guests at any of the resorts. I’ve witnessed obnoxious and drunken behavior out of business people at the Yacht Club and Gran Destino Tower, and have enjoyed perfectly peaceful stays at the All Stars.
There is one wrinkle to this that had a bit of validity in the past, which was/is crowds. It used to be the case that the All Stars had packed pools, overstuffed food courts during peak hours, tons of people loitering around the common areas, chaotic lobbies, and huge lines for the buses were problems. We’ve experienced all of these things ourselves, so I know they actually happened and weren’t exaggerated.
We’ve encountered this problem less at the All Stars in recent years. It’s still likely a problem when the ESPN Wide World of Sports is hosting a major cheer or dance event, so we recommend consulting the ESPN WWoS calendar before booking if this is a concern.
For whatever it’s worth, I stayed at Sports during one of those events last year and had no issues. Crowds weren’t bad, and the kids (and their parents) were better behaved than in the past. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that Disney has made it clear to chaperones that their groups need to behave, and be better supervised.
Ultimately, the answer to the titular question is an emphatic yes. If it’s been a while since you stayed at the All Star Resorts or you’ve never stayed after hearing horror stories, consider giving them a (second) chance. Bus transportation, rooms, maintenance, and more have all improved by leaps and bounds in the last several years at the All Stars.
Given quality of the reimagined rooms, efficiency of buses, on-site guest perks, and overall experience at the All Stars, a compelling case can be made for many parties on tight budgets to choose the All Stars over off-site accommodations. That’s without even addressing the emotional and subjective side of things–that emotional pull to be inside the Disney Bubble.
If you’re a frugal traveler wanting to get the “full” Walt Disney World experience but unable to splurge or spend extra on Pop Century or another higher-tier resort, the cheapest hotels on-site are actually good.
They’re not my first or even fifteenth choice among on-site accommodations I’d choose at Walt Disney World if money were no issue, but I don’t find myself regularly winning the lottery, so value does matter to me. I also don’t feel like I’m compromising on the quality of my overall experience when staying at the All Stars. If I did, I wouldn’t keep booking them!
Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!
YOUR THOUGHTS
Have you stayed at any of the All Star Resorts in the last few years? What did you think of the quality? What about the hotel(s) as a whole? How do you think these options compare to third party or off-site accommodations? What about relative to Pop Century or higher-tier hotels at Walt Disney World? Do you agree or disagree with our assessment that the All Stars are actually good hotel options for those wanting to be in the Disney bubble? Hearing your feedback about your experiences is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts or questions below in the comments!