Disney’s Yacht & Beach Club Resorts are in the midst of multi-year construction until 2027. During this, one under-the-radar project has been a room redo at Yacht Club. These were last refurbished in 2017, and although the end result was controversial among Walt Disney World fans, we loved the new rooms. This review features a photos tour of the refreshed guest rooms, and our thoughts on the good & bad of the changes.
We generally love Yacht Club and find it to be an underrated hotel. The resort has a certain air of stateliness and sophistication, with rich woods, dark colors, leather furniture, and an antique-looking globe, and an abundance of yachting decor to reinforce the theme. As someone who’s only exposure to yachting comes from rich people doing it in movies, Yacht Club has this air of faux exclusivity. Like we’re briefly members of a private club for senators, titans of industry, and such. It feels like you’re getting an actual luxury hotel and not “just” a Disney Deluxe Resort.
A lot of Walt Disney World fans dislike the hotel for precisely the same reason. What we see as stately and sophisticated, they call stuffy and snobby. While we don’t agree, we can certainly see the basis for that perspective, and despite them being ‘sister’ resorts, Yacht Club and Beach Club have very different vibes. The good news, if you view the resort as too stuffy–or rich, dark, and antiquated–is that the redone rooms remedy these criticisms!
Before digging in, let’s cover Walt Disney World’s official ‘construction bulletin’ regarding the hotel: Disney’s Yacht Club Resort is undergoing routine exterior maintenance through late 2026. As part of this work, the porte cochere will be closed through late November 2025. This work may impact views from various locations throughout the resort, and at times, alternate paths of travel may be in place.
We previously discussed this project at length in Disney’s Yacht & Beach Club Refurbishments Extended to 2027, so if you want more information about the exterior maintenance, refer to that.
What I can add about the exterior work is that we didn’t notice it during our Christmas-time stay at all. I’m not sure whether this is because the construction is paused for the popular holiday season or if we just somehow missed it. But we drove and parked at Yacht Club and spent extensive time around the hotel, and didn’t once see anything.
With that said, Yacht Club is a very large resort. If there’s one thing having a room at the very end of the hallway reinforced, it’s this. There are a lot of tucked away areas, and even during my last time visiting Yacht & Beach Club, the facade maintenance was very targeted. Just small crews working on isolated areas.
In other words, don’t necessarily take any of the above as an indication that the exterior maintenance is finished. Walt Disney World is not in the habit of wrapping up construction projects a full year in advance. Given how targeted the work has been to date, the chances that it’ll impact you are low, but if you’re chronically unlucky, you might want to make a room request just in case. At the very least, it’s a good idea to ask for something closer to the elevators–unless you need some marathon training.
The under-the-radar room refurbishment was first announced last April with a bulletin that “some” guest rooms at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort would be under refurbishment from this January through May. That was later revised to remove the end date and reference to the guest rooms.
Our best guess is that Walt Disney World felt it unnecessary to have a separate alert for the rooms given the all-encompassing construction bulletin. And as we pointed out back when the refurbishment was first announced, ~5 months wasn’t long enough to complete a room refurbishment at Yacht Club.
Either way, Cast Members at Yacht Club advised us that this room refurbishment is now finished. It was a soft goods refresh, following up on the last hard goods refurbishment that was completed in 2017. This means the project was mostly iterative in nature, so we’d stop short of calling these “new” or “reimagined” rooms. Walt Disney World took the foundation that was already there, refreshing and refining it.
Let’s take a look at the circa-2017 ‘new’ rooms before we offer further commentary:
As noted in the intro, the last hard goods refurbishment of Yacht Club was controversial with Walt Disney World fans. The rooms went from being bright and light, with lots of reds, whites and blues to being darker and more sophisticated. Gone was the carpet, the playful headboards, bed runners, and other Disney details, replaced by a lot of rich woods and muted tones.
These changes to the guest rooms at Yacht Club were largely aimed at making the more appealing to the convention-going demographic. Yacht Club is Walt Disney World’s luxury hotel for conventions, or at least it was until Gran Destino Tower opened. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if many large events favor Coronado Springs, even if it’s technically a Moderate Resort.
Another view of the previous “new” rooms at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort:
As you can probably imagine, business travelers have different tastes and preferences than families. We’ve seen this reflected in Walt Disney World’s room refurbishments over the last decade; when the goal has been making rooms more appealing to non-families or non-fans, the result has left something to be desired for fans.
We’ve harped on this in the past, so I won’t rehash it all here. Basically, the more ‘mainstream’ Walt Disney World makes a hotel room, the less-themed the result. There have been some exceptions to this, and these room designs have been a bit hit or miss. At least, from my fan perspective. Conventioneers and others might (and do) disagree.
When these rooms were first redone, we spoke with a manager at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort who indicated that they had solicited a lot of feedback, particularly from conventioneers, prior to making the updates to the room. Supposedly, Disney created multiple different test rooms to aid in the redesign.
Our ‘unpopular opinion’ for a while was that the new rooms at Yacht Club were actually good and well-themed. They weren’t perfect, but keep in mind that this was back in 2017. It was a dark time (literally and figuratively) for Walt Disney World room refurbishments.
Contrary to the common perception that today’s new rooms are “bad” or “unthemed,” many of the redesigns that fans dislike were actually done from around 2015 to 2018. Admittedly, some of the worst impulses are evident even in those Yacht Club rooms.
We liked the new rooms at Yacht Club back then, but (also admittedly) were grading on a curve after experiencing the bland and boring rooms at nearby Beach Club and BoardWalk. The style was a bit dark and drab, one-note, and lacking in that quintessential ‘fun’ Disney vibe to them. Thankfully, the 2025 room refresh at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort fixes pretty much all of that.
The photos pretty much speak for themselves, so we’ll share a batch here and then offer critique on the good & bad of the redesign:
As is probably evident in comparing the photos, approximately three-quarters of the room is unchanged.
Again, this was a soft goods refurbishment. This type of refresh is done between hard goods “guttings” to extend the life of a particular room design, and to give them a fresh look that takes advantage of industry trends and innovations in design.
Soft goods refurbishments typically involve updating furnishings, including but not limited to wall coverings, flooring, linens, decor, and some furniture. And that’s precisely what we see here with the one-quarter changes to the room design.
The good news is that Walt Disney World took full advantage of those ~25% changes.
If they previously polled only conventioneers on the room redesign, this one was influenced exclusively by Walt Disney World fans. In fact, if you took reader complaints from DisneyTouristBlog.com and sought to address those, this would pretty much be the end result.
The first big thing we noticed is the rug under the beds. This style was first introduced at the Grand Floridian and strikes us as a compromise between fully-carpeted rooms and the easier-to-clean wood or laminate flooring. The rug looks great, complete with hidden Mickeys, nautical stylization, and pops of color.
This is pretty much the trifecta of the Yacht Club room refresh: more color, more Disney, more detail.
It’s a huge success. There’s still the extensive use of dark woods, which really give the room an air of sophistication. There’s also a variety of textures, the extent of which might be tough to ascertain from the photos. This looked great before, but it also looked a bit one-note and drab.
With the refresh, Walt Disney World has infused these rooms with excellent uses of navy blue, reds, and whites to contrast with the beiges. It looks really sharp in person, and the color palette alone reinforces the nautical theme. This is basically Brooks Brothers or Ralph Lauren: The Room. I felt ready to go perform in the Olympics after spending the night here (competitive steak and Cake Bake eating is an Olympics sport, right?).
There are a lot of things that I like about the refreshed Yacht Club rooms, but the big one is the added Disney art.
Previously, the artwork on the walls was weird abstract(ish) stock photos of boats. It was like what would come in the frame at Home Goods; maybe that’s exactly what it was. I cannot imagine that even conventioneers liked that; it was just odd and ugly, having nothing to do with Disney or sophisticated style.
That art is, mercifully, gone. This isn’t a huge surprise, as the same happened at Beach Club, BoardWalk, and everywhere else that used off-putting stock art. In its place, we have fun and on-theme Disney artwork that should satisfy fans wanting a bit more whimsy and characters.
Another big change is that the sofa was swapped out. This was previously beige and is now navy blue, but is otherwise substantially similar.
I don’t have a strong opinion on the old color versus the new one, although I do prefer the new slightly. The main reason I’m calling this out is because, during our more recent stays prior to this refresh, the couch always had the worst wear and tear. This change was probably made on that basis alone.
Also, I absolutely love the red piping on the navy couch. Another little touch that reinforces that nautical theme.
Although there are more blues in the new rooms, the big addition is the reds. These really make the Yacht Club rooms pop and, in the words of Sam Eagle, make them Distinctly Patriotic.
There are examples of this throughout, but my favorite is the throw pillows. These check so many boxes for me–colorful, on-theme, whimsical Mickey Mouse. They really tie the room together and prevent the all-white bedding from looking overly sterile.
Honestly, the rise in throw pillows like this make me feel vindicated in my multi-year rants about Disney removing bed runners. While these are obviously not the same thing, they seem like an olive branch extended to fans who complained about the bland bedding. I’ll take this as a win!
Another change is the new nautical inspired chair, also with more red in it.
Above that, you can see that the desk is the same. I believe they swapped out the charging stations here, as there’s now USB-A in addition to USB-C. Most of the other outlets around the room are still USB-A.
I didn’t test out any of these to see whether they work or how quickly they charge. I’ve read too many horror stories about “juice jacking,” making public ports like this a no-go for me. The main point, though, is that the outlets are largely the same as before–except on this desk.
Another major change is the curtain.
Previously, this was darker but had constellations of Disney characters–the one bit of intellectual property and whimsy in those rooms. I really liked the constellation curtains! But, they were darker and perhaps too subtle, so Walt Disney World swapped them out.
I don’t have any issue with the new curtains, per se. They’re on theme and add more color to the room, so that’s good. The constellation curtains were just so clever; one of the truly underappreciated details of these (and perhaps all) guest rooms at Walt Disney World.
Another change is the knot-ical wallpaper in the bathroom.
I love this. It reminds me of something straight out of the 1990s, both in terms of the playful Mickeys in the design and how it looks a bit more “busy.” Design trends are cyclical, and I’m happy to see highly-themed on the upswing.
Otherwise, these and other surfaces are largely unchanged. This wasn’t a hard goods refurbishment, so we didn’t expect to see the room gutted and fully updated with new sinks, headboards, etc. All of that plus the dresser and any other furniture not specifically mentioned above is the same as before.
I’m fine with the lack of changes elsewhere.
There are small rivets or other ship fastenings throughout, including on the dresser and other furniture. This looks sophisticated and on-theme, just as it did before. Other features of the room now include a built-in ironing board, wood floors, abundance of storage (including under-the-bed room for luggage), and Keurig coffee makers.
The attention to detail in the refreshed Yacht Club rooms is incredible, and all of it works to cement the theme.
The updated rooms at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort are not the most dramatic changes we’ve seen from soft goods refurbishments in recent years. However, they are arguably among the most consequential.
With the exception of the constellation curtain’s replacement (which is debatable), every change here was an iterative improvement. Not only are the changes themselves (almost) all positive, but they elevate what was done during the last room overhaul. The design is now punctuated with color and characters and more thematic flourishes.
Wins, all around. The team behind this room refresh truly understood the assignment, and made every single change count. It’s frankly remarkable how much better the room looks despite only ~25% of it being updated.
I actually do see these changes making a meaningful difference for families considering a stay at Walt Disney World. Whereas many fans criticized the previous rooms as boring, bland and beige, I don’t think that can be said about these.
They may not be as loud as some fans might like, but they really thread the needle. I highly doubt anyone will look at the immediate before vs. after and contend the 2025 room refresh is a downgrade. That’s a really tough–impossible, if you ask me–case to make.
Beyond the room changes, the hallways and some common areas have also been refurbished and look great. Some areas of Yacht Club were looking a bit worse for wear, so these refurbishments are very welcome. Not all of these changes are new as of this year, but here’s a look just in case it’s been a few years since you’ve stayed at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort:
Overall, the Yacht Club room refurbishment is one of those rare times a change has been made in a Walt Disney World hotel that will please both the fan and non-fan constituencies. With the recent changes, this is at once a luxury hotel and a Disney Deluxe Resort. Sophisticated, stately, well-themed, and distinctly Disney.
Conventioneers liked what was already here; the modern and fresh-looking rooms that are well-appointed and classy. Nothing that was done here undermines that, not even swapping out the “artsy” Home Goods stock photos for character art. You’re at Walt Disney World, a bit of whimsy comes with the territory.
On the other hand, true Walt Disney World fans will appreciate all of the changes that reinforce the themed design. The added details, characters, and color are all fantastic (well, minus the curtain–minor detail). I’m sure there are still legitimate quibbles to be made with these new rooms, but frankly, I didn’t spot anything that I’d consider even remotely major.
From my perspective, this is a job exceptionally well done by Imagineering and the other teams tasked with the refresh–they really made it count and the end result is practically perfect. Yacht Club once again has top-tier rooms; arguably the best balance of themed design and modern luxury in all of Walt Disney World.
If you’re debating other options in the Crescent Lake area–or beyond–we’d recommend reading our Rankings of ALL Walt Disney World Hotels from Worst to Best. You might be surprised by how ‘low’ Yacht Club ranks on that list, but the competition is fierce and that was last updated before this room redo. Rest assured that YC is moving up our rankings!
If you’re still not sure which Walt Disney World hotel is right or you simply want someone else to do the work in planning your trip, let a professional help you for free: Click here to get a quote from a recommended, no-fee Authorized Disney Vacation Planner (Disney’s term for travel agent). They’ll book your trip, assist with reservations and add-ons, and get you the best discounts. Using an Authorized Disney Vacation Planner is the win-win option if you’re overwhelmed by the complexities of Walt Disney World and don’t want to do all of the “homework” yourself.
Your Thoughts
Do you agree or disagree with our take on the new Yacht Club rooms? Would you stay here, or is this resort off of your radar due to the refurbishment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing feedback about your experiences is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
