How to Use the Walt Disney World Bus Transportation System to Get From Your Hotel to the Parks.

Because Disneyland is my "home park," 2021 was my first visit to Walt Disney World in Florida since I was 14 years old. I did as much research as I could on-line about how to get from our hotel to the different parks but I was still a little anxious about it when I left. So I thought I would post a few pictures of the "in's and out's" of using the Walt Disney World Bus Transportation System. It was an extremely convenient and easy system to figure out, even for me!

 

We like to get to the parks as early as possible - usually getting to Disneyland about 45 minutes before the park opens. I knew I'd be at the mercy of the buses at Walt Disney World, so I wanted to make sure I got on the earliest bus. I was told that the first bus leaves about an hour before the park opens. The virst Park we were visiting was Animal Kingdom and when we got to the bus loading area an hour before Animal Kingdom opened, we found that the first bus had already left. But another bus was there in only a few more minutes. So if you want to make sure to catch the very first bus, I recommend getting to the loading area about an hour and 15 minutes before the park opens.

This is a look at the Loading Area. We stayed at the All-Star Movies Resort where it was located out in-front of the hotel. 

Each park (and Disney Springs) has it's own sign, queue, and bus pick-up area. Just find the sign of the park you want to go to and get in line! 

There are different styles of busses, some with seats facing forward and some, like this one, with seats against the wall. This was from our second day, heading to Epcot.

Depending on what resort you're staying in, the drive can take from 5 minutes to 20 minutes. The good news is that you get to bypass all the traffic!

Here's a look at the bus drop-off area at Epcot. From here, it's a moderately long walk to the entrance.

But it's easy to find if you just follow all the people headed in the same direction...

...or the many signs that point the way.

Finding the way back to your resort at the end of the day is also a pretty easy process.

The parks will have signes indicating the direction where each method of transportation can be located. This was the sign outside of Epcot.

For bus transportation, they then have this board that will tell you which "gate" to go to, to get to your resort hotel. Again, this is the board at Epcot.

Here's a look at the board at the Magic Kingdom. If you can read the small writing in this picture, you can see that the bus for our resort, the All-Star Movies, leaves out of gate 20... 

...so we found gate 20 and got in line to wait for our bus. How long you'll have to wait for your bus depends on when the last bus left. We never waited more than about 15 minutes for ours.

      

Here's another look at the bus loading area at Magic Kingdom. 

This is the Bus Directory at Disney Springs, the shopping area. When we were ready to get back to our hotel, the All-Star Movies Resort, we looked at the board and saw that our bus was leaving out of gate 18...

                              

...so we made our way to gate 18 and our bus was already there.

                              

                                        

This is the bus loading area at Animal Kingdom where the "gates" are found. In this picture, you can see that gate 14 is going to Disney's Saratoga Springs. The only drawback is that when we were there, you couldn't go from one of the parks to the Disney Springs shopping area. So we took this bus to Saratoga Springs since it is a pretty short walk from Saratoga Springs to Disney Springs. Hopefully Disney will start providing buses to go directly from the parks to Disney Springs in the near future.

Here's another look at the bus loading area at Animal Kingdom. These loading areas are huge! There are typically about 30 gates at each one, meaning that there is room for 30 busses to park to load up guests.

This is the bus loading area at Hollywood studios. The only slight drawback to the bus transportation is that it is a pretty long walk to get to certain gates so, if it's raining...

...you're going to get soaked!