On our January 2022 trip, we were incredibly lucky to stay four nights at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge. My brother-in-law is a DVC member, and he used his DVC points to book this room and invited us to stay with them!
First of all, Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge is absolutely stunning. Just walking into the lobby will take your breath away! This resort has two sections—Jambo House and Kidani Village. When booking you can choose from savanna view, pool view, and standard view rooms. (Standard rooms and suites—meaning non-DVC villas—are all in Jambo House.) We stayed in a savanna-view two-bedroom DVC villa on the Kidani Village side.
Each side has its own lobby, gift shop, arcade, pool, and bus stop (though they share busses). Kidani Village definitely feels quieter and cozier, while Jambo House is livlier and full of fun energy. The main thing that Kidani Village lacks is a quick-service restaurant. You can still get drink refills in refillable resort mugs at Kidani Village—there’s a soda fountain and coffee/tea station in the back of the gift shop in the lobby.
I would call this resort medium-sized. Once you’ve stayed at Pop Century or walked around Caribbean Beach, Animal Kingdom Lodge practically feels cozy.
Pools
During our stay, the pool on the Kidani Village side was closed for refurbishment, so we walked over to the Jambo House side multiple times to eat at The Mara and go swimming. There is a shuttle you can take between Kidani Village and Jambo House, but it’s probably only about a 7-10 minute walk.
The pool at Jambo House (pictured above) is gorgeous, and our kids had a blast swimming and going down the waterslide multiple times. There’s also a pool bar that serves drinks and snacks, but we didn’t try anything from there. We had no problem finding available chairs in the middle of the day, and it proved to be a really nice break from the parks!
Dining
The Mara is the only quick-service restaurant at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge. It’s located on the Jambo House side, and it can be kind of hard to find if it’s your first time staying there! You have to go in the front of the Jambo House lobby, down the stairs, outside, and past the pool, and it’s on the left. We ate here a couple of times during our stay, and the food was great. One thing to note about The Mara, however, is it’s currently only open until 10:00pm. We love to close down the parks, and one night in particular, when we were too busy riding rides to eat dinner, this really threw a wrench in our plans. We ended up ordering pizza on Door Dash (first time we’ve ever had to do that at Disney before!).
There are three table-service restaurants at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge—Sanaa is at Kidani Village, and Boma and Jiko are at Jambo House. We ate at Sanaa, and it was incredible—a new Disney World favorite for us! The Indian-style Bread Service and the African Triple Chocolate Mousse were the absolute stand-outs of our meal. This is a great place to try if you want something new and different, but don’t worry about bringing kids—the kids’ menu has both adventurous and standard options. My niece is the pickiest eater I know, and both her and my kiddo were very happy with their cheese pizza. 😆 You can see the full menu on Disney’s website here. Table-service restaurants require advanced dining reservations, which you can make up to 60 days out from your trip!
Transportation
One major drawback to Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge is that the only transportation option is a bus. This might not be a drawback for you if you drive to Disney World or plan to rent a car. But for us this was pretty unfortunate at times. When we were there in January 2022, the busses were not running consistently or often. This may have been due to staffing shortages (we saw many “in training” bus drivers throughout our stay), so I’m not sure that it’s always like this. But we consistently waited 20+ minutes for a bus to arrive. And, unless you’re going to Animal Kingdom, the bus rides are long. Besides Animal Kingdom, the next closest park is Hollywood Studios, which is about a 15 minute bus ride away.
After staying at Pop Century on our previous trip (which has the skyliner) and coming from Bay Lake Tower, where we stayed on the first part of this trip, (which has the monorail) this took some getting used to! The night we wanted to go to Magic Kingdom for Extended Evening Hours for Deluxe Resort Guests, we waited 20 minutes for a bus and when it still hadn’t come (and we figured it would take another 20+ minutes to even get to Magic Kingdom), we decided to just stay at the resort and take the kids to the arcade instead. Major bummer!
Both Kidani Village and Jambo House have their own bus stops, though they do share busses. This varied sometimes, but generally the busses would drop off at Kidani Village first and then go to Jambo House. And they pick up at Jambo House first and then Kidani Village. Just a bit of a life hack: if you’re staying at Kidani Village when you get on the bus at the parks try to stay near the front or along the sides where you can get off easily whenever possible. If you’re sitting in the very back of the bus, you’re going to have to climb over everyone to get off at Kidani Village. 😆
Arcades
Both Kidani Village and Jambo House have arcades. Kidani Village has the Safari So Good Arcade, which is located on the first floor around the corner from the lobby (near Community Hall and the elevators). This arcade is small but still fun and tends to be less crowded. Jambo House has Pumbaa’s Fun and Games arcade, which is located next to The Mara. This one is probably twice the size of the one at Kidani Village, but definitely gets more crowded especially in the evenings!
Our kids love arcades, and these were no exception! They certainly managed to spend all their allotted arcade allowance haha. 😆 Liam maintains, however, that the Pop Century arcade is still his favorite.
The Room
We loved the room at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge. As I mentioned above, we had a split stay on this trip. The first three nights we stayed in a two-bedroom DVC villa at Disney’s Bay Lake Tower Resort. The room at Animal Kingdom Lodge was roomier and more updated than Bay Lake Tower.
DVC villas have full kitchens, living/dining areas, multiple bathrooms, and a washer and dryer, which is SO NICE. Now I can see why people say once you stay in a one- or two-bedroom villa you never want to go back to a standard hotel room!
The BEST part about staying at Animal Kingdom Lodge is of course the savanna view!! Even if you don’t have a savanna-view room, both sides of the resort have areas where you can sit and watch the animals on the savanna. When we were there in January 2022, there were animals out on the savanna all the time! The giraffes (our favorite!) tended to be out really early in the morning, around sunrise when they eat. (It’s so cool to watch the cast members drive around the savanna and feed the animals in the morning!) But we saw all different animals at all different times of the day!
The balcony was our favorite part of this room. It was huge! It extended all the way across our room and had doors from both bedrooms and the living room and plenty of chairs for everyone. We spent every morning of our stay out here (as you can see above, we’re all in our pajamas haha) having coffee with the giraffes. I highly recommend getting up for sunrise at least once if you can. So gorgeous!
This might cramp your style if you’re a hard core Disney parks rope-dropper, but try to take at least one morning easy and watch the savanna. It’s worth it, I promise! But if mornings aren’t your thing, we also found there to be a lot of animals out in the early evening, around 5:00–6:00pm.
Overall
We absolutely loved our stay at Animal Kingdom Lodge. The unique table-service dining options, the quality of the room, and the savanna view just cannot be beat! If you have a real animal lover in your group, this is absolutely a must-do experience!
That said, I don’t think we will be jumping to book here for trips in our near future. Dining and transportation are probably the top two amenities we look for in a resort, and both of those were lacking for us at Animal Kingdom Lodge. When we go to Disney World, we like to be in the parks and we like to hop around. Having the ease of non-bus transportation options puts many resorts ahead of this one for us. Also the limited hours at The Mara really didn’t work for us.
I’m really glad we experienced a stay here, but in the future I would probably only book here if we were using DVC points (if someday in the future we have them!) and we were planning a more resort-stay type of vacation with less park time. Or for one or two nights as part of a split stay.
Have you ever visited Animal Kingdom Lodge? Where does it fall on your list of favorite Disney World resorts? I’d love to hear your thought in the comments below!
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[…] Deluxe resorts are of course the nicest and most expensive—they have sit-down restaurants (and often signature dining experiences), pools with water slides, balconies, extra transportation options, sometimes spas, and more. The Grand Floridian, the Polynesian, the Contemporary, Beach Club, Yacht Club, Boardwalk, Riviera, and Animal Kingdom Lodge are some of the deluxe resorts. We stayed at Animal Kingdom Lodge in 2022—click here to read our thoughts! […]
[…] And they’re open late! I think they serve dinner until 10pm most nights. (If you read our Animal Kingdom Lodge review, you’ll remember that our main complaint about The Mara was how early it closed.) Our […]