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Staying at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort has been a goal of mine for a long time! It’s a unicorn property, because it’s a Sheraton, but also considered a Deluxe Disney Resort that comes with almost all the perks of official Disney Resorts (more on that below). That means you can use Marriott points to book a Deluxe Disney Resort like the Swan, Dolphin or Swan Reserve! We chose the Dolphin, because it has the most extensive outdoor resort area and the Friendship boat transportation right out front.
We used 240,000 Marriott points to book our four-night stay at the Dolphin, in a standard room with two double beds. When we checked in, I asked if there were any upgrades available, and she said she was upgrading us to the tenth floor, resort view. I have no idea if that was an actual upgrade or if we would have been in that room anyway, but the view of the Swan across the lake was lovely.
We opened two different Marriott cards to earn the points for this stay:
Marriott Bonvoy Boundless Earn 100,000 points after spending $3,000 on purchases in your first 3 months from account opening with the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless® Credit Card ($95 annual fee).
Marriott Bonvoy Business American Express Card (Earn 75,000 Bonus Marriott Bonvoy Points after you use your new Card to make $3,000 in purchases within the first 3 months of Card Membership, $125 annual fee)
The receptionist also checked to see if there were EPCOT view rooms available, and there were none. That would have only cost $30 extra per night, and I would gladly have paid: you can watch EPCOT fireworks from those rooms at night!
To hear more about our stay at the Dolphin, be sure to check out this episode of The Disney Points Podcast:
Dolphin Deluxe Resort Perks
The only Deluxe perk the Dolphin doesn’t offer is you can’t tie your Magic Band to your room. Other than that, you pretty much get all the perks: complimentary park transportation and extended park hours. Every morning, you can visit any of the parks 30 minutes before they open. We took advantage of this at Hollywood Studios by being in the park at rope drop and waiting in a short Slinky Dog Dash line, followed by a short Rock N Rollercoaster line. At EPCOT, the best rides to hit during the early 30 minutes are Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure and then Frozen Ever After.
For a limited time at Deluxe Resorts guests also qualify extra evening hours at EPCOT on Mondays and Magic Kingdom on Wednesdays, meaning you can stay in the parks for two hours after they close! You can even do this on the day you check out of your Deluxe Resort, like we did for our split stay. We moved to an off property hotel midday, then returned to EPCOT for the extra evening hours.
The best part of extra evening hours is an extra chance at Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind! Normally, you can only try for a virtual queue twice a day, at 7am and again at 1pm. You can only ride in one boarding group, unless you also purchase Lightning Lane (if they haven’t sold out!). The extra evening hours come with a third 6pm virtual queue, allowing a chance to ride Guardians again–hopefully to a different song! Our songs were “Conga” and “September.”
Tips for Virtual Queueing: Make sure everyone in your party who has My Disney Experience has all their accounts linked, so that all your groups tickets are in everyones account (scroll all the way to the bottom and links your friends and family under your profile). Set an alarm for 5 minutes before the queue. On the hour, everyone with a My Disney Experience account should hit “refresh” and then “join queue.” In our experience, one of us has ALWAYS been able to get a virtual queue using this method, at Disneyland and World.
Dolphin Resort Extra Fees
Here are the extra fees associated with rooms redeemed on points:
Parking fee*: $35/night or $49 for valet–we didn’t rent a car.
Rollaway beds: $25/night fee–we opted for no rollaway bed and packed a backpacking mat instead.
Resort fee: $40/night.
Breakfast*: $25/person–we had our own food in the room and did not purchase breakfast.
Spa: prices vary by services rendered. If you are a Marriott gold member like we are, you can enjoy their relaxation and changing rooms for free!
Because we didn’t rent a car, ask for a rollaway bed or eat breakfast at the hotel, our stay at the Dolphin cost us only $160 in resort fees. (We also paid a total of $150 in resort fees at the second hotel in our split stay, the Holiday Inn Lake Buena Vista). That means our total cost for seven nights lodging was $310!
*Saving Money on Breakfast
There are multiple ways to save money on breakfast at the Dolphin Resort. The first is to pack a suitcase full of breakfast food and snacks (that’s our favorite!). The second is to order groceries to the Dolphin (you’ll have to meet the deliverer in the lobby or parking lot). The third way is to walk over and eat at the Boardwalk Bakery–it opens at 7am!
We spent 150 filling a carry-on suitcase with breakfast and snack food for this trips and it replaced approximately twelve family meals! We ate dinner and treats out, and spent about $950 total on food the rest of the trip. At home, we budget about $300/week on food–so we subtract that normal spending from our total food cost and figure we only spent a total of $800 on vacation food (a family of five ate on vacation for $100/day!).
*Dolphin parking fees
We priced out all our transportation options and found that the least expensive option for our family of five would be using Lyft to get to and from the airport, between hotels for our split stay, and roundtrip on our Universal studios day. We spend a total of 165.81 on Lyfts for those four rides during our eight day trip. A rental car in Orlando is typically $44/day when we rent, so renting a car would have cost us $352, plus all the parking fees we will cover next.
Parking fees at the Dolphin are $35/day. We also visited Universal Studios Orlando one day, where parking costs $27. That means we would have paid an extra $202 in parking fees for Dolphin plus Universal if we had rented a car.
To summarize: renting a car would have cost us $554, but we paid only $165.81 using Lyfts.
We saved $388.19 in transportation costs!
Dolphin Resort Amenities
We absolutely love the grounds of the Dolphin resort. On our park rest days, we enjoyed swimming in the pools (pools at the Dolphin are open 9am-9pm), going down the slides and relaxing in the hot tubs. My daughter and I spent time on the beach. We spent hours playing ping pong and pool as a family near the basketball court.
There’s also an arcade where you can pay to play games, and a laundry facility. I did one load of laundry before we left, and it cost me $6.00 to purchase soap, wash and dry the laundry.
The fitness room is spacious with lots of equipment, a water station and restrooms with showers. It even has a Cross-fit room. My son didn’t think they had enough machines for him to get a thorough workout–he had to use free weights. But all in all, our whole family used and enjoyed the gym.
Dolphin Resort Restaurants
Because we were out and about quite a bit, we really only ate at one of the restaurants in the Dolphin: The Fountain. It’s a family restaurant on the ground floor serving American food, and we highly recommend. We ate their once as a family, and our kids ate there again one night while my husband and I had Sushi across the way at The Swan (both Fountain meals cost less than $100).
We highly recommend the Sushi restaurant Kimonos. Located in the Swan resort, everything from the ambiance to the food felt authentic. We had a date night there including hot tea & Saki, gyoza and multiple rolls for around $100 total.
Dolphin Resort Transportation
Getting to the Parks
You don’t need your own transportation to any of the parks if you’re staying at the Dolphin. If you’re headed to Magic Kingdom or Animal Kingdom, we recommend heading across the boardwalk to the Yacht & Beach Club and taking their shuttle buses, which will drop you right in front of those parks (instead of the Ticket & Transportation center, where the Dolphin shuttle bus drops guests for Magic Kingdom. From there you have to take the monorail or ferry, and sometimes the lines are long). Check with the Dolphin front desk for bus schedules.
If you’ll be heading to Hollywood Studios or EPCOT, you’re in luck! Both are either walking distance or a complimentary Friendship boat ride away from the Dolphin. We both walked and rode the boats, depending, and it was a fantastic experience.
We also explored the Monorail resorts one day; to get there, we headed to Yacht & Beach club and took a bus to Magic Kingdom. It was actually quite a busy night, as they were emptying the parks for a Christmas party, so we walked over to The Contemporary and boarded the Monorail. From there, we rode to the Grand Floridian, where we got out to view the lobby (it was decorated for Christmas at the time and there is a life-sized Gingerbread house where they sell souvenirs). We rode all the around to the Ticket & Transportation center, got off and walked to The Polynesian. We ate a quick service dinner there and enjoyed dole whips for dessert. After dessert, we took a bus back to the Yacht & Beach club and walked home to the Dolphin.
Dolphin Airport Shuttle
There is a Dolphin airport shuttle, which costs $293 dollar roundtrip for an SUV or van. We didn’t use it because that would have cost more than all of our Lyfts combined!
Dolphin Shuttle to Disney Springs
You can also take a shuttle bus from the Dolphin to Disney Springs, to eat, drink, shop and listen to live music. We moved hotels halfway through our trip over to a Disney Springs hotel, so we considered taking the shuttle bus to Disney Springs and walking to our hotel from there. In the end though, we were too tired and the walk from shuttle to hotel would have been over a mile–so we took a Lyft!
Takeaways
Our total cost for food, ground transportation and lodging for this eight-day-trip only cost us ~$1340. Not bad! The last significant expense is, of course, admission: to see how we’ve also used points to also cover Disney admission, read this post:
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