Back from WDW! I booked 6 nights at POR for 5 of us over a year ago, for thanksgiving week, with AA miles. Recap: When I found out that POR was not opening, I called disney twice to see what would happen but they couldn't/wouldn't do anything because I booked through AA. I knew contacting AA was going to be useless, and it was. They could only refund the points, but there were no more disney hotels to book through their site. So I put it off so I could think about it. Considered going to universal instead. Emailed disney guest services just to see and they transferred it to their "wholesale" dept. They were great and upgraded us to SSR, 2 bed villa.
It was fabulous! It was not a refurbed room, and it was still fabulous. Loved the resort. Now I wish I booked longer because we needed a few extra days.
Having a kitchen and laundry is a game changer.
Parks were great too, definitely a different trip than usual, but not unexpected. Parks were at their pandemic capacity (tried to change a park reservation and couldn't). Long waits without fastpasses (also expected). I read other accounts that posted wait times were less for a lot of people. Not true for the holiday week, they were pretty spot on. And popular rides were around 80-90 mins. It was nice to see some queues that I've never seen before because they were on rides that I always had a fastpass for.
But pandemic capacity was noticeably lower than a normal holiday week. For example, after getting food and drinks around EPCOT, we were always able to actually find a seat.
The COVID precautions were good. Though it made the lines reeeeeeeeeeally long. Finding the ends of some of them were challenging. I'm looking at you, Flights of Passage. Felt pretty safe though, with the mask mandate, 6ft markings in lines, reduced capacity of park, rides and restaurants. Only thing I would skip is Disney Springs at night. While the stores were limiting people, it was still very crowded walking around (at night, daytime was fine) and hard to avoid people.
Buses not too bad. It was nice not having people squished in on top of you. Had a short wait most of the time. One was 30mins and it was a little frustrating to try to leave AK and have 4 contemporary buses pull in right aside of you while waiting for SSR. First world problems...
Anyway, we are all spoiled now and it will be hard to go back to one room for the 5 of us.