Disney's Port Orleans Resort
Disney's Port Orleans Resort is a moderate resort hotel at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. It consists of two linked sections, French Quarter and Riverside, set along the Sassagoula River northeast of Disney Springs. With 3,056 guest rooms in total, the combined resort has more rooms than any other single hotel complex on Walt Disney World property. The French Quarter section opened on May 17, 1991, as the original Port Orleans Resort; Riverside followed on February 2, 1992, under the name Disney's Dixie Landings Resort, and the two were merged under the Port Orleans name on April 1, 2001.
History
A New Orleans-themed hotel had been discussed at Walt Disney World since the early 1980s, when it was proposed near the Disney Village Marketplace as a companion to the steamboat-styled Empress Lily restaurant. The idea was revived in the late 1980s and designed by Fugleberg Koch Architects of Winter Park, Florida, working with the Disney Development Company; ground was broken in the autumn of 1989. A new artificial waterway, the Sassagoula River — the name derives from a Native American word associated with the Mississippi — was dug to connect the site with the Marketplace, now Disney Springs.
The original resort opened with 432 rooms in three buildings and grew to 1,008 rooms in seven buildings as construction finished. Dixie Landings opened the following year further up the river. The two hotels traded as sisters for nine years before Disney combined their operations in 2001, renaming the original hotel French Quarter and Dixie Landings as Riverside. The resort closed in March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and was among the last Walt Disney World hotels to reopen, Riverside returning on October 14, 2021, and French Quarter on October 28, 2021.
French Quarter
French Quarter is the smaller and more compact of the two sections, with 1,008 rooms in seven three-storey buildings of 144 rooms each. Its streets reproduce the historic French Quarter of New Orleans in miniature: wrought-iron balconies, gas-style lamps, courtyards, fountains and a permanent Mardi Gras atmosphere, with jazz references throughout. Its compact layout, a single bus stop and a short internal geography make it popular with guests who find the larger resorts unwieldy.
The section's pool, Doubloon Lagoon, is guarded by a sea-serpent waterslide whose tongue forms the slide itself, with a figure of King Neptune riding the serpent. The Scat Cat's Club cafe is known within Walt Disney World for serving beignets, the powdered-sugar pastries associated with New Orleans, and the Sassagoula Floatworks and Food Factory provides the section's main food court.
Riverside
Riverside, with 2,048 rooms, evokes the Mississippi River country of the rural South. It is divided into two districts. Alligator Bayou contains 1,024 rooms in sixteen two-storey lodges finished to look weathered and rustic, set among pine trees and waterways; some of its rooms sleep five, using a fold-down bed. Magnolia Bend contains a further 1,024 rooms in four large buildings styled as the white-columned manor houses of southern plantations, fronted by formal gardens and magnolia trees.
In 2011 and 2012 about a quarter of the Magnolia Bend rooms were converted into Royal Guest Rooms, decorated as the chambers of Disney princesses with fibre-optic firework effects in the headboards. Riverside's main building, the Sassagoula Steamboat Company, houses check-in, the Boatwright's Dining Hall restaurant and the River Roost lounge, long associated with the piano entertainer Yehaa Bob Jackson. Its central pool, on Ol' Man Island, is themed as an abandoned sawmill swimming hole, and the section has five further quiet pools.
Transportation
Water taxis sail down the Sassagoula River from both sections to Disney Springs, a journey of about twenty minutes from Riverside. The two sections are also linked by a riverside walking path of roughly a mile. Buses serve all four theme parks and the water parks; French Quarter and Riverside share some routes and operate separately on others.