Newport Bay Club

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The Disneyland Paris resort has seven hotels on the property, with around 6000 rooms of accommodation. Each hotel has a theme; in order of increasing price, they are the Santa Fe, the Cheyenne, the Davy Crockett Ranch, the Sequoia Lodge and Newport Bay Club (very similar in price and accommodation), the Hotel New York, and the Disneyland Hotel.

The themes of these hotels are astonishingly well executed. Walking around the Santa Fe, which is designed to look like an inexpensive hotel in New Mexico, it is very easy indeed to forget that you are thousands of kilometers away from the real city of Santa Fe. Similarly, the Cheyenne looks just like the old western town it is designed to represent, the Sequoia Lodge looks uncannily like northern California, the Newport Bay Club (pictured here) looks like a New England resort, and so on. Even the trees and plants are selected to maintain the illusion in each hotel, and it is very convincing.

All of these hotels are very nice as well, with luxurious accommodations by the Spartan standards of European hotels, and nice accommodations by American standards. During holiday periods and the high season, these hotels sell out completely; the cheapest of them, the Santa Fe, is frequently sold out even at other times. The Davy Crockett Ranch is especially popular, because it is in the middle of a real forest, and the hotel rooms look like rustic bungalows (but with all the comforts of home inside). The Disneyland Hotel is popular with celebrities.

These hotels are unique in many other ways as well. At one time, the Santa Fe offered a free laundromat, and cereal and chocolate milk in the minibars in the rooms (because many guests come with young children). The exceedingly cheap habits of Europeans and some problems with payments have forced the resort to reduce the extras and special details, though. Europeans can't appreciate it, and either are unwilling to pay for it and/or will take greedy advantage of it. (For the same reason, the many different types of excellent restaurants once found inside the Magic Kingdom and at the hotels have gradually converged on pizza and sandwiches over the years, as that's all that Europeans understand and are willing to pay for.)

Anyway, the hotel pictured above is the excellent Newport Bay Club, which holds the distinction of being the largest hotel in Europe. You are looking south across Lake Buena Vista in this photo; the hotel is so wide that I had to make it a panoramic shot—sorry. This hotel is great inside, and the view from the upper rooms is beautiful (they look over nearly the entire resort). There are two swimming pools, one indoor and one outdoor.

As I've said, the hotels and theme park used to have great restaurants, until it became apparent that Europeans just wanted everything to be cheap, cheap, and cheap. The Newport Bay had a fabulous buffet, and the Sequoia Lodge had a grill that served all different types of meat (it is converging on hamburger and pizza today). The Santa Fe had a real Tex-Mex cantina, and the Cheyenne served real barbecue and buttermilk pancakes with maple syrup. Most of that is gone now, and the restaurants serve cheaper, more mundane fare, but they are still good restaurants, compared to what you find in most hotels and theme parks in Europe (for many European theme parks, the only food available at all is salami sandwiches and soda pop).

Photographed in April, 2002.