Walt Disney World is a big place and a full day in a park – any park – is a whole lot of walking. It’s hard enough to do those 15-20,000 steps a day if you’re a full-grown, healthy adult who’s in decent shape, but for little kids, even more so.
WDW rents strollers for daily use but they’re hard plastic (hello, MAJOR sweat in the summer) and non-adjustable. Fortunately, lots of companies in Central Florida rent strollers and frankly, there are several advantages to them:
- Off-site companies have many more options of what type of name brand stroller to rent
- You rent for your length of stay, so you don’t have to return your stroller at the end of the day (and subsequently have to carry your sleepy 6-year-old 45-pounder back to the hotel)
- The off-property companies’ prices are generally cheaper than Disney’s
- At least one off-site company rents special needs strollers
For years, if you were staying at a WDW-owned resort hotel, Disney allowed outside stroller companies to drop their strollers off on the day you arrived so it would be waiting for you at bell services when you got there. But in late 2019, all that changed.
On October 1, 2019, WDW changed its policy about strollers being allowed to be dropped off and left at bell services (read more about the policy change here) for Disney-owned hotels. Unless you rented from their one and only “featured provider,” you could no longer have your stroller dropped off early. Instead, stroller rental companies could only deliver if the guest was at the hotel to personally accept it at the time of delivery. WDW suggested it would, “enhance and simplify the vacation planning process,” but in reality, it caused inconveniences for a lot of Disney guests, particularly those who arrived after hours and then couldn’t receive their strollers until the next morning.
However, a couple of local stroller companies have worked out an excellent workaround. If you land at Orlando International Airport, they will leave your stroller there for you at a predetermined place, the same as what used to be done at WDW.
- Orlando Stroller Rentals will leave your rental stroller at the Orlando International Airport counter directly next to Disney’s Magical Express entrance. Their hours are Mon-Sat 8:30am-7pm Sunday 8:30-5pm
- Kingdom Strollers will leave your rental stroller at Wrap N’ Fly, which is located on Level 1 of Terminal A (next to the USO lounge ). The counter is staffed from 7am to 7pm, 7 days a week (pick-ups and returns before or after hours will be left in front of the service counter).
Once you have your stroller, you can go on your merry way to enjoy your vacation – take Disney’s Magical Express (well, until the end of the year, anyway…), rent your car, whatever.
These companies started their respective services in 2019 but stopped when COVID hit. They’ve both now started up again, albeit with some minor location/time changes.
Applause for Orlando Stroller Rentals and Kingdom Strollers for thinking outside the box and refusing to be victims of Disney’s policy change.
H/T: Orlando Weekly
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
