On Tuesday I shared some really fun and FREE things to do at your Disney resort. Today, I am going to talk about killing two birds with one stone by doing a not-so-fun task while you are enjoying your resort. I hate to say the word, but it’s LAUNDRY.
I realize that not everyone does laundry while on vacation, but I can tell you from experience that a lot of us do. There are several reasons I do our laundry in the middle of our trip:
- it enables us to pack half of the clothing we would have to pack if I didn’t wash
- when visiting in the Fall/Winter season when clothes are so much bulkier, it saves a lot of room in our bags
- I like to be ahead of the game when we get home instead of arriving home with loads and loads to wash.
If you plan to do some laundry during your trip, I hope you will find this information helpful.
Guest laundry facilities are available at every Disney resort. You can find out from the front desk or any cast member where the facilities are located at your resort. Many resorts, like the Port Orleans Riverside, place their laundry room near a pool so you can enjoy time with your family in between the cycles. If you are staying in a villa, you likely will have a stackable washer-dryer combination in your room. You can find out about the laundry facilities at your resort ahead of time by checking their website online, asking your travel agent, or calling Disney.
Laundry facilities offer standard-size, self-load washers that cost $2.00 per load; dryers are available for $2.00 per load as well. Single use packets of Tide, Cheer, Downy, Bounce, and a few other selections are available for $1.00 per packet. I take my own detergent and dryer sheets with me as we drive to Walt Disney World so we just throw them in the car.
As most of the machines are coin-operated, I typically take 2 rolls of quarters on the trip and that more than suffices for our needs. This past trip to the Contemporary Resort, I found out that I no longer needed quarters there as they now have now upgraded their machines from coin-operated to room key readers that just add the charge to your room bill and you can take care of it at checkout.
For ease in getting to and from the laundry facility, we simply use our largest suitcase, which is on wheels, and wheel all of the trash bags of dirty clothes to the facility at once. Since they have been in trash bags when dirty, I have no problem folding the clothes and placing them right back into the suitcase for the trek back to the room.
Don’t let doing laundry during your trip get you down; just fill in the time with some great family fun (see this past Tuesday’s article). Just think of how lucky we are to only need to wash a couple loads, as opposed to Disney’s sad suds story. Do you have any idea how many loads of clothes the Disney Laundry Staff washes every day? Well, I found out during my recent Keys to the Kingdom Tour. Here are the facts: if you were to wash and dry 1 load of laundry every day for 52 years, you would clean as much as they do in a single day. That is nearly 19,000 loads a day. In addition to the regular laundry, there are 30,000-32,000 garments dry-cleaned daily.
Doing a couple of loads while enjoying the resort? I think so!
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Brenda is a native Texan born and raised on the Gulf Coast. She visited Disney World twice as a teenager and always dreamed of growing her family Disney. She took her first-timer husband and their three children to Disney World in 2000 and they now spend every Thanksgiving there. Brenda writes with a comedic twist on various Disney topics. She will be sharing tips she has learned during her travels and also hopes to enlighten people on little-known freebies that Disney has to offer. She wishes she could have met Walt Disney and considers herself to be a student of Walt. In parallel to his dream it is her wish that everyone would take at least one trip to Disney World in order to share in its magic with their families.
