Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge - Jambo House Villas Reviews
2901 Osceola Parkway, Lake Buena Vista, FL

80%
families recommend
251 family reviews



AnthonyG - Apr 13th, 2012
The day started at 3:00pm, the advertised check-in. One of the kids who was supposed to check in with us could not make it. This apparently is such a huge catastrophe that they had to rebook us completely. The entire process took 50 minutes. more +FIFTY MINUTES. Our two young children of course had it after 10 minutes. The lady did not seem to know what she was doing and could not seem to understand we were missing one child. The manager got involved and, while nice, seemed equally incompetent. After the grueling 50 minutes we were told to wait because our room was not really. Really?! I asked the lady what time check-in was and she told me 4pm. Nice lie,,lady.

We finally get up to the room. At this point we're exhausted with the check-in process that we just enter the room and try to relax. We had the 1 bedroom hotel room here. For some reason 1 thermostat blew hot and another cold. I just ignored it as it seemed tolerable enough and really did not feel like calling down for them to fix it, or worse, move us to another room. Determined to have a good time, we do have a great time in the Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom during our stay.

The buffets were excellent at the resort, which I think is the only bright spot of the resort. My wife and I on our last night here thought we would have a good meal at Jiko. We both ordered filets. Her filet she ordered medium and was burnt on the outside and rare on the inside. I don't even know how they achieved that. Mine was also burnt but since I like it rare, it was tolerable. Nowhere near worth $45 a plate however.

The next time we come here we are skipping the Disney hotels and staying somewhere nicer and cheaper since it won't have the Disney name attached to it.

Bottom line - this is supposed to be one of the nicest resorts. It's checkin staff was incompetent and the restaurants leave something to be desired.

Date of Stay: 04/11/2012
Children in Party: 4


Tots (0-2)
Tweens (10-12)
Tweens (13+)
Accommodations
Dining
Kids Play Area
Money Value
Staff



DanielleRB - Nov 2nd, 2010
To give you a little background about our family and why our review may be a little "different" - we are a family of 4, including myself, my husband, our 7 year old son and our 9 year old son. Our oldest son is a brain tumor and stroke more +survivor with profound disabilities, which factored into our trip to Disney World in many ways, thus I thought this may be of value to any family travelling with a special needs child...little bits of advice never hurt!

Our trip was from December 26th through January 1st of last year. We stayed at Jambo House in a one bedroom Villa. We did this for a couple of reasons, first being that with younger kids and one who requires good "crawling" space, we thought this would be better than 2 adjoining rooms. We liked the idea of a kitchen to have breakfast in the room before we started our day, and also liked the idea that the resort was like going to another country, with lots of interesting experiential opportunities.

The accomodations were very expensive, but very lovely. The property was everything it promised to be, with lots of unique cultural spots for my littlest one to learn about Africa and the animals we saw out our balcony were amazing. Check in was a breeze, and very welcoming...so why wouldn't we stay there again you ask? Given we are a family with a kid who doesn't do well in restaurants, we thought we would order room service for dinner a couple nights and just watch a movie...room service was AWFUL! I mean REALLY BAD! The choices on the menu were trying too hard to stay true to the resort theme, but even with that, there were no real good choices. If we had a car, I would have driven to a grocery store and just cooked, but since we didn't, I had to go down to the store in the hotel and get what I could to make due...grilled cheese, PB&J, Cup A Noodles...blech.

When I called to get reservations in the restaurants on property, they were completely booked. Call us the unprepared family to not have booked our restaurant options months in advance, but I know we can't be alone in thinking room service would at least be a potential option. Next time we go, it will have to be a more mainstream hotel (likely the Grand Floridian) so we have better and more options.

The parks...we went to town hall the first day of our visit and requested a special wheelchair access pass, which we received for the entire week, good at all parks. Our son has been known to reach out and touch people as he has some visual impairement, thus he wants to know what is in his "space"...lol...so they offered us a special pass that allowed us to go to a special line in the parks...THANK YOU WALT DISNEY WORLD! With that pass, some lines were still very long, but for the most part, we would wait no more than 10 minutes to go on a ride. This was critical, given the parks were so busy that week they actually shut down the entrances to new guests as they were at capacity. It was very overwhelming to our kids, but with the pass, we were able to spend 4 to 5 hours in each park and see a good variety of the attractions. We skipped the parades as the crowds were not very "kind" to our wheelchair kiddo...no worries.

We did also spend one day at Universal Studios...they had an AMAZING special needs program - even better than Disney World (dare I say it?)...they took such good care of us that we would spend more time there next trip instead of just one day.

At the end of the day, the trip was fun, but so exhausting for our family...I said to my husband "can we not come back here for 5 years?"...lol...he agreed...amazing experience to be had, but I would still choose a cruise for a more restful vacation. I felt like I needed a vacation from my vacation at the end of the week!

Date of Stay: 12/26/2009
Children in Party: 1


Kids (7-9)




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