Walt Disney World has announced more details about Disney Lakeshore Lodge, along with new concept art that reveals the lazy river (country) and pool for the first time. Here’s the latest official details about the property, new late April 2026 construction photos, what we can surmise from permits, and more.
Amusingly, this is the second update on Disney Lakeshore Lodge in the span of a week, after radio silence for the previous 16 months! This makes me wonder what changed. Perhaps Island Tower at the Polynesian recently hit an internal sales target that triggered an opening of the floodgates on Lakeshore Lodge. With how DVC likes to hold back on marketing new properties to avoid adversely impacting active sales, that wouldn’t be a huge surprise.
Or was the Walt Disney World fan and DVC member response to the last piece of concept art deemed overly negative, and the new update is a course correction that is more likely to garner positive reactions? Although it kind of feels that way given the water-forward nature of the new concept art (shades of the original Cars Land concept art versus Piston Peak Fun Map), this is pretty fast by Disney standards for a reactionary release.
Regardless of the reason, here’s what we know about Disney Lakeshore Lodge, first based on the official announcements in April 2026. Following that, the new concept art and construction photos, along with unanswered questions and our reaction to this new resort.
Nestled along the shores of Bay Lake, this tranquil waterfront retreat will invite members and guests to celebrate the beauty and magic of nature, as seen through the eyes of Disney artists and storytellers. Guests will follow a lush tree-lined driveway and arrive at Disney Lakeshore Lodge beneath a porte-cochere, inspired by a bird in flight and surrounded by cascading water features.
Disney Lakeshore Lodge will celebrate the profound connection between nature and imagination, a bond at the heart of Walt Disney’s artistic vision. From the lush forests of “Bambi” to the colorful winds of “Pocahontas” and the majestic glacial peaks of “Brother Bear,” alongside a rich collection of archival artwork, the resort will pay homage to decades of beloved Disney stories inspired by the great outdoors.
Subtle nods to these timeless stories will appear throughout the property, woven into the architecture, artwork and ambiance to establish an experience where families feel surrounded by the enchantment of nature.
Disney Lakeshore Lodge will embrace its surroundings as an integral part of the guest experience. Expansive floor-to-ceiling windows will frame the resort’s lush landscape, inviting natural sunlight to illuminate interiors. The resort’s location along Bay Lake will offer serene views of native flora and fauna by day and the Magic Kingdom fireworks illuminating the sky by night.
The property will feature 967 themed accommodations, with both standard hotel rooms and dedicated Disney Vacation Club accommodations. The latter will range from convenient studios to spacious multi-bedroom villas, designed with families in mind. Studios and villas will combine sophisticated style with the comfort and functionality guests have come to love, featuring warm natural materials, earthy color palettes and upscale amenities.
Disney Lakeshore Lodge will also introduce one and two-bedroom Lake Houses positioned along the waterfront, offering guests an up-close connection to the beauty of Bay Lake. These unique accommodations will provide privacy and water views.
Additional details will be shared in the coming months about dining, recreation, amenities and design elements that will bring the spirit of nature and storytelling to life. Disney Lakeshore Lodge is slated to open in Summer 2027, so there’s some time to slowly pull back the curtain on its unique accommodations, amenities, and marquee features.
Here’s the new piece of concept art for Disney Lakeshore Lodge that reveals the lazy river, pool, water slide, waterfront restaurant, A-frame cabin, and boat dock:
If the goal of releasing this follow-up concept art were to recalibrate the conversation around Disney Lakeshore Lodge, I’d say: mission accomplished.
There’s still going to be the criticism that the hotel itself looks like a generic Marriott or Hilton, but that’s unavoidable since it does. Those complaints are also nothing new. That’s been the dominant discourse since the first concept art for Disney’s Riviera Resort and Gran Destino Tower. More recently, we’ve seen Island Tower at the Polynesian, the exterior of which is the biggest offender of the trio.
This trend of boxy, value-engineered exteriors extends beyond Walt Disney World or Disney Vacation Club. It’s a similar story with the newer Villas at Disneyland Hotel, as well as Helios Grand Hotel at Universal Orlando and Fantasy Springs Hotel at Tokyo Disney Resort.
I would personally argue that those last two entries are the biggest offenders. They’re in-park hotels that should be flagship properties and exemplars of themed design. Instead, they very much are not. If even OLC isn’t spending on an in-park hotel at Tokyo DisneySea as part of the blockbuster $2 billion Fantasy Springs expansion, there’s absolutely no hope for a DVC property at Walt Disney World!
On a more positive note, it’s also fair to say that all of these examples from Walt Disney World have been pleasant surprises on a substantive level. That they are nice places to stay once you get past the hideous exteriors and half-baked locations. The rooms are nice, the interiors are textured and detailed, and the properties offer strong slates of amenities.
Personally, I think that the facade of Disney Lakeshore Lodge looks less bad than its immediate predecessors, and also has the most promising slate of amenities since Disney’s Riviera Resort. The pool and lobby here will be better, with the jury still out on the dining scene. Riviera probably wins for both transportation and congestion, or lack thereof.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves! We only have 2 pieces of official concept art and over a year until Disney Lakeshore Lodge opens. Fortunately, there’s also a lot that we can glean from construction photos & permits…
Although some minor details could’ve changed since, Disney Lakeshore Lodge should be substantially the same resort that was announced back when it was Reflections in 2018-2019. We know this because the permits did not change, and thus far, visible construction progress has been consistent with the original plans.
The footprint of Disney Lakeshore Lodge is unchanged from the previous permits and site plans for Reflections. Disney Lakeshore Lodge has a “W” layout of its wings, with two main courtyards.
Lakeshore Lodge is a mixed-use resort, meaning there are separate hotel and Disney Vacation Club wings. At one point, I knew the rough breakdown between the hotel inventory and DVC inventory, but can’t recall–it’s close to 50/50 or 60/40, though. At opening, most of that will be available for cash bookings, as even what’s dedicated Disney Vacation Club inventory won’t be declared.
The base structures have now been topped off at their maximum heights, and work is underway inside the buildings and around the grounds. In the photos below, you can see the pool, waterfront restaurant, boat dock, and outlying A-frame cabins all taking shape.
Active construction is visible from Bay Lake, Wilderness Lodge, and even the Settlement area of Fort Wilderness. There’s zero construction impact on guest rooms/campsites at Wilderness Lodge or Fort Wilderness, but it’s very visible from the Settlement of the latter.
Below is a look at new aerial photos from late April 2026 showcasing the latest progress on Disney’s Lakeshore Lodge, which was moving at an incredibly fast pace ahead of its planned Summer 2027 opening. In the last few months, visible progress has slowed, presumably as crews have moved to the inside of the resort (which you cannot see from a helicopter).
As always, all aerial photos are courtesy of friend of the site bioreconstruct, who graciously provided the construction photos here:
A lot of what follows concerns topics we’ve recently covered related to Disney Lakeshore Lodge. As noted towards the top, this is the second update on the new mixed use hotel in the last week, after 16 months of silence. Aside from the new concept art and construction photos, not much has changed since we last discussed this project.
With that in mind, let’s turn to some of the question marks and confirmed details. We know there will be A-frame cabins based on the concept art and construction, but treehouse villas were originally intended for the Fort Wilderness side. Work has yet to start on those. It’s possible where those will be built is being used as a staging site, or that they’ve been cancelled.
Back at the 2019 D23 Expo, Bob Chapek revealed details, including a Princess and the Frog waterfront restaurant, along with Pocahontas and Bambi-inspired decor throughout. It’s unknown the degree to which all of this has changed in the last 6+ years. The IP could be have changed, or 100% the same.
What we do know is that Disney Lakeshore Lodge will be a massive resort complex. This 10-story resort, 967 room resort will be Walt Disney World’s biggest since Art of Animation or Animal Kingdom Lodge. By contrast, Wilderness Lodge has has a 7-story main building and 728 rooms in total.
The largest resort in the Magic Kingdom area is Grand Floridian; it’s ~1,000 rooms between the hotel and DVC wings. Lakeshore Lodge will be fairly close in size to the main resort–with more inventory than the Poly or Contemporary.
Relative to recent resorts, Lakeshore Lodge is massive. Disney’s Riviera Resort is 9-stories tall but with only 300 rooms. With over 3 times as many rooms, that also means roughly triple the guest load on amenities.
Disney Lakeshore Lodge will feature both a waterfront restaurant and a lazy river, both of which are in the main courtyard, on the side closer to Fort Wilderness. Recent aerial photos show that the full loop of the lazy river was just finished; it had been a horseshoe for months.
As you can see from the concept art, this lazy river is huge. The pool complex will be the likely highlight of Disney Lakeshore Lodge, making it only the third Walt Disney World hotel to offer one, joining the iconic Stormalong Bay at the Yacht & Beach Club Resorts.
The concept art also shows the water slide, which looks like it’s styled as a treehouse. Our hope is that there are nods to River Country here, as is the case with the newly-expanded pool complex over at Fort Wilderness. With lots of DVC members being old school Walt Disney World fans, that nod to the past seems like a no-brainer.
Disney Lakeshore Lodge’s feature pool will also include a zero-entry design for easy access, water slides, and a splash pad for the children’s play area. The pool area should offer scenic waterfront views of Bay Lake.
The waterfront restaurant will have views of the “bayou of Bay Lake,” as the waterfront trees have not been removed. As noted above, this was originally planned to be a contemporary-styled but Princess and the Frog-inspired table service restaurant. That was before Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this now features a different IP.
I would also expect this restaurant to be mixed use, similar to Wailulu Bar & Grill at Island Tower or Geyser Point at Wilderness Lodge. The sit-down side will probably be nicer than either of those, but the point is that the venue will likely also double as a pool bar, lounge and/or quick service spot. The size and layout both seem conducive to that.
My hope is that many more trees are planted around the periphery of the resort once exterior work is finished. One of the big issues with the Island Tower and other recent projects is a lack of lushness. If this continues with a resort in the wilderness, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb.
Disney has teased a lush tree-lined driveway leading to the front entrance; here’s hoping that makes the final cut. It would be smart of Disney to do this, both because it’s a nature themed resort and because trees can conceal design shortcomings, hiding underwhelming facade work, and back of house areas.
This is one of the big problems with Island Tower. Even just walking around the outside, you can see back of house and plain, bare walls that look awful. It’s nice that Disney has left so many mature trees in place over at Lakeshore Lodge, but they also cleared out a ton of them. Planting more trees around the perimeter will be badly needed. Here’s hoping Disney doesn’t value engineer the tree budget the same way they have with hotel exteriors.
As teased in the release, Walt Disney World and Disney Vacation Club should announce more about Lakeshore Lodge in the coming months. We would not expect this weekly cadence of updates to continue; it wouldn’t be surprising if this is the last we hear anything about Lakeshore Lodge until the new fiscal year.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s news about Disney Lakeshore Lodge at D23 Expo, but I wouldn’t expect anything in the marquee Parks Panel. Although that was the case back in 2019, things have changed since then. But there likely will be a Parks & Resorts both with the potential for a scale model, and if not there, maybe a DVC booth.
To give just a couple of reference points, hotel reservations for Riviera opened on January 22, 2019 (for a December 2019 grand opening of the property), and DVC sales started two months after that. The model room also debuted around the same time, and we already had full official details on all of the restaurants, pools, etc.
Island Tower sales started on October 1, 2024 (ahead of a December 2024 grand opening), just in time for the fresh fiscal year. It’s also notable that it was pretty much radio silence from Disney on that resort until May 2024, at which point the name was revealed, as were a few other details. After that, there were regular updates to generate interest and enthusiasm throughout the summer and fall.
Ultimately, this new concept art has me looking forward to Disney Lakeshore Lodge more, even though it doesn’t really reveal anything new that we didn’t know from construction photos, permits, and site plans. It’ll be interesting to see if this changes the conversation among the Walt Disney World fanbase as a whole, many of whom didn’t know about the lazy river, etc.
As before, we’re looking forward to staying at Disney Lakeshore Lodge in Summer 2027. While I have a lot of reservations about this project and its proximity to Fort Wilderness, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’m also really looking forward to it. Part of that is my love of lodges, and the ‘wilderness region’ of Walt Disney World.
Another part is how I’ve ended up feeling about other dubiously-designed resorts that have opened since 2018. There’s the aforementioned Riviera Resort for one, which has grown on me a ton. We also have ended up loving Gran Destino Tower. Hideous as it is from the outside, we’ve enjoyed Island Tower far more than expected.
Disney Lakeshore Lodge looks much more ambitious, fully-featured, and better looking than any of those. If this has a healthier budget for placemaking and a lush environment around the outside, that alone will make it a massive upgrade over the Island Tower.
It’s a shame that Disney Lakeshore Lodge towers over the Settlement, as opposed to being centered between Fort Wilderness and Wilderness Lodge, but it should still be an asset to this resort ‘region,’ as well as the DVC portfolio and Walt Disney World as a whole. Failing all else, we’re looking forward to finally being able to walk between Wilderness Lodge and Fort Wilderness again!
If you’re considering joining DVC and want more guidance, be sure to read our Ultimate Guide to Disney Vacation Club. That guide covers the pros & cons, resale v. direct, how much money you’ll save, and other important things to know before taking the plunge. If you still can’t decide whether membership is right for you, “try before you buy” with the recommendations in How to Save BIG on Deluxe Disney Accommodations Renting DVC Points.
Your Thoughts
What do you think of Disney Lakeshore Lodge? Surprised at just how massive this new Magic Kingdom resort looks from above? Are you looking forward to this new mixed use hotel and DVC resort? Thoughts on Lakeshore Lodge opening in Summer 2027? Do you agree or disagree with our assessment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
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