Unlike other hotels at Tokyo Disney Resort, which have lobbies and restaurants that the general public can access, the new Toy Story Hotel is only open to guests with a room reservation. Its entrance is blocked off by a parking garage (the “RC Racer Garage”), so you can’t even really see the front of the hotel from the sidewalk. The only real photo op for non-guests is the sign out front, which is visible from across the street at Bayside Station, one of four stops on the resort’s monorail loop.
The Toy Story Hotel opened in April 2022, and it’s considered “the first moderate-class” hotel at Tokyo Disney Resort, per Disney Parks Blog. This means it’s priced somewhere between luxury hotels like the Miracosta and the more budget-friendly Celebration Hotel. We stayed there last month, about a year and a half after it opened, in a standard bay-view room.
In terms of sheer convenience, the monorail ride from the Toy Story Hotel beats the shuttle bus ride from the Celebration Hotel any day of the week. That’s especially true in the morning, when time is of the essence and you’re taking advantage of the Happy 15 Entry perk to enter Tokyo Disneyland fifteen minutes early.
View of Tokyo Bay from our Toy Story Hotel room.
To access the Toy Story Hotel, you’ll show your reservation to a staff member outside and then walk the winding path, marked “Hotel Guests Only,” back to Slinky Dog Park. This playground outside the hotel is decorated with Tinkertoys, Christmas lights, an oversized Pixar ball, and 12-foot-tall Jessie and Buzz Lightyear action figures. The idea is that guests are shrinking down to toy-size when they visit, similar to how they would in Toy Story Land at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
Inside the hotel, you’ll find a front desk with a Lite-Brite behind it, not to mention rooms with Etch-a-Sketch TVs and wall clocks shaped like giant Mickey Mouse wristwatches. Toy Friends Square is an elevated plaza behind the hotel, where you’ll have a view of Tokyo Bay and more action figures, including Woody, Bo Peep, and the penguin crooner, Wheezy. The piggy bank Hamm is positioned by the stairs on a crane, lifting Little Green Men into the square.
Woody at the entrance to Toy Story Land in Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Compare this figure with the one in the Toy Story Hotel gallery above.
Many of these figures are the same as the ones they have at Hollywood Studios, so it’s as if Andy or Bonnie from the Toy Story movies just had their toys boxed up, shipped across the ocean, and reassembled in a new location.
The only restaurant at the Toy Story Hotel is the Lotso Garden Cafe, but after dining out at Michelin restaurants in 2023, we found the food at the cafe’s breakfast buffet to be pretty lousy by comparison. We felt the same about the Wish Cafe at the Celebration Hotel, so maybe we’re just ready to graduate from breakfast buffets at Disney resorts.
Overall, though, the Toy Story Hotel was a fun, immersive addition to our Disney trips this year. It’s not exactly cheap (our room cost ¥38,000, which is over $250), but it’s still more affordable than any of the deluxe Disney resorts in Tokyo. If you can land a reservation, it might be worth booking at least once.