I just got back from our first full trip at POR 3/23-3/29 and I figured that I'd share a few thoughts in case they're helpful to anyone trying to choose a hotel. We had stayed for one night before but this was our first "real" POR trip. We thought this was a lovely resort initially and staying there the full time did not decrease the loveliness of the grounds. We had booked "riverview" for $50 more total for the 6 nights (over gardenview) and I'm not sure the view was worth it. We did end up in a preferred building, #27, which we might not have if we were in a gardenview room.
To understand our perceptions, it's important to know that we usually stay at a deluxe resort and this was the first moderate we had tried--so we understand the comparison between the two categories is unfair. That said, we were a little disappointed with the main pool. It seemed pretty small and quite busy. We had planned on using the "quiet" pools more, but they always had a bunch of noisy younger kids in them (granted it was during spring break weeks!). The room was perfectly fine for us. We ended up in a non-updated room, but that was okay. We would have liked more storage space, as with the fold down bed there wasn't very much, but this had very little effect on our trip. The resort quick service was nearly always busy, but not crazy. It seemed organized and there were lots of options. We didn't eat any real meals here but grabbed drinks and snacks several times. We prefer sit-down meals, so being farther away from areas with a variety of TS restaurants meant we spent more of our time traveling back and forth. We did take the boat into Disney Springs one evening and appreciated the convenience of this.
The real difficulty for us was the time it took to get to all the parks. The buses just felt like a hassle all the time, in a way that hadn't previously. We were about equal distance between the West depot and South depot, and used whichever one we thought would be best. There were times the lines to get on the buses were so long, they had to send two buses to get everyone. I think we rode standing many more times than we had a seat, both to and from the parks. Again, it was a busy time of year, but I imagine that POR is often pretty full, so I can't imagine this had too much of an impact on the number of people on the bus. Disney was good about sending a second bus, when not everyone could get on the first one, but this was usually still an extra 10 minute wait--and then standing the full 15 minutes to the theme park. Because we prefer to take a mid-day break each day, we felt like we spent lots of time waiting and standing on buses. We finally started using Lyft/Uber at times that we knew it would be really busy. I figured that in some ways this was money well spent, as we could probably use a ride-share 6-8 times for the $100 cost to upgrade to a deluxe hotel from a moderate for even just one night. Due to the way we vacation (mid-day breaks and lots of table service), we're considering if Disney moderates will work for our family. We were spoiled before with being able to walk to some of the parks when we stayed at the Epcot area deluxes or have a wider variety of food and a theme park very close by (Animal Kingdom Lodge). Overall, POR was a really lovely & peaceful resort but I'm not sure it worked for us.
