Staying at a Disney World hotel has many different perks.
Disney’s BoardWalk Inn
You’ve got free transportation to and from the Disney World parks, Early Entry to any of the four parks every day, and Extended Evening Hours on select nights if you’re staying at a Deluxe Resort. Another perk you can take advantage of is Resort Refillable Mugs, which are only available to those staying at a Disney World Hotel for an additional fee. But is anyone still using this perk, or are they just sitting there?
What are Resort Refillable Mugs, you may be asking. These are reusable mugs that can be purchased for $22.99 per tax (they saw a price increase in October this year, which is a bummer, and we typically see one every year) and allow you to get FREE refills of coffee, soda, or tea at your hotel throughout your whole stay!
Refillable Mug
One mug is included for each person if you’ve purchased the Disney Dining Plan for your trip (which can only be purchased if you’re staying at a Disney World hotel), but otherwise, they can be bought individually. These mugs use what’s called the Rapid Fill program, which means that for the duration of your stay, they will be active at any soda/coffee/tea refill location around Disney World hotels. However, once your stay comes to an end, the cups will no longer work — even if you return to the same hotel for a trip in the future.
Refillable mugs at Vero Beach
And yes, you heard us right — these mugs can ONLY be used around Disney World hotels. They cannot be used in the parks (unless you’d like to bring it with you and pour a drink you’ve purchased in there, which you certainly can do) for free refills, and many people buy these cups without realizing that fact. If you’re not spending a lot of time at your hotel, you forget to fill it up in the morning and at night before and after returning from the park, or you don’t drink a lot of soda/coffee/tea, it’s often not a great purchase.
Resort Refillable Mug
These can make great souvenirs, as you can certainly use them at home for whatever drinks you’d like, or bring them with you on future Disney World trips and pour purchased drinks into them, so if you think you’ll make a lot of use of it at home too, then we say go for it! However, otherwise we recommend using a more solidly insulated reusable water bottle around Disney World if you’re just looking for something to carry around the park with you to keep you hydrated.
Self-service Beverage Station
It’s also important to keep in mind that many of these drink refill stations are located at Disney World hotel restaurants, which are not open 24/7! Therefore, if you’re leaving super early in the morning or coming back from the park late at night and the restaurant isn’t open, it’s near impossible to make use of your refillable mug. However, some pool bars around Disney World hotels have 24/7 drink refill stations, and other resorts, including The Market at Ale & Compass (at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort), and Primo Piatto at Disney’s Riviera Resort, feature Coke Freestyle machines!
Refillable mug and drink Station at Drop Off Pool Bar at Disney’s Pop Century
The decision whether or not a Resort Refillable Mug is worth it is totally dependant on what group you’re traveling with — if you drink a lot of the beverages included and feel you’d get lots of use out of it, then go for it! Otherwise, if you mostly drink water or only get a soda here and there, it likely will feel like a waste. As always, stay tuned to DFB for all the latest Disney World news, tips, and tricks!
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How do you feel about Resort Refillable Mugs? Tell us in the comments!
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I wish Passholders could purchase a mug to use the entire year of visits!! A special Passholders mug.
I think less people are using it because they just raised the prices. We used to buy 3 of them for our family of 4. Now we only buy one. It works great at certain resorts but others it’s a waste of money. It’s great at Fort Wilderness by the pool.
Unless you are only getting water or have a short stay (like 2-3 days), it will end up paying for itself. You’re looking at theme park prices for most drinks ($5-7 for each), which adds up very fast. Plus, it makes a great souvenir!
Dirty little secret, you can still use your older mugs for refills of coffee and tea. There are no chips to read with coffee and tea and nobody is going to stop you from doing it.
It would be so great to be able to purchase cup to be unlimited refills, either a daily or yearly one and used in parks . Carowinds does and works well.
Probably won’t purchase again at certain resorts purely for the distance to the refill station, in some cases it can be a 15-20 min round trip to your room if you wanted to refill
These used to be free. Now a huge waste of money unless you sit around your resort drinking coffee and soft drinks. We take a nice insulated water bottle, fill it with ice in the morning, and add water as needed throughout the day. Free.
We use the mugs. We stay for a minimum of 2 weeks, normally more, so we get our money’s worth. (Yes. I know the cups are only valid for 2 weeks but we show the receipt and we get them extended each time for free.) We’re DVC members so have done the parks many times so we do spend more time at the hotel to relax these days than we used to. Great souvenirs but we have so many now and I’d prefer to save the planet by not buying another piece of plastic. We have been told in the past that we can bring an old mug and pay to have it reactivated but it costs the same as a new mug, so we don’t do that as it makes me disgruntled. If they did the reactivation for even a couple of dollars discount I’d do it.
Pre-pandemic, we almost always had a dining plan and the mugs were included, so we made a point of picking them up and using them. Since the pandemic, a variety of things have impacted our decisions not to get the mugs on our trips. We discovered the delight of Fort Wilderness cabins. There are too many perks for us to staying in the cabins to stay anywhere else (at least until they went DVC – we’ll have to see if we’d still rather stay there for the money). If we’re not eating at the parks, resort table service, or DS, then we fix ourselves meals in the cabin. But the cabins do make having the refillable mugs practically pointless, unless you plan on spending a lot of time near where you can fill one up (and we don’t). Also, since the dining plans haven’t been available for our past few trips, we have learned to adjust, and we don’t really feel a need to go back to the dining plans, at least as they are now. We also had an annual pass on our last trip, the cost of which was not only offset by the discount on our accomodations (and one of us had our tix on top of it), but then the AP got us a discount on dining that was almost as much as the dining plans claim to offer, without wrestling around with the dining plan parameters. But I digress. Outside of meals and morning coffee, it’s a job just to keep ourselves hydrated (and that’s usually visiting in January now) so we only drink water at other times. Plus, the cups in recent years have gone up in price every year, and often they have not been very cute to boot. I did buy some cups with the Mickey head shaped lids on ebay (for about half of retail), but other than that, I just haven’t been tempted. And the sky’s the limit when it comes to Disney trip souvenirs for me lol!
If you like pool days, eat breakfast at the hotel, take longer trips, or are near a fill up station, these are great deals.
At our DVC resort, many people seem to use the mugs.
We try to always purchase the cups, it’s just a tradition for us and we use them when we get home! We have mugs from years back and everytime we use them it brings back special memories for us!!
We tend to stay 2 weeks so they make sense. And contrary to a comment above, the refillable mugs were NEVER free. Less expensive, yes, free, no.