Walt Disney World recently extended ongoing hotel construction projects at Disney’s Yacht & Beach Club Resorts through 2027, but with one component of the work slated to wrap up this month. Since we’re currently staying in the Crescent Lake area and had to walk past these hotels for Very Important Research about the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival, we made a detour to check on the work.
As a reminder, it’s getting close to that time of year when Walt Disney World schedules a flurry of projects for the upcoming fiscal year (or in this case, years), so there are probably more hotel renovations on the horizon. Keep an eye on our 2025-2026 Walt Disney World Hotel Construction Tracker for updates on other, smaller-scale projects.
Even since the Yacht & Beach Club refurbishment extension, Walt Disney World has added a couple new projects to that list. In any case, here’s the construction alert on the Walt Disney World website for Disney’s Beach Club Resort:
Disney’s Beach Club Resort is undergoing routine exterior maintenance through 2027. As part of this work, the porte cochere will be closed through September 2025. This work may impact views from various locations throughout the resort, and at times, alternate paths of travel may be in place.
While efforts will be made to minimize disruptions, construction may be noticeable during daytime hours. All services—including valet, luggage assistance, and transportation—will remain available. All pools, resort dining and most other amenities will remain available.
From January 25, 2026, through January 31, 2026, Disney Skyliner will be closed for refurbishment. Complimentary bus service will be available. (Note: there’s an almost identical bulletin for Yacht Club, with the only material difference being an end date of late 2026 for the exterior work.)
Here are current photos of the Beach Club porte cochere rebuild, followed by other limited facade work I could find at Yacht Club:
This porte cochere project started back in mid-June, and I first saw the construction in late July. Not a ton of progress had been made then, but work has seemingly accelerated more recently. At the time, it was slated to be a 3-month project. Technically, it still is. Although I guess that could be pushed to 3.5 months since “through September 2025” could mean the 30th of this month.
I’ll start with my normal preface that I’m not a construction expert, so take any opinions here with a grain of salt. What I do have is extensive experience in tracking Walt Disney World construction projects, and just judging by the pace of the work here to date, they’re going to be hard-pressed to make that September 2025 deadline.
Crews are basically rebuilding the porte cochere. Walt Disney World describes this as “routine exterior maintenance,” but you can see the scope and scale of the work for yourself. Maybe it doesn’t meet some technical definition of rebuilding, but we’ve basically got ourselves a quasi Ship of Theseus situation where so much is being replaced that it might as well qualify as a new porte cochere when all is said and done. It looks to me as if all of the roof and wood is being rebuilt, atop the underwhelming structural supports.
This is reminiscent of a similar project at Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort back during the phased reopening, which took a lot longer than 3-4 months to complete from start to finish. Granted, that involved rebuilding the porte cochere around a monorail station, but it was a similarly ambitious and time-consuming project that also involved a big crane.
It’s definitely not going to take until 2027 to finish just the Beach Club porte cochere, but the entrance component of the construction not wrapping up until the start of the holiday season strikes me as a very realistic possibility. Honestly, if this isn’t finished by early 2026, I wouldn’t be shocked. Walt Disney World has had a habit of quietly extending these timelines recently, so I wouldn’t take the “through September 2025” timeline as the gospel. Especially since it’s now September and the project still looks like this!
Fortunately, there’s a large area on the other side of the porte cochere that still allows for guest drop-off, unloading of vehicles, valet, bell services, etc. Unfortunately, buses can’t enter this area because of the limited space and turning radius, so if you’re catching Mears Connect, you’ll be redirected to a farther-away location.
Nevertheless, I felt this was worth checking out and sharing as we had several readers who experienced the current arrival experience and flagged it as ‘suboptimal’ (their words were less charitable). I could definitely see that on an especially hot or rainy day (like this one!), but location-wise, it’s still very close to the front entrance. Just a slightly longer walk and no cover from the elements.
The rebuilding of the porte cochere is in addition to work taking place on the exterior of the building.
The good news is that while wandering around Yacht & Beach Club, I didn’t notice too much of an impact on the exterior. There were a few spots at the Yacht Club and a healthy-sized crew, but the amount of blight wasn’t bad.
I wouldn’t have even bothered to stop and take photos had I not planned on writing this–meaning it wasn’t something that stopped me in my tracks. Work has been much more noticeable in the past.
Perhaps this is the why of the exterior maintenance refurbishment project being extended into late 2026 and 2027 at the sister resorts–because Walt Disney World is opting for a smaller crew to reduce the project area into something smaller and less impactful.
Hard to fault them for that approach, especially if they’ve gotten guest complaints. That means it’ll take twice as long and affect double (give or take) the number of guests over time, but the blight will be diluted. That, or I caught this at an in-between time before more scaffolding had gone up.
Either way, the one thing I keep coming back to when watching the work at Disney’s Yacht & Beach Club Resorts is just how common it is for construction and maintenance to be occurring here. As mentioned before, it seems like there have been nearly perpetual projects at Yacht & Beach Club for the last ~5 years.
Fans like me bemoan the boxy style of Walt Disney World’s newer resorts, but I wonder whether the skyrocketing maintenance and labor costs are a big factor in that decision. Ditto Universal opting to build its in-park hotel at Epic Universe on the cheap, as opposing to making it a flagship luxury resort. I cannot fathom how many tens of millions of dollars Disney has spent on the exteriors of just Yacht & Beach Club Resorts in the last several years; it’s a similar story with Portofino Bay Hotel over at Universal Orlando.
It’s telling that even the freer-spending OLC (operator of Tokyo Disney Resort) opted to build the more basic and boring Fantasy Springs Hotel as opposed to outdoing Hotel MiraCosta. Sadly, I suspect rising refurbishment costs–due to materials and construction crews–mean we’ll never see anything that ornate and labor-intensive again. That’s a real shame for fans of themed design, but I get the practicalities of the decision.
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Your Thoughts
What do you think of the exterior refurbishment at Yacht & Beach Resorts? Think the porte cochere rebuild will actually be finished by the end of this month? Have you experienced construction impacts at either of these resorts in the last ~5 years? 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!