Dear Friends,
I wished on the evening star that you would visit, and here you are! Naveen and I are pleased as punch to have you stay with us.
Some say a person’s home is their castle, and for us that couldn’t be truer. But it’s the happy memories that make our house a home – like the time I spent with Mama and Daddy making gumbo when I was a little girl.
So hop to it and make yourself at home!
All my love,
Princess Tiana
As we say in New Orleans, ”y‘all have a good time“ – Naveen

In 2012, Port Orleans Riverside completed a resort-wide refurbishment program which saw the opening of its first “Royal Guest Rooms” originally in Oak Manor (90) and Parterre Place (95) in the Magnolia Bend mansion building area. These luscious and immersively themed rooms were the resort’s literal “Jewel in the Crown,” and remained so for the next 14 years. Further information and photos of them can be found on our Royal Rooms Archive page.

A planned update was due to start in April 2020 but the COVID shutdown sadly put paid to that, giving the designers another six years to plan the successor, which was finally completed and opened to guests on 5th April 2026.

So what had Walt Disney’s famous Imagineering division been hard at work developing for the past six years? Sadly, it seems like the day that they were due to create this brand new design, a failure to imagine occurred and a rather lackluster replacement was phoned in instead. Now located in building 95 only, the replacement Royal Room core design is exactly the same as all the other recently refurbished Magnolia Bend rooms, even down to the same fixtures and fittings and colour scheme.

Trying to start on a positive note, the rooms have the same refreshed light style, new features, and cleanable practicality as the other Magnolia Bend rooms in buildings 80, 85 and 90, which have already been beautifully refurbished and welcomed by guests. However at first glance these supposedly unique Royal Rooms cannot be easily distinguished from the other regular Magnolia Bend rooms. They have the same layout, fixtures and fittings, colour palette, white bedlinen and identical scatter cushions, dresser/counter, table and chairs, flooring, door & curtain designs, plus all of the other more practical hotel room features (TV, USB charging sockets, vanity mirror, etc).

To try to maintain at least some distinction between the various different booking categories and price points, there have at least been a few minor modifications though. However nothing that gets anywhere close to the previous detailed, immersive theming that we’ve become used to, where every element – right down to the faucets, light switches and Aladdin’s magic carpet depicted on the floor – was unique to the Royal Rooms.

The initial reactions have been somewhat underwhelming at best, as rather than being rethemed the new rooms appear to have been effectively dethemed.

So what now are the differences between a Standard Location room and a premium-priced Royal Room for an extra $95 (on average) per night? Sadly, it seems very little:

• There is no difference in the bayou artwork displayed over the bedheads, but in the Royal Rooms it can light up with LED effects mimicking an evening view with flickering fireflies. While perhaps not quite as compelling as the previous firework effects, it is very pretty and is probably the only significant selling point between Standard Location and Royal Rooms.
• The overhead lighting above the beds in Standard Location rooms is not present in the Royal Rooms. Instead there is an additional pendant light hung above the table.
• The table and chairs are identical, however the tabletop is slightly more elaborate in the Royal Rooms with a letter from Tiana printed upon it.
• The dresser/counter is identical, even down to the handles, but in the Royal Rooms the drawer fronts have some printed swirly decorative flourishes.
• There is a decorative wallpaper border around the top of the walls in the Royal Rooms which is not present in the Standard Location rooms.
• The oval portrait picture of Tiana and Naveen is the same, but in the Royal Rooms the other two smaller pictures have been replaced with a single larger “stained glass” effect portrait of Tiana.
• The bathroom mirrors have different frames, with a central “T/N” crest featured in the Royal Rooms.
• The wash/vanity room floor tiling is identical, but in Royal Rooms the wall tiles in the bath/shower area are larger with a white & grey mottled pattern.

Unlike the previous Royal Room design, there is nothing at all invoking the other Disney movies beyond “The Princess and the Frog”, so just like the rest of Magnolia Bend these are purposefully Tiana-only rooms rather than general Disney Royalty. Even the revised wording of the letter from Tiana displayed on the tabletop (above) has deleted any references to other characters.

To be honest, way back in 2012 when the Royal Rooms were first introduced, I was surprised to see the blatant juxtapositions of the various characters within the designs, as Disney was then still strictly enforcing the concept of the various filmed universes as being separate isolated places – Belle from 18th century France, Snow White from 16th century Germany, Sleeping Beauty nearer to the 14th century, Jasime from the Middle East, etc. The resort even had to quickly remove several original pieces of artwork from the rooms which showed many of the characters standing together in front of various Port Orleans locations, which is itself a recreation of the Antebellum South of the USA. Ironically, the more relaxed modern “Princessverse” of today would probably have been much more amenable to having the characters interact.

So the big question now has to be: are these new style Royal Rooms worth on average an extra $95 per night when compared to the very similar Standard Location mansion building rooms? Honestly, it’s very hard to justify that sort of extra expenditure for little more than an illuminated headboard and a different portrait of Tiana, in an otherwise practically identical room. My advice, sadly, would be to avoid booking these lackluster “upgrades” and spend the money on something more useful.

Royal Guest Rooms, First Refurbishment Photos (April 2026)

Port Orleans Riverside, Royal Room, 2026 Refurb

Port Orleans Riverside, Royal Room, 2026 Refurb

Port Orleans Riverside, Royal Room, 2026 Refurb

Port Orleans Riverside, Royal Room, 2026 Refurb

(Thanks to Johnathan Cole for the updates)

Located within the elegant Magnolia Bend district of Port Orleans Riverside, Parterre Place (building 95, shown in red below) is completely devoted to this type of specialty room. As it is a three-storey building, elevators are located in the central area, next to the main entrance. Prior to the mid-2025 room refurbishments, building 90 (Oak Manor) also used to contain Royal Rooms, but that building now only offers regular mansion building rooms.

There is now only ONE Booking Category for Royal Room, covering all 256 rooms in building 95 with no distinction as to view type. There are no King Bed rooms in this section.

Please click on the red building in the map below to view a more detailed floorplan layout with the current category choices listed, or you can view a PDF file containing all four of the mansion buildings.

(Note: adjacent rooms are mirror images of each other, so any connecting doorways are always located beside the beds)

Parterre Place Mansion Building

Parterre Place mansion building, river facing section

Parterre Place mansion building, North Wing from the nearby leisure pool

For historical information on the original Royal Guest Rooms, launched in 2022, please see our Royal Rooms Archive page.