When Disneyland Resort finally reopened after more than a year, it was a shell of itself. A number of attractions, events, and experiences that had been there pre-pandemic, were missing. While the reasons for this were mostly understandable, that didn't make it any less frustrating. Over time, we’ve slowly seen most of these offerings brought back at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure and starting today Disneyland guests can book guided tours for the first time since the closure, including a chance to get inside Walt Disney’s apartment.
Two guided tours are open for booking at Disneyland now, with Walt’s Main Street Story tours starting as soon as tomorrow, October 6, and the Holiday Time at Disneyland tour starting November 11, along with the rest of the resort's winter holiday festivities.
The Walt themed tour will cost $160 and run for 90 minutes. It will give you a tour of Main Street U.S.A. and teach you not only about this part of the park but also Walt's boyhood home in Missouri that inspired it. It will also include some things you just can’t do any other way, including visiting Walt Disney’s Disneyland apartment above the firehouse on Main Street, and enjoy refreshments on the apartment’s patio, something that has not been available in any previous tour.
The Holiday Time tour will run for 2.5 hours and cost $110 per person. It includes a reserved viewing space for the Christmas Fantasy Parade, a ride on the special holiday version of It’s A Small World, and “delicious holiday treats.”
Guided tours often seem to go under the radar at Disneyland. It’s maybe not that surprising. There’s so much to do at Disneyland, during the holidays especially, and taking a couple hours out of your day to do a tour is a couple hours you can’t be doing something else like going on a popular attraction. But if you’ve been to Disneyland before and done all the standard stuff, tours are a great way to potentially see the parks in different ways, and see those things that you just can’t see any other way.
There’s also not exactly the cheapest option in the parks. These tours cost a lot of money for just a couple hours, or less, of time, and that’s on top of the normal theme park ticket that you have to have on the day of your tour.
Visiting Walt Disney’s Disneyland apartment, a place which has been said still holds Walt's spirit is a bucket list item for me, so at some point this is a tour I’m going to have to take. The lamp in the window of Walt’s home away from home was recently replaced, and now we’ve probably learned exactly why that happened. The apartment has probably been getting cleaned up and ready for visitors for a while, in preparation for the tour, and the lamp was just the part that the rest of us could see.
