At what point does the Fort not become worth it?

[Grumpy and Grandma 740]

Hate to bust the "Conspiracy Bubble" about reservations and sites being held, but "POP".

Went looping yesterday afternoon about 3 ish.  11 empty in 200, now 1, 16 empty in 300, now 2, numerous empty in the remainder of the Full, Pref and Prem. Tonight not even a dozen empty total.  1500 has 2 empty sites and 2000 has 26. about a 1/3, which yesterday afternoon after the scouts, left was only about a 1/3 full. As soon as they empty out they fill up. 

Apparently you have to book early and if you can't make it cancel.  This place "FILLS UP".

 

[Grumpy and Grandma 740]

4 hours ago, lightbikes said:

 

We've gone looking at several area campgrounds, some further afield then we would like, and at some point I'm going to post asking everyone's opinion of the three or four we settle on once we look at two more later this week but we are done paying Disney rates.

 

Check out Lake Magic & Thousand Trails only about 20/25 minutes away.  

[Tri-Circle-D 2,059]

16 hours ago, Grumpy and Grandma said:

Hate to bust the "Conspiracy Bubble" about reservations and sites being held, but "POP".

Went looping yesterday afternoon about 3 ish.  11 empty in 200, now 1, 16 empty in 300, now 2, numerous empty in the remainder of the Full, Pref and Prem. Tonight not even a dozen empty total.  1500 has 2 empty sites and 2000 has 26. about a 1/3, which yesterday afternoon after the scouts, left was only about a 1/3 full. As soon as they empty out they fill up. 

Apparently you have to book early and if you can't make it cancel.  This place "FILLS UP".

 

I am missing the point you're trying to make.

What conspiracy bubble did you pop?

How does the Fort filling up on a Sunday dispel the truth that they block guests from making weekend reservations, and hold those days for guests who will make longer reservations?  That's not a conspiracy, it's a long-standing business practice at the Fort.

Also, as noted up thread, we are currently in "Value" season where the rates are currently as low as they are going to get before they jack them up around mid-February.  Is anyone surprised that the campground if full of wealthy retirees and/or escaped Canadians enjoying the low rates?

TCD

[Grumpy and Grandma 740]

The point I'm trying to make is there is more turnover than you think, with many more families on weekends.  Just because you can't get a last minute reservation doesn't mean other people don't plan ahead. 

MLK  and PRES day weekend this place turns into a "zoo" with the locals arriving. This past Sat and Sun GC traffic was horrendous, last night, nobody out and about. 

 

 

 

 

[Tri-Circle-D 2,059]

6 minutes ago, Grumpy and Grandma said:

The point I'm trying to make is there is more turnover than you think, with many more families on weekends.  Just because you can't get a last minute reservation doesn't mean other people don't plan ahead. 

MLK  and PRES day weekend this place turns into a "zoo" with the locals arriving. This past Sat and Sun GC traffic was horrendous, last night, nobody out and about. 

So, what, all those people who checked in on Sunday are going to leave on Friday so the locals can have their spots for the weekend?

As for President's Day weekend, I have no doubt that a bunch of the long-term campers will vacate for that- those people have it figured out, and will pop over to Lake Magic or Sherwood Forest to avoid the Fort's peak rates. What you are seeing now, you will not see after February 16th, when the rates are jacked up.

And, you are missing the point about weekends- unless you plan more than 365 days ahead, there are none to be had.  But, if you want to book a week or more, no problem.  So, there are sites available, but they are being held for stays that encompass more than a weekend.  Again- this is no conspiracy, it's a factual business practice. So no bubble has been popped.

TCD

[Tri-Circle-D 2,059]

Here's two screen shots that prove my point.

Let's say I want to camp Memorial Day weekend.  When I put in for a three night stay from Friday to Monday, nothing comes up:

But, if I'm a wealthy retiree or a crazy Canadian who can spend a week, I have my choice of campsites, including Memorial Day weekend:

Conspiracy?

No.

Just how they do business.

TCD

[Travisma 1,317]

Yup, the Fort is no longer for weekend warriors, at least ones that don't plan out more than a year, which is crazy.  I hate having to book Halloween a year out, and if you have kids (grandkids) school schedules aren't even out that far in advance to make a plan.

[Tri-Circle-D 2,059]

11 minutes ago, Travisma said:

Yup, the Fort is no longer for weekend warriors, at least ones that don't plan out more than a year, which is crazy.  I hate having to book Halloween a year out, and if you have kids (grandkids) school schedules aren't even out that far in advance to make a plan.

They don't want or need you and your grandkids and your puny pop-up.

They have plenty of retired couples who will come in for three or four weeks or more and pay for premium sites.

And it's a beautiful thing for the retirees- they don't have to plan ahead, there are sites blocked off just for them.  It's a beautiful thing for Disney because they can get by with less staff out in the loops since there's a lot less turnover.

Everybody wins.

Except you.

And me.

Sorry.

TCD

[Travisma 1,317]

Are you branching out and becoming artistic with your descending reply?

[lightbikes 73]

And don't forget once they take out the cabins in the 2100 loop they'll have even more sites!

 

[lightbikes 73]

On February 2, 2016 at 7:05 PM, Grumpy and Grandma said:

Check out Lake Magic & Thousand Trails only about 20/25 minutes away.  

Thanks - We're hoping to get to those two Wednesday 

[Starbuc71 162]

TCD. You are right on the money. I guess after camping at the fort for over 10 years, I'm starting to see more and more that running the business in terms of making profit margins is more important than following walts dreams where Disney world is for everyone.  I know a lot of people do not like "Paying locals" coming for three day weekends mostly because of the amount of people, but again, we are still paying obnoxious amounts for a concrete pad and last time I looked, my money was just as good as a retirees money. I booked all my three day weekends last Sept. Now true, I paid around $400 in deposits, but as I canceled 2 already this year, I did get my cash back. It's unfortunate that we are forced to book this way for a campground 

[Travisma 1,317]

So we just got 2  partial site weekday nights at the Fort (Wednesday ,Thursday) in the middle of March, way before most school spring breaks begin, and it cost us $191.  We really wanted Friday also, but guess what, it's not available.  Can't go onto MDE to try to add a day, have to call reservations, and since it's a Friday, if we even get it, it'll be over $100 on top of the $191 we already have.  We are thinking of cancelling it, and just staying in a hotel Friday which is really the day we were looking for.  $300 for a quick trip is a lot to spend. Sorry, but the Fort aint that magical.

[The Troll 67]

Well, Leslie and I just got back from a two week stay at the Fort, and I have to say, we probably won't be going back.

[Tri-Circle-D 2,059]

20 minutes ago, The Troll said:

Well, Leslie and I just got back from a two week stay at the Fort, and I have to say, we probably won't be going back.

I'm sorry to hear that, Norm.

How about a little Troll Rant^TM for old times' sake?

TCD

[The Troll 67]

11 minutes ago, Tri-Circle-D said:

How about a little Troll Rant^TM for old times' sake?

TCD

Well, OK, you asked for it!

Before I say anything, please, everyone, please understand I am not trying to be mean-spirited, argumentative, or ugly. And I certainly do not mean to offend anyone. I love this site and I love everyone on it. Probably the best message board I'm a member of. So if anything I write offends anyone, please accept my apologies in advance.

So now here we go.

The place has become a dump.

I fell in love with the Fort as a child. My memories of the place are of modest middle class families in modest station wagons pulling modest travel trailers or popups and nestling them onto a densely wooded site deep inside a Florida forest on the outskirts of the world's greatest theme park. The Fort was secluded, quaint, private, and quiet. That vision of the Fort is long dead.

The place now is very little more than an RV/trailer park.

We all say that we love the Fort...but seriously, what's there to love?

The never-ending rattle of the diesel engines of Aerosmith-caliber touring buses?

The pleasant aroma of diesel exhaust as you're trying to read in your hammock?

The never-ending din of leaf blowers (employed by both employees and the guests), pressure washers, power drills, gas powered golf carts, and diesel powered F-350s?

The lunarscape of what was once a beautiful, lush Florida forest but is now a burned out, brown herbicide dumping ground? I mean, seriously, all you have to do is take a walk down the nature trail from the Fort to the Lodge and take a look to the left to see what the Fort once was. Or better yet, walk toward the Four Seasons along the canal, walk past the fence, toward the golf course, and take a glance to the right. That's what the Fort once looked like: Exploding undergrowth; old, fallen trees covered by vines; wild flowers; tall Florida grasses; acres of wild Florida ferns.

Now? You're lucky if you have a tree on your site. And a palm bush. The staff at the Fort literally and deliberately use herbicides to kill all the undergrowth. The result? Horribly stark loops that you can see straight through, end to end, yielding a grand view of what now resembles more an RV storage lot than a campground. Depressing. Ugly. Tacky.

Everyone loves to go looping to see stuff. See what? Huge pickup trucks? What's there to see? Semi trucks used to pull massive fifth wheels larger than my house? Work trailers deliberately parked on a site to advertise some local's pressure washing business? At every other site -- or more -- there is now a huge pickup truck on huge tires parked parallel to the road, with the front and rear wheels off the pad.

We saw -- and I am not making this up -- many sites with three vehicles jammed onto them. Huge pickup truck on the pad and a vehicle on its left and right, parked in the leaves, on the drainage slopes.

It's a parking lot. A grotesque parking lot, dotted every now and then by the occasional pine tree, which had better behave itself, lest it get felled by the management, to be replaced by a lemon tree.

Try to "enjoy the Fort" by maybe swinging in your hammock or lounging in your reclining camp chair, and all day long you'll be serenaded by some dude trying to thread a honking 40 foot long fifth wheel onto a full hookup site that was never designed to accommodate such vehicles! Or you get to enjoy the gentle sounds of some jerk using a gas leaf blower to blow leaves off of his $40,000 pickup truck.

And now along the vein of this thread -- what is with all these people living at the Fort?! GO HOME! I cannot fathom why a world class organization like Disney would possibly have allowed people to become full-time residents, a la trailer park, of a "resort" campground. You now have these permanently parked 40 foot fifth wheels parked on site that haven't been moved in years. The sites are chock full of depressing, decaying, sun-faded junk: Half-collapsed storage tents, planters that once held flowers that have now become overwhelmed by weeds, broken down golf carts, cheap Walmart Christmas decorations still up at the end of January...It's exactly, exactly, what you'd expect to see in a trailer park. It's a disgrace. Pure mismanagement. Completely defeats the original vision of the Fort. Disney World is supposed to be an escape from the ugly real world, not a celebration of it.

I don't know...maybe I'll change my tune in six months or so and decide to go back. But right now I just can't justify the expense. I don't want to spend $80 a night (or more) to "camp" in a depressing parking lot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Tri-Circle-D 2,059]

Whoomp, there it is!

Post of the year!

Thank you Norm.

I'm sorry that you came home from a two week stay feeling that way, but when you're right, you're right.

The Fort has become a destination for wealthy retirees who can afford the jacked-up rates, and can take advantage of the blocked reservation calendar.

So sad.

TCD

[The Troll 67]

9 minutes ago, Tri-Circle-D said:

Whoomp, there it is!

Post of the year!

Thank you Norm.

I'm sorry that you came home from a two week stay feeling that way, but when you're right, you're right.

The Fort has become a destination for wealthy retirees who can afford the jacked-up rates, and can take advantage of the blocked reservation calendar.

So sad.

TCD

Thank you, Andrew. I am glad to know that, at a minimum, I am not crazy. That there are still some intelligent people left who understand what the Fort once was and who understand what the hell is wrong.

In a sense, it's hard to fault Disney for doing what it's meant to do -- make money. But! Think of the original vision of the Fort: Campground. For middle class families. Who take their kids to the parks and buy princess dresses and pirate muskets. MONEY.

But I guess that's not a thing in America anymore. Now the middle class families pile into a value resort. And the campground becomes a parking lot for retirees in their Aerosmith houses on wheels. Not that I'm against retirees...I love them and thank them for their lifelong service to our nation. But it's just a crying shame. The Fort now sucks because of it. I think they can now bulldoze the place and I really wouldn't care.

It's a ridiculous pipe dream, but I would very much love it if Disney would build a completely separate (and far away) RV resort and return the Fort back to what it was. Put a hard limit on the size of camping vehicles. Disallow any sort of gas-powered anything. Let Florida be Florida AND GROW BACK. Only one vehicle per site, parked perpendicular to the road. Three week stay limit. Want to stay longer? You must move sites. Plant some damned oaks and cypress and grass. And flowers! Theme every loop. Give people something to explore and look at. Conceal things like utility boxes and trash cans with wilderness-ish looking stuff. Yell at people who make too much damned noise or who allow their children to behave like brats. Call in the real Imagineers and have them design customized playgrounds, not buy generic ones from stock vendors. Bring back the totem poles and moose topiary. Build a frickin' water park like the one at Four Seasons. Lazy river. Fun slides. Ropes and swings and stuff. Food court with reasonably priced (for Disney) food. Hammocks on the beach. Cordon off a section of Bay Lake at Clementine and treat it so people can swim in it. Put rocking chairs all over the damned place. Actively change/refresh the theming for each month's holiday. Bring in new sh!t from time to time, like they do at the parks.

 

[shoreline99 137]

Norm, I totally agree. I doubt we're going back to WDW any time soon for many of the reasons you and Andrew have outlined above, in addition to others that I've mentioned. (On top of all that, it now appears that we brought home bedbugs from the cabin we stayed in at the fort; our house is being fumigated as I type).

[ependydad...Doug 176]

So, it's interesting to read these comments. I had always heard that the Fort was the place that everyone compares campgrounds against. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice place and actually pretty nice as RV parks go but it's no "the best ever". BUT- it's a much better way to spend a Disney vacation vs. a hotel as I've come to quite dislike hotels.

I'm biased here, but I do think the angst against diesels + super large units is unwarranted. For me, I try to be very aware of how long my truck is running and how much noise it makes. I am in a 42' camper, but haven't had an exceptionally long parking job in a while. (Knock on wood/it's coming, I know.) It's also quite a fact of life that campers have simply gotten bigger in recent years. You have to look for the smaller units.

In other news, I was just talking to a friend and they were talking about spending 2 months at the fort next year. Out of curiosity, I called Disney reservations to find out what it would cost to stay on a Premium site for the months of January and February. Turns out that price is $3,202.99 and $3,746.33. I'm not sure that a month or two at Disney is worth that.

[The Troll 67]

18 minutes ago, ependydad...Doug said:

I'm biased here, but I do think the angst against diesels + super large units is unwarranted. For me, I try to be very aware of how long my truck is running and how much noise it makes. I am in a 42' camper, but haven't had an exceptionally long parking job in a while. (Knock on wood/it's coming, I know.) It's also quite a fact of life that campers have simply gotten bigger in recent years. You have to look for the smaller units.

I understand what you're saying and it's an excellent point. I'm even seriously considering buying an F250 to pull my little camper with. I don't fault the owners of the trucks, I fault the management of the Fort.

The Fort was designed in the late 1960s to accommodate modest campers, tents, and station wagons. It was not designed to accommodate today's monster vehicles and campers. Yet the Fort still charges premium prices and expects people to somehow thread and snake their vehicles into narrow sites, using an extremely narrow, one-way road as access. The result is the incessant, "Pull forward! No! Cut the wheel to the left! Now back up! No! Pull back out again!" All. Day. Long.

Disney is charging people for an RV resort but giving them a 1960s campground. Like I said, Disney should build an RV resort, complete with pull through sites to accommodate guests like you.

You know, on another note, and I may be way wrong, but I sense that the wilderness hack down that occurred was the result of environmentalists complaining about invasive nonnative plant species in the state. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But probably not. So why aren't they screaming about the wanton use of herbicides in a Florida wetland? Where are they when we need them?

 

[Avatab.... Steve 124]

4 hours ago, The Troll said:

 

Disney is charging people for an RV resort but giving them a 1960s campground. Like I said, Disney should build an RV resort, complete with pull through sites to accommodate guests like you.

 

 

You are saying what many of us have felt for awhile.  I have said here many times that Disney should have been expanding the Fort all along or building new CG's to keep pace with demand in general and for larger sites in particular.

I also believe that the widely abused 10 person per site rule has been a contributor to this downward slide.

The intent (Walt's intent) was to give middle class/working class families an affordable and clean place to come to Disney with all their kids in a station wagon and a tent or a trailer w/o spending a fortune.

The Fort was never intended to handle the size of the groups and vehicles that are crammed into every loop now.

I think you should edit your above posts into one email and send it to every Disney email address in the chain of command.

[mommy rainbo.....Bo 41]

26 minutes ago, Avatab.... Steve said:

You are saying what many of us have felt for awhile.  I have said here many times that Disney should have been expanding the Fort all along or building new CG's to keep pace with demand in general and for larger sites in particular.

I also believe that the widely abused 10 person per site rule has been a contributor to this downward slide.

The intent (Walt's intent) was to give middle class/working class families an affordable and clean place to come to Disney with all their kids in a station wagon and a tent or a trailer w/o spending a fortune.

The Fort was never intended to handle the size of the groups and vehicles that are crammed into every loop now.

I think you should edit your above posts into one email and send it to every Disney email address in the chain of command.

What He and Troll said.   Send it to everyone.  We are only Cabin campers, but this last trip in early December we looped and it was kinda depressing.  Not as well kept as our first trip in 2006.   I feel really bad for those of you who saw the Fort in its Glory Days.

[keith_h 420]

Mr Troll (aka Norm) - After our last trip Rene and I were questioning whether is was really worth making another trip anytime in the foreseeable future. While the Fort  is still nicer than any KOA I've been to it is not what I expect of Disney nor for the price we pay. Our opinion was over the year between our trips the Fort was looking tired and not as clean as it had been previously. Instead of spotless we would see beverage cans and paper on the ground throughout our loop. Many of the pads had large gleaming oil spots that I don't recall seeing before. I don't need to go into playing dodge the golf cart whenever we would walk somewhere. So what we have decided is to go visit some other places for a while and see how things look in a couple of years.

[PGHFiend 140]

Seroisly? Find a campground as nice as the fort in such proximity to a major, heck, even minor attraction that has the turnover it has and I'll go visit there just to see how its managed. 

You guys are living in the past pining for the good old days.  Guess what, these are the good old days, so enjoy them instead if whining.  When is the the last time you saw a station wagon pulling a camper! I could just see the photos some of you would post, "Look what we saw towing in the fort today, bet they were wayyyy overloaded!" . 

And you guys dislike that someone has the means to stay at the fort for a few weeks? I would love to do this! You have a lot of room to talk when you cite the wealthy retirees, who possibly are themselves the adults that took you to the fort as children.  I've seen some of you post pictures from places I will never be able to afford. I'd rather have a retiree in a tour bus next to me that a busted down wagon with a family of 6.  Just sayin.

If anyone owns a campground, connected to the nations largest tourist attraction, with a line of people who are waiting for a spot to open year round is reading this, please tell me why you would limit stays and lower prices. I would love to hear it!

I wish the fort was free and vacant when I am there. It's not reality unfortunately and the way other campgrounds are maintained, it looks better every day. I'd say 15 percent of CG's that we have tried are ones we would go to twice. The fort has a dinner show! Two stores! Two pools! Paved sites! A marina! AND ON AND ON AND ON.  I pay 85 bucks for a good CG near our home with a tenth of the amenities......whats wrong with the price? Imagine your posts if they didn't have high prices to keep out some of the riff raff.

Bottom line is that you can not, will never, and can't justify or nullify someone's choice of the way, how or where they vacation. 

I will agree that sometimes there are ignorant people, but have you watched the news?

 

 

Posted from my cell if there are spelling  errors.