We sipped soup from an authentic tureen in a pretend Parisian bistrot. We heard “It’s a Small World” in French and in English. We compared Space Mountain and other rides to their US versions — and found (to our shock) that we liked the French versions better. And we slept in a hotel that imperfectly mimicked our home of Northern California.
I had expected Disneyland Paris to be a lesser version of the Disneyland we know and love in California. But by the end of the day, Toth and I agreed: Disneyland Paris rocks!
But is Europe’s Disneyland worth using a precious Paris day to go there? That depends.
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Is Disneyland Paris worth it?
Most of us have limited vacation time. Whether visiting Disneyland Paris is worth it really depends on you and your priorities: How much do you love Disney parks? What will you have to give up in Paris to make time for Disney?
In the past, I never felt that Disneyland Paris (fka Euro Disney) was worth a visit. I came to Paris to walk the streets. To admire architecture, absorb the french language and culture, eat food and visit museums. I definitely didn’t fly to Europe to go on rides!
So what changed my mind? Easy: I got into to Disneyland Paris free! My husband is a Disney corporate employee. So I have a “Silver Spouse” main entry pass that gets me and my guests into almost any Disney park worldwide.
With cost out of the equation, I decided to spend one precious day of my European trip at France’s Disney park. We also spent the night at one of the on-property Disney hotels.
Here’s what we learned.
1. Getting to Disneyland Paris from Charles de Gaulle airport is easy.
If we’d had to travel hours out of our way to get there, EuroDisney would not have been worth it. However, it only takes 9 minutes on the TGV high-speed train to get from CDG to Disneyland Paris!
Of course, your travel time from a flight landing in Paris to the Disneyland entry gate won’t be quite that short. Here’s a rough estimate of how long it would take from seat to door:
- Getting off the plane, through immigration and to the train platform: Anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours. This part of your day varies so widely! Of course, you’ll have no idea in advance if your plane might sit on the tarmac before getting a gate. You won’t know how backed up immigration will be, etc. People online recommend alloting anywhere from 90 minutes to 3 hours for this step. We were sitting in the back of the plane, and it took us about an hour from touchdown to get off, get through immigration and pick up our checked bags. On the other hand, when my parents arrived in Paris the next morning, their flight was early. Because they were using a wheelchair, they were escorted to the front of the security line and got through the whole experience in under half an hour.
- Getting from baggage claim to the TGV station: 15 minutes. This was farther than I expected! The walk took us at least 15 minutes.
- Waiting for the TGV: up to 30 minutes. We arrived on the platform about 30 minutes before our train. We actually wished we hadn’t gone down so early, because there are no bathrooms there and we wanted to change clothes and freshen up after the red-eye flight. Also, a warning: Sometimes the TGV is late! When we returned to the airport the next day to meet my parents, it was delayed by about 40 minutes, throwing our whole morning off.
- Riding the TGV to Marne-la-Vallée Chessy station: 9 minutes. I spent most of the trip in the bathroom, brushing my teeth and changing clothes.
- Walking from the station to your hotel: 15-20 minutes. If you’re staying on property, like we did, you could store your baggage at the hotel. If you purchased your park tickets with your hotel room, you also need to pick those up from the hotel. There is apparently a free shuttle, but we didn’t see it. It took at least 15 minutes to walk from the station to the hotel, not counting the security check we had to pass through. If you want to skip this step, you could pay extra to check your bags and pick up your tickets at the Disney Express Counter right at the train station. Since the park entrance is right at the train station, this seems like a really good idea and I wish we’d done it! (You could also use the lockers at the station to stow bags.)
- Checking in and stowing bags at hotel: 15 minutes. There wasn’t a long line, but this still took us a while. The front desk clerk was super friendly. She was excited that we’re from California because she was planning to visit Anaheim for Disney’s 70th anniversary.
- Walking back to the park: 15 minutes. This was the point when we really started to feel like we should have paid extra for the express check in!
All in, it might take you 4 hours to get from your airplane seat to a seat on a Disneyland ride. Or you could get lucky and — with the Disney Express Counter — get from place to place in under 2 hours.
2. Disneyland Paris has a great vibe.
I’m not the biggest rides person. To me walking around the park and looking at things is the main attraction. Disneyland Paris is beautifully designed with many attractive details. There’s also a second park, Disney Studios, which has the Pixar and Avengers stuff. The Paris area around Remy’s Bistrot and the Ratatouille ride is uncanny — it looks so real, and yet here you are in a theme park.
The staff also contribute to the good vibrations at Disneyland Paris. Every single person who worked there was So! Nice! Like, they had clearly all been trained in “American style” customer service, and almost all spoke English well. But they also just went out of their way to help us. My employee spouse card is supposed to get me discounts on merchandise and some foods and drinks, and the staff took all the time needed to make sure that I got that discount, even if the register didn’t want to recognize my foreign pass.
3. Some Disneyland Paris attractions seemed better than their US counterparts.
I should qualify this one to say that my Disney experience is mostly with Disneyland in California. As the original Disney park, Disneyland is of course the oldest. But Disneyland Paris is also over 30 years old! So I didn’t anticipate how fresh and high-tech the rides would feel.
The teen agreed that the Paris Space Mountain ride felt faster and more exciting than the California version. We both found the animatronics in the Pirates of the Caribbean were more impressive. We also really liked the Remy ride, which they don’t have at Disneyland in Anaheim.
4. It’s fun to hear classic Disney-isms in French.
Maybe it’s just me, but I loved riding “It’s a Small World” and hearing, “Car le monde est tout petit …” (“Because the world is small …”) And while we waited for the Remy ride, we got a kick out of the videos of the fancy French chef “Gusteau,” speaking actual French.
5. Seeing European families on vacation is interesting.
We ran across very few Americans at Disneyland Paris, which makes sense: Why travel all the way to Europe for a theme park we have at home? Although a theme park is ostensibly a fake place, the lack of Americans ironically made me feel like I was experiencing European people more authentically than anywhere else.
Here were French families, but also Germans, Swiss, Italians, even a few English families, out trying to have a nice time, and dealing with all the challenges that we American parents know so well of Disney parks. It was hot out. It wasn’t horribly crowded, but sure, we were in a crowd. As the afternoon turned to evening, we saw that, yes, tired European kids have meltdowns too.
6. The on-property hotels are decent.
I liked staying at Sequoia Lodge, one of the less-expensive on-site hotels. the room was cute, with a wallpaper border of Bambi characters. The hotel had a pool, although we didn’t make it there. The Northern California-inspired lobby decor was cool, except for the parts that weren’t, like a Native American headdress on display with no context. We were wondering — “Is this real? Do you have permission from this specific Native American nation to display it?”
7. Visiting a theme park is a great way to walk off jet lag
I wasn’t expecting this benefit, but this was actually the perfect way for us to spend our first day adjusting to the new time zone. We were out in the sunlight all day, for one thing. For another, we weren’t doing anything that taxed our brain power, like appreciating art or navigating the Metro system. And every time we started to get sleepy, we went on a ride for a jolt of adrenaline.
Toth and I figured that we’d be exhausted and back at the hotel by 6 p.m. In reality, we stayed at the park until after 8 p.m.!
A few drawbacks that make Disneyland Paris less worth it
Although I’m glad we went to Disneyland Paris, there are also reasons to give it a miss:
1. The snacks were uninspiring
There were a few cute-looking snack booths, like a crepe stand. But in general we found the refreshment booths too far between (of course, as Americans, we were looking for snacks!) and most of the items didn’t seem unique.
2. There isn’t much Paris-specific merch
I’m not usually a big theme park shopper, but I definitely wanted to buy something to show I’d been to this specific Disneyland. I would have purchased a few gifts as well, if they’d had cool, unique merchandise. But most of the items I saw were just for generic Disney characters without French language on them or the word “Paris.”
I did get this cool Groot (from “Guardians of the Galaxy”) magnet. And I’ve been kicking myself for months that I didn’t buy the Chez Remy Paris sweatshirt I tried on. But other than that, we didnt’ find much unique Disneyland Paris merchandise.
3. The security checkpoints are annoying
This isn’t something I would cancel a visit over, but it was a bit confusing to understand what in the park/hotel/downtown area was inside or outside security.
While walking from the train station to our hotel, we had to go through security, which was annoying since we had our bags from the flight. Then, when walking from the hotel to the park, we had to go through security again, even though we thought we were now “inside the perimeter.” In the morning, we had to go through security again to walk from the hotel to the train station!
4. You could be in actual Paris instead of Disney Paris!
This point hit home hardest when we were eating at the Bistrot Chez Rémy. Like, the ambience was similar to a real Parisian bistrot, and the food was good, for a theme park. But if we could have been sitting at a real Parisian bistrot instead! The very next night, my son and I had a late-night dinner at Louise, an honest-to-god sidewalk cafe/bistrot in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of Paris. And Louise was just real. Like, the waiter was short with us, and distant. A man shoulder to shoulder with us smoked and talked on the phone incessantly, knocked over his empty wineglass, and I miraculously caught it and placed it back on his table without him even noticing. And the food tasted better.
In the end, I do feel that visiting Disneyland Paris was worth it to us. I would even visit again! (Maybe just to buy a Rémy sweatshirt!) But whether it’s worth it to you really depends just how much you love Disney, and how much time you have.