The Disneyland Resort currently offers early entry to Disney hotel guests who are staying at The Disneyland Hotel, Pixar Place Hotel, and The Grand Californian Hotel & Spa.
This is where hotel guests can enter Disneyland or California Adventure park 30 minutes before non-hotel guests.
Not all of the rides are open at this time, but it’s a great chance for guests to get in a few rides with little to no wait before the regular admission guests enter the park.
Early entry was available in Disneyland on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. It was available in California Adventure park on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays.
The rides this is offered for in Disneyland are Alice in Wonderland, Astro Orbitor, Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters, Disneyland Monorail, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, King Arthur Carrousel, Mad Tea Party, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Peter Pan’s Flight, Pinocchio’s Daring Journey, Snow White’s Enchanted Wish, Space Mountain, and Star Tours – The Adventures Continue.
The rides offered for it in California Adventure are Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission BREAKOUT!, Incredicoaster, The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree, Monsters Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue!, Soarin’ Around the World, and WEB SLINGERS: A Spider-Man Adventure.
This amazing hotel perk is unfortunately going to be ending for good on January 5, 2026. It will be replaced with a different perk for hotel guests instead.
The new perk is that Disney hotel guests will receive one Lightning Lane for a Lightning Lane Multi Pass attraction that they get to choose based on what rides are available.
They will get one Lightning Lane for their entire hotel stay, not one per day of their stay. This is likely to keep sales up for Lightning Lanes because they don’t want to give out so many Lightning Lanes that hotel guests aren’t buying them anymore.
A reason for the change is that Disneyland said a lot of guests were not doing early entry and taking advantage of the extra time they could have in the parks. Also, it was frustrating for guests who wanted to go to the park that didn’t have early entry that day.
Staying on-property for early entry has been a big perk, so it will be interesting to see if people are still inclined to stay on-property as much and if guests will like the new Lightning Lane perk.
It’s nice for the theme parks to not have to operate for an extra 30 minutes a day, but if this loses appeal for guests to stay on-property, then it might not be worth it for Disneyland to keep the new perk around.
Disney hotel guests can still enjoy Early Entry for the rest of 2025 and the first few days of 2026, so take advantage of it while you can.
Also, unfortunately, another perk is going away for Pixar Place Hotel guests also on January 5, 2026. The theme park entrance to California Adventure that was exclusive to guests of the Pixar Place Hotel is going to be permanently closing.
Disney said that this entrance is underutilized, so they are closing it with no plans of reopening it.
This is a bit of a surprise because this entrance was closed earlier this year and just reopened in June.
There are definitely still perks of staying at Disneyland hotels though. Read about reasons to stay at them here.