The Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Studios Orlando

hello welcome back to another episode of bounce off i'm scott ball i i make comics and uh children's books i'm an artist and this is georgia ball she writes those books and many others and today georgia we're going to talk about a little bit more about our experience going to universal studios and horror nights aren't we we're going to be talking about the uh experience of staying on property uh but first i want to give an update on clifford we're going to bump last time about how that was going and um i found out officially through wikipedia that clifford is definitely going to be released on december 7th that's the book and yesterday on twitter the trailer for the uh what they call the final trailer for the clifford movie came out um some people were passing it around and the movie is going to be coming out i think november 10th so it's going to be a month ahead of the graphic novel oh that's a relief just in time um christmas yeah we were i mean at this time last month we just didn't know when it was going to be coming out if it was going to be coming out and we were hoping it would still make it out by the end of the year but we know that the movie itself got delayed so that's really good news i'm glad to hear that um and uh the early buzz on it's pretty good isn't it i think people really are looking forward to seeing a wholesome family film right now um pretty decent like the comments that i saw on it like they weren't weren't expecting much because i know that the the big red cgi dog can be a little overwhelming the first time you see it but they're getting used to the idea well it's a giant dog is it because it's cgi or is it because just the concept it's a dog the size of an elephant it's because it's cgi i think there's just some something's always a little bit off about that especially when it's a real creature versus like a little golem you know you know it's like you know what a real dog acts and feels like and something's just not quite there but people are seem to be a little bit willing to forgive well uh that's um yeah so uh it'll be coming out uh and what's the date again november 10th november 10th okay and the book will be out december 7th right yes so uh be looking for that on amazon and on bookstore shelves but uh it'll be george's first uh solo writing project for scholastic is that correct yes it is the first one great so i've seen some uh pages from it and it does look really good it looks like a fun book so yeah still an adaptation but there are a couple of new scenes that i i got to write totally added in and a new way also go ahead no the it's a new ending it's not the same ending it's in the movie oh okay so we also wanted to talk about um an update on one of our own projects so we do uh this children's book series it's called uh brianna does this brianna gets that uh series and um it's it's kind of um uh well how would you describe it george you're better describing these things well i call it the brianna books and it's about a girl who's got a messy personality so instead of a lot of the uplifting um sweet hero heroic kind of girls that you see in a lot of picture books today she's a girl who doesn't always behave correctly so they're behavior books and the first one that we published was um brianna and the behavior chart as the concept of a behavior chart was really new for me and my daughter would come home and always talk about how like kevin's always on the bottom of the chart he's got down another rung today and i started asking her what that meant and it was all about you know behavior in the classroom so that's uh the first book and then in the second book and my daughter joined 4-h um we were introduced to the idea that a lot of the kids in that group were showing their cavies at fair so a cabbie is a fancy name for guinea pig and this is a story about adjusting to the idea that a cage animal has a lot of work attached to it and it's a lot of responsibility for young young girl and brianna doesn't always handle that responsibility perfectly so the third book that we're about to release going to release it in time for christmas is um called brianna has math problems and it's all about don't we all yeah um in common core math my daughter was in that when we were in washington state it involved a lot of graphical representations of math that was really uh foreign to us and we as parents had to learn how to do it and so this book is a little bit about teaching the parents how it works and then teaching the child at the same time and uh her feelings about being not as good at math as her friend is good at math yeah and it's still an early reader so it has value in that too so you know it's an ideal book for small small children just working on learning how to read for the first time so um it serves multiple purposes but it's a really clever story i think that you wrote on a way to like help um make something as foreign as figuring out how to do addition and subtraction to a small child and something that they can relate to and now i won't give it away beyond that but it's a fun book so we're really excited about that and should we mention that about that we think this is going to be able to come out and hardback yeah i was going to say that amazon has placed us in the beta program for um producing hardcovers so i'm going to go ahead and do it that way i had been planning on doing it through a third party but we're going to do it this way instead and i think that's really great to just get the whole one-stop shop process out and and have hardcover copies of these books this time for all of them all three and that's relatively new to amazon right that's i mean it's a beta probably offered before yeah so that'll be cool and that should be coming out sometime sometime in the month of november so real soon so we actually uh finished up uh the line art today so there's still uh some more uh color work to do and then we have to put the book together but uh we're hoping that we'll get it done real soon i do all the book layout i'm working on the cover right now so yeah yeah we should move on because actually there are a lot of photographs to show okay so today so last episode we were talking about foreign nights which is kind of like that premier event for universal orlando where uh for halloween and people who come out and see haunted houses and it's just a really cool environment uh to be in and so we we went there and we kind of like wanted to test it out and do a podcast on it but we also came up with a thought that wouldn't be fun to stay there because it's going to be a late night and we just thought we'd make it a little bit of a mini vacation we did something we've never done before we actually stayed at a universal resort hotel uh and we've stayed at resort hotels before uh specifically many many disney resort hotels but we've never done one out of universal studios so we thought we'd try that and um so we we got we we chose we had options there's several options here in orlando for these resort hotels the one we chose was the royal pacific correct that's right we picked the royal pacific this is actually part of the annual pass holder package that was going around for horror nights i don't remember all the details of that package it came to us as an email offer that they were doing but it you got tickets alongside with a stay and so um this is a shot of the entrance and one of the things that's kind of nice about many of the resort hotels and connected to the universal resort is that even though they're really real close within walking distance to the parks you don't feel it i mean there's a lot of they did such a great job with the greenery to really give it a sense of privacy it's so it's really quite quiet now around the hotel property but you are so close to the parks and um this is a view of the main building and all these resort hotels you know of course are very large because they want to cater to a large large guest population and um so rather than it being a high rise because i think they also didn't want to mar and make it so high that you also can start seeing the city and the interstate and all that they keep it a little low and uh almost tree level that way and it really kind of helps to also add to that privacy factor i was really impressed with all the greenery there's just tons and tons of palms and ferns hedges things that that looked like they were taken straight from thailand you know the whole design of it was very south asian as opposed to um and when you described it to me you said it's going to be kind of like tropical and polynesian and it wasn't polynesian it was actually more like a thailand kind of setting yeah i i thought it was gonna be more polynesian as well and it is more uh south asian and i thought one of the cool things here too i don't know if we have a picture shot of it but at that front entrance they had to um kind of set up these step steppings or um steps that are very common in thailand and those areas of um indonesia and such that um i don't even it's for farming right where they can like flood the area and they do farming and it's just kind of like different ramps and steps but they've recreated that to a respect for that main entrance it was very very cool to see that this is actually the center atrium and just on the side of it is where the lobby is where you check in and it doesn't look like the kind of thing that would be in in the center of a hotel in orlando it's just gorgeous yeah it was they really did a good job and this is uh to be specific so universal i don't believe handles their own resorts this is part of the lowe's um corporation of resorts so they they kind of do resorts um all over and i think they handled several of the ones here at universal so we this is a view from our room and we had a great view of the pool and you can see the hulk way over there in the background this is the coaster yeah so you can see just that's how close you are to one of the universal parks because what's really ideal for staying at universal is that everything is for the most part walking distance they have one resort two resorts that are not um but a lot of their main resorts they're um and this would be considered one of their higher echelon resorts but they're all within walking distance it was a really nice pool what did you think of that pool one of the best pools that i've been to in orlando it reminded me actually quite a bit of the bonnet creek pool uh the windham resort that's on disney property it's very big very beautiful perfect temperature most of the time at least when it was hot it was and it was still hot i mean it is orlando it's hot boast of gear um so this is uh this is our room so um it wasn't very good itself it was quite sizable and i i really like it i thought it was really well-apportioned um it's getting to be more and more than a lot of these resorts that connected to theme parks in my opinion they're skimping on stuff a lot more and i didn't feel that way here at all i thought they did a really good job of making it very roomy and very comfortable to spend time in in a really nice pretty bathroom i was constantly afraid that i was going to slip and kill myself on yeah the tile floor was super slick the whole time and it always seemed to be covered in a sheen of water that's always happens though it's not always happening like every hotel bathroom especially like if you're somewhere and it's a resort setting where there's a pool there's the beach or something you're always constantly having to shower off all that but um and you know i had the nice usual accompaniments of so you had a fri refrigerator you had your own you had a keurig coffee maker which is nice and it's just so handy to have that refrigerator right so you can store your drinks after all it is a theme park and we went to universal studios and it's still hot so it's really nice you can have your own drinks there and stuff to set up that way this is a picture of the bar the bar was quite hopping at night and i have another picture of that um they were having some kind of a convention going on at the same time that we were there and everybody was at the bar that night yeah and isn't that the roof line it's just so beautiful it's an exquisite roof line the design to these buildings is so impeccable and they really spare no expense that way but this this bar was really interesting it's actually um it's an asian bar um and it's a sushi bar so a lot that's one of the reasons probably was hopping because late at night you go there and you can add sushi and then a lot of the drinks were also asian influenced as well a lot of ginger drinks and lychee drinks and things like that yeah i wasn't crazy about mine what was it it was really sour wasn't it yours was quite sour i love mine mine was really good it tasted a little bit more caribbean tropical but um yeah i didn't really care for yours as much you know the alcohol brings up a good point you know when you talk about these resorts and you know we you kind of get the gist that we really enjoyed our time here at the resort and we did and we really thought that a lot of it was a pretty good bargain but let me just point out that when you go to these resorts the where they're going to get you is with these right here and these these the alcoholic drinks when you get these resorts is almost like taking out another mortgage they were crazy expensive it was like the lowest price you could expect was fifteen dollars for a drink yeah we we later went to the bar at the hard rock we wanted to check out the hard rocket i think we spent on two drinks close to about forty forty five dollars for two drinks for three because we got the daughter a virgin and that one was also not cheap no okay so three drinks three drinks for forty forty five dollars that's a lot guys that's a meal to me so um that's where they get you if you can do these hotels and kind of hold back on the constant drinking and stuff you'll you can get a pretty good deal it's the drinks so one of the the what they really tout with staying at one of these places is that you are within walking distance of uh universal studios it's not the shortest walk in the world but it is a very very pretty very comfortable walk but i would argue and say that that's that's what helps the privacy factor i mean if it was a really short walk then you'd be there at the turnstiles and you don't want that so i had no issue with the walk at all that's what keeps it quiet right right this is an area that's right around where the boats are so you can take the boats over to the studios if you want to instead this was a staircase that led you down um everywhere you look there were these really beautiful interior details it really was i mean so the lobby is on the second floor and uh you everything is down below the restaurants had two restaurants and then the swimming pool which is massive and all that but everything in in this store had a couple of stores at the hotel and so the lobby's kind of two stories that way you come in on the second floor and you can go down below to where all the recreation items are and this is an example of the waterway canal that the boats go off of and you can kind of see glimpses of yet another universal hotel off in the distance but you can just kind of get a sense for just how much privacy there really is it was really really quiet this was the hotel where we had dinner at do you recall the name of the restaurant oh no i don't either i'm sorry i don't it was it was at the sapphire falls yeah that's at the restaurant at the sapphire falls hotel this was one of the interiors of the um sapphire falls and it had this really gorgeous atrium that had a lot of photographs kind of like a wine cellar uh the restaurant was good yeah it was again a very beautiful hotel a bit larger than i think the royal pacific even is but i i really kind of wanted to see the pool area love to see pool areas and hotels and i couldn't get to this one but i've heard it's really nice and um this might be on my list for a future stay very much i know my daughter wants to stay here this was a shot of the boats as they're arriving we were really um laughing because when you take the boats during the day there would be this really pleasant music the boats would be playing but during the nights that was when horror nights was going on and suddenly they would really ramp it up with the really loud rock music and craziness um it is a a different experience that they were trying to give you yeah a little shot of the night going into horror nights and so like this is city walk for any of you who aren't that familiar with the whole universal area here in orlando you have on one side actual universal studios theme park and then over on the other side you have another theme park called islands of adventure and then in between the two you have what's called city walk and on either side of it you have a whole collection of nightclubs restaurants shopping it is impressive it's really impressive to see and this is as you see is like a hard rock this is not the hard rock hotel this is just the restaurant they have a hard rock hotel and it's somewhere else and their restaurant looks like the colosseum it's just massive inside i went down these are pictures from the hot tub next to one of the cabanas um we didn't obviously rent when the cabanas it there were people in the hot tub talking about whether or not it was really valuable to have a cabana right next to people who are just enjoying themselves in the cabana they were watching them they were just getting outside talking and watching bob's burgers on that television and people were going like she's spending all that money like a banner just for bob's burgers to watch an episode of bob's burgers i don't know yeah i don't know i mean they are beautiful cabanas i mean but they are pricey i mean every nothing is free for sure but uh except for the pool and um but you know you come to these um these resorts and you know either you have lots of money so it's not really an issue and you want to just like be a taste everything that the resort has to offer or you're on a little bit more of a budget and so that's okay but the pool itself was really really nice and you know the the theming was so good and we have some video that we shot i think that we're going to interstitial in here where you can see a nice little 360 turn around just how big and large the pool really is and one of the things my daughter really loved was the volleyball that they had so one of the things i think that's worth pointing out one of the mistakes i made is that i brought some of our own favorite pool toys you can't do that here they they won't let you have them and they provide their own beach balls they have quite a few so you're not trying to fight everyone for just like one beach ball and so there's really plenty to go around so i was okay with that you know and i get it i understand they don't want tons of people showing up with god knows what in pool toys so that was not an issue to me oh talk about um we should talk about what happened with checkout because we got to use the pool well after we checked out so one of the nice features one of the i would list really as a hallmark feature to universal that i do not think that disney offers this i'm pretty sure they do not is at certain levels of their hotels that includes the royal pacific that includes the hard rock and um the um the other the other hotels escaping the italian villa hotel and uh at those hotels they offer the benefit of when you check in even though they have a check-in time you can show up as early as you want that morning of check-in even like 7 a.m and you get access to either go into the pool uh or you can go ahead and get your fast passes for the park we'll talk about that in a second and then i was amazed that same thing happened on the day of checkout so normally you go into a hotel right you just you have checkout at 11 and they're really trying to kick you out the door and here um they still have a checkout time it's something like 11 i think it was like that as well but then they told us that we had the option if we wanted to continue to use the pool until 10 o'clock closed that night and we could get they had facilities they had changing rooms so that wasn't a problem but we could stay and spend the rest of the day there i was i was really shocked about that what did you think about that i was too i never had that with a hotel before and we weren't necessarily going to take advantage of it but we went walking for a little while to see some of the other resorts we came back we were hot and we'll um we just want to get back in the pool for a while went out the car got our stuff brought it back no one said anything didn't have too much trouble getting back in and changed clothes went in for a dip and we were there until it started getting cool again and had to leave yeah now the other thing they give you is the fastpass system and again this is included in their upper tier hotel and this is where i start to feel like the price of the hotel really warrants uh when you start getting the adding in the perks so you ever there's been a lot made of like the disney genie uh program that's about to erupt and universal has their own fastpass system and basically it allows you uh for a cost to uh come in and jump to the front of the line of pretty much just about every ride at universal studios i can't stress enough how how special of an opportunity it is to be able to avoid all the long lines and just jump to the front of everything and when you stay at one of these higher level hotels that comes complementary couldn't believe it because that's actually a pretty hefty cost to add on to your ticket so that was just complimentary for all of us and that was for the entire term of our stay from day of check-in through the end of day of check out and i just i was very impressed with that what did you think it really made the stay feel like a vacation it made paying me extra money for where we stayed at and everything between the pool i think and the express pass it really made it feel worth it and feel relaxing and and took some of the stress that a lot of times comes with going to a theme park just totally out of the equation yeah i agree with that i mean it was very relaxing and you're right not theme park vacations by nature don't tend to be relaxing because if you're not staying on site and for whatever reason you're off site you're at the howard johnsons and you have to try to figure out how to get into the park and all that it can be maddening and what was so nice here is that we parked our car checked in and never hit the car again until the night we checked out so we were able to just walk to everything we needed to go or take the boat shuttle and it was just so absolutely convenient now that said they do charge parking at the hotel you can't escape that and it is pricey but that's pretty much a standard anymore that's not something you can really escape so georgia tell me a minute a little bit like i just want to like compare because we've stayed at a number of the disney resorts here in orlando as well aren't you just rattle off several that we stayed at and then compare the experience like how you felt did you uh you know which one did you prefer and why oh no i've done the the beach club the yacht club the contemporary the polynesian the grand floridian um the wilderness lodge fort wilderness i've done most of them it's probably easier to list the ones i haven't done if i were to compare what this day felt like the most it would probably be to what's now port orleans i know most of the times when i stay there with dixie landings and the the quiet and the solitude and the really gorgeous grounds you know but as far as like the pool goes except for the the i guess the exception of the beach and yacht club this was the best pool out of all of that type of theme park resort that i've done it's really hard to get better than the beach and yacht club because of the novelty of it it's such a big pool the sandy bottom the little tides and eddies and the way it feels a little bit more like a water park still like for for just beauty of a pool and breath of it this one was really high up there the last few times i've been to disney resort hotels i've frankly been a little disappointed just just a little i mean there's still good hotels but for what you're paying for them i feel like the the the rooms and and such you just feel a little lacking and i did not feel that way here i was i was impressed it was better than i was expecting it to be and i have high standards and um you know right down to like the keurig in the room and something like that and just the way that the you know the bedding the pillows the sheets the quality of materials was very very high yeah that was really nice and one caveat on all this the cafe was really gross are you not saying it was dirty really bad food no it was bad like you're stale cinnamon roll and my really gross burrito didn't work out as well in that sense but you know they have a lot of different things i mean it's it's a cafe but it's like a general store you know that's very common in these resort hotels you get fruit you can get um candy bars you can get like equip the munchies on the go and i will say that i went like late one night and they were actually open at like 1am so god bless them for that being open at 1 am so that for the rest of us poor slobs just getting in but um yeah the food in general if i was doing a straight comparison like disney to universal i still feel like disney's got a little bit more of an advantage on food in general you know right down to like when we were talking about the baked goods the other night the other podcast on horror nights disney's still just doing it a little better they've got a little bit more of a chef team experience there that i think is just working out but the lines getting really close between the two resorts in my opinion as far as quality i think universal is right there and you know when that new one opens up in a few years at epic universe i don't know universal might be top dog in town might be but um the royal pacific absolutely um a thumbs up for me big recommend yeah and with the perks added on of like the the way that the tickets work uh the the quick access shuttle to the specific parts that really helps and it's worth putting out like at disney yes they have shovels too but relatively their shuttles that park is so wide and and massive the shuttle's still you're probably you might very well have to take one shuttle to another shuttle just to get into the park and literally here at universal you can walk to the park if you want it it's wide open for you that way so i was very very pleased and very happy with my stay at the royal pacific i thought i highly recommend it one other thing i might add is that these hotels are relative to the experience that you want i think that's important to say too because they have the hard rock and they have the royal pacific sapphire falls cabana bay beach club and then portofino which is that is kind of like their top top line now the difference being is portofino is really doesn't tend to cater as much to kids it would be kind of like the equivalent of the grand floridian a lot of couples stay there it's a very quiet intimate experience uh conversely hard rock is more of a party atmosphere for adults and also might not be as good for small kids and such the cabana bay beach club tends to be focused very much for kids kind of like a little bit like the all-star disney does because they have the giant pool the very very giant pool but it's a little bit more hectic and chaotic the sheer number of rooms and uh clientele that they cover so i think it's important to do your research here anything else you want to add nope let's wrap it up okay so that's another episode of bounce off that's again a thumbs up for the royal pacific hotel at universal studios orlando you can't go wrong staying there as well as probably any of the resorts in orlando and the universal area okay so until next episode i'm scott ball that's georgia ball and thanks for watching bounce off we'll see you next time

Channel: Bounce Off

Views: 282

Keywords: travel, Orlando, theme parks

Id: _jiVJxHqegk

Length: 31min 42sec (1902 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021