When we travel, we always try to keep our luggage to a minimum. We also like to stay comfortable and prepared. One of our tricks for packing small but having a big trip to Disneyland Resort is doing laundry during our visit. This way, we can pack half as many outfits and simply wash them partway through our visit. Keep reading for our tips on doing laundry at Disneyland including links to helpful products.
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Here are our top five tips for doing laundry during your Disneyland visit.
Pick a Disneyland Area Hotel with a Guest Laundry Room
Be sure to check with the particular hotel you are considering, but we have found that most hotels directly around Disneyland Resort have laundry rooms for guest use. This includes the three Disneyland Resort Hotels.
The laundry rooms at the Disneyland Resort Hotels take credit cards and use an app to help you pay for and track your laundry loads. You will need your room key to enter these laundry rooms.
Bring Your Own Detergent
We know we said that we like to keep our luggage to a minimum, be we actually do bring our own laundry soap with us to Disneyland.
Most laundry rooms (including the ones at the Disneyland Resort Hotels) do have product vending machines. However, we have found that new laundry detergent can easily cause skin irritation or trigger unexpected allergies, so we like to stick to products we use at home. That way, we avoid new perfumes or other ingredients, and we also end-up saving some money.
We still keep things light by buying soap pods like these to use in the machines instead of carrying large containers of liquid or powder detergent in our luggage. We bring just enough pods for the number of loads we expect to do.
One additional tip and warning for families with small kids: we do keep these soap pods in our locked travel medicine bag (we have one like this), because there are cases of young children mistaking these pods for candy.
Bring a Laundry Bag
Again, we acknowledge that we are adding another item to your Disneyland packing list, but we really do think a laundry bag is worth the space. Plus, we use a thin laundry bag which barely takes any space at all.
We have used disposable garbage bags as laundry bags in the past, but they always seem to end-up ripping, and we hate causing more waste. A nice travel laundry bag is easier to carry, and it keeps our hotel room so much neater as we toss dirty clothes in there each evening. At the end of the trip, the bag keeps dirty clothes separated from clean in our luggage. For these last two reasons, we now bring our laundry bag on trips even if we do not plan on doing laundry while we are traveling.
We swear by the laundry bag we got in this three pack, and we use the other two items to keep both our luggage organized and our stroller neat. We use the clean/dirty cube to bring a change of clothes into the parks for our kids. This looks like the same laundry bag without the two extra bags, in case that is what you prefer.
Be Prepared For Unexpected Laundry
Whether we are planning to do laundry or not, we always bring a couple of travel packs of no-rinse laundry soap for hand washing items during our visit. Using this on clothes in our hotel room sink has helped us avoid ketchup stains or given us an extra day of fresh clothes in a pinch, and we always bring some now.
Plan for Laundry Time
We advise planning a time in advance for doing your laundry.
We know that we never actually want to do laundry after a fun day at Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure Park. Instead we plan to do laundry on one of our “rest days”. If you are making a visit to Anaheim part of a larger Southern California trip, you can also plan to do laundry at the beginning or end of the Disneyland portion of your vacation.
Thank you for reading our tips on doing laundry at Disneyland. We hope that you found them helpful.
For tips on what clothing to pack, please see:
- What to Wear to Disneyland: Part I, Base Layers
- What to Wear to Disneyland: Part 2, Cold or Wet Weather
- What to Wear to Disneyland: Part 3, Shoes
- How To (Comfortably) Dress Like a Princess in Disneyland
We mentioned that all of the Disneyland Resort Hotels have laundry rooms available to guests. For help choosing your hotel, we have 5 Excellent Ways to Choose a Disneyland Resort Hotel. We also have information on other hotels like the Best Western Plus across the street from Disneyland or the nearby Howard-Johnson (both have laundry rooms as well). To get future advice in your inbox, please subscribe below. Thanks again for reading.