Disney Hotel Cheyenne at Disneyland Paris [In-Depth Review]

One of the most fascinating aspects of travel for me, coming from a globally dominant culture, is seeing what pieces of Americana we dismiss as kitsch or lowbrow that other people throughout the world embrace wholeheartedly and without irony (such as the genuine French obsession with Jerry Lewis — yes, that’s a real thing). It’s like looking at oneself in a funhouse mirror.

Something else that the French adore about American culture that we Americans mostly write off as being too cheesy to endure years ago? Anything to do with the Wild West.

A startling number of French people are still enamored with gunslingers, wagon trains, and bank-robbing outlaws with handlebar mustaches decades after American children put away their Howdy Doody, stopped playing cowboys and Indians, and switched from toy rayguns to plastic rayguns.

At Disneyland Paris, one of its more popular hotels plays into that Gallic affection for all things Wild West. It’s an open-air mock-up of an Old West town in hotel form, slotted into the backstory behind the backstory of a couple of the more popular characters from the “Toy Story” movie franchise.

So, during a springtime visit with my family of 3 (2 adults and 1 kindergartener) to visit friends in France, we spent 2 days at Disneyland Paris and 1 night at Disney Hotel Cheyenne in Coupvray.

Booking Disney Hotel Cheyenne

I paid for our stay at Disney Hotel Cheyenne using my Chase Sapphire Reserve^®, which earned me 3x points on this travel purchase. I bought the smallest vacation package: 1 night at the hotel and 2 days’ worth of passes to the Disneyland Paris parks, without the park-hopping option. (If I’d just paid for 2 days’ worth of park tickets around this time, it would’ve cost me between $182 and $235 per day for each adult, or $168 to $216 per kid.)

During the booking process, Disneyland Paris offered a meals add-on starting from €34.12 (about $37) per child from 3 to 11 and €62.55 (about $68) per adult that would’ve covered meals at both the park and the hotel, but I declined.

Of course, you might think it would’ve made sense to book this hotel with the Disney^® Premier Visa^® Card or Disney^® Visa^® Card, which both grant perks like 10% off select dining, 15% off guided tours, and special photo ops at Disney parks. However, those benefits only apply to U.S. parks, not Disneyland Paris.

Figuring the hotel room was really only a place to lay our heads for a few hours between park days, I reserved a no-frills standard room, which came with a pullout bed for our child.

I paid $11.82 in local taxes on top of the $966.81 I shelled out for the room and tickets, earning 2,900 Chase Ultimate Rewards points.

Hot Tip:

Fortunately, there are ways to reduce the cost of your Disneyland Paris trip, or at the very least, earn some valuable points or cash-back on your spending with the best credit cards for Disney and Universal vacations.

Location of Disney Hotel Cheyenne

Disney Hotel Cheyenne is in the town of Coupvray near Disneyland Paris in Chessy, France. It’s an eastern suburb of Paris about 35 minutes by car or commuter train from central Paris. To get there, we took the Réseau Express Régional A, better known as the RER A, to Marne-La-Vallée Chessy. From zone 1 in central Paris to Disneyland Paris, an RER A ticket cost €5.50 (about $6) for an adult, and was half fare for children 4 to 10 (kids under 4 ride free).

Most of the Disney hotels were on a back road near the parking lot of Disneyland Paris, and this hotel was one of the farther ones. Although technically in a different town than the park, you could easily get there by foot.

It was still quite close to the park, which was a nice change of pace from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where guests are accustomed to taking a combination of buses, monorail, Skyliner gondolas, and ferry boats to get to the more far-flung Disney resorts there.

Disney Hotel Cheyenne was a 20-minute walk or so to the park, though the sidewalks weren’t especially wide, well-marked, or well-maintained.

The Disney hotel buses ran from the bus depot to the hotels every 12 minutes from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., 7 days a week, and each hotel had its own stop.

The buses were clean, safe, and efficient, and anyone who’s stayed at a Disney hotel in Orlando would have recognized them instantly.

The Disney bus depot butted up right against the train station, so it was an easy transfer from Paris via RER to the Disney bus to the hotel and vice versa. The entrance to the parks and Disney Village was right on the side of the train station.

Checking In

After a mildly complicated trip via RER C and RER A from our friends’ place in Versailles (west of Paris) into the city and then back out of the city to the eastern suburb of Chessy, we left the SNCF station (SNCF is short for “Société nationale des chemins de fer français,” the state-owned railway company), hopped on the bus for Disney Hotel Cheyenne and were at the hotel within minutes.

The bus didn’t stop directly in front of the hotel, but it was a brief stroll along the sidewalk to reach the check-in area.

Reception was in the main building, which was also home to the Chuck Wagon Cafe, the hotel’s gift shop, and Starbucks.

It was still before noon, so the plan was to leave our luggage at the hotel and hop on the bus to make the most of the day at the park. The amiable check-in agent, who was fluent in English, knew exactly what we were up to and made it easy for us. She immediately checked us in and handed me a folder with a hotel map and 2 key cards.

It was too early to assign us a room, but she said the hotel would send me a message through the Disneyland Paris app when it was ready to let us know what room we’d been assigned.

I’d already downloaded our park passes through the app that morning, so we didn’t need those from the hotel.

The hotel offered a complimentary luggage drop-off service (and no one expected a tip, because this was France), so I dropped off our bag, got our tag, and we were on our way to Disneyland Paris.

We spent the entire day (and night) at Disneyland Paris, returning to the hotel around midnight. I never received a message with our room confirmation, as the hotel implied I would, so I asked an agent at the front desk when we returned late into the evening. We had been assigned room 2530 and made our way to our room, at one of the farther ends of the hotel property, to get some sleep.

Amenities

Lobby Activities

The lobby was the hub of activity at the hotel, and there was lots of seating, much of which was occupied by families during the day. To one side was a small area for kids, a semicircle of seats made of miniature saddles that faced a TV screen showing Disney TV shows while a bored-looking staff member sat nearby and handed out coloring pages.

Theming

Disney’s the master of theming, and it was no different at the Disney Hotel Cheyenne.

The first thing you saw as you approached the main entrance to the lobby was a stagecoach under the portico, with images of people who looked a lot like Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley as the passengers. (Hickok and Oakley reportedly met, but it was Calamity Jane who was his close companion and possibly wife and mother of his child.)

Even the mailbox was thematically appropriate, fashioned out of a saddlebag.

The hotel buildings themselves did an admirable job of making the property look like it was inhabited by Western buildings of various sizes and functions, like make-believe facades for a bank, stables, town hall, and so on. The building labeled “saloon” really was the bar, and the “general store” was the hotel shop.

Each side of the property had open space with structures like a Middle America-style gazebo or a large fire pit

Pixar’s Woody, Jessie, and Bullseye were clearly the stars of the show here, though, and were on everything. They even busted out of an old-school boxy TV at the entrance to the restaurant.

Character Meets

Unsurprisingly, the meet and greets involved Woody and Jessie, too, and a line formed every morning in the lobby for these character interactions. We saw Jessie pop in to wave hello at breakfast, too.

No Bullseye. I suppose prancing around on all fours in a horse costume for nearly 3 hours every day isn’t a popular acting gig in Chessy.

Playgrounds

There was 1 major playground on the property that we didn’t discover until just before we left, and I wish we’d found it earlier because it was right in my kid’s wheelhouse. The stairs to the top of the watchtower were roped off, but the rest of it — the wooden palisades, the play locomotive, and all the rest of it — was exactly the right kind of setting for an active 6-year-old to work off energy.

Hidden in another copse on the property was a ring of tipis. I didn’t get the sense that the French are currently undergoing the same self-evaluation about depictions of Native American culture as we are in the U.S. (and at Disneyland Park in California).

Both the fort and the tipis were devoid of people when we visited them.

Trails

The hotel map boasted about the number of nature trails throughout the property. We didn’t have time to walk any, but they seemed small, sedate, and about as wild as the shortcuts we take to get to soccer classes in the parks in New York City.

Shop

You can’t have a Disney park without the merchandise. The hotel’s “general store” was full of the Disney products you’d expect, with an emphasis, naturally, on the “Toy Story” Pixar characters of Woody and Jessie.

Room

All of the guest room buildings were named after famous Old West figures, such as Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Sitting Bull, and so on. Our room was in Geronimo.

We were on the first floor of the 2-story building, all the way toward the back. It was about midnight by the time we came in, so it was unsurprising that the porch and hallway were quiet. There were chairs and small tables on the porch and at the base of the stairs inside. The table outside, of course, was made from a wooden barrel.

Our key cards worked effortlessly, and we slid into the room.

Our room number was blazoned on a sheriff’s badge.

The room looked exactly like the picture on the website, except that the ceiling fan was on when we entered. The wallpaper was a wood print, the cover and pillows were cow prints, and Woody, Jessie, and Bullseye were everywhere, watching everything you did.

Everything.

The pullout bed came out easily from the bed, but I, being a furniture genius who somehow didn’t understand the derivation of the word “pullout,” tried to basically deconstruct the couch before realizing I could just, y’know, pull it out.

Both beds were reasonably comfortable, but we were all so exhausted from 2 straight days of traveling and a full day at the park that the mattresses probably could’ve been made of concrete, and we would’ve gotten a full 8 hours of sleep or more.

The room came with 2 water bottles of the French brand Vittel on a side table by the closet.

The desk held a coffee maker and Lavazza coffee pods and creamers — and more than 2 of them. It actually also had teabags, which I almost never see in U.S. hotels anymore.

The coffee was also somehow richer and more enjoyable than the pod coffees of any brand in hotel guest rooms I can remember, though, again, maybe that was just the travel exhaustion. It even came with a carafe for a more civilized coffee service.

The hotel closet was wedged between the room door and the connecting door and had plenty of hangers and, surprisingly, a fold-up children’s playpen. I’d marked down our son as 6, obviously too old for a playpen, but it was great that a room in such a family-focused property came equipped with one.

The room was rather dimly lit, but at midnight, we didn’t really care.

Bathroom

The bathroom was, like the bedroom, rather dimly lit and had a sole sink despite the counter having enough space for 2. It was a bare-bones but functional affair that brought to mind Disney’s Pop Century Resort and Disney’s Art of Animation Resort in Orlando.

The theming, surprisingly, carried into the bathroom, with faux-wood paneling around the bathtub and horseshoe patterns on the shower curtain.

The water pressure was decent, and there was plenty of hot water, though getting the right temperature took fiddling.

The “Toy Story” branding even continued with the shampoo and conditioner.

Throughout the hotel, both in public spaces and in our room, I came across examples of shoddy workmanship, half-done screws, chipped plaster, hastily glued-on repairs, and so on. None of it seemed unsafe, mind you, but compared to Disney World or Disneyland in the U.S., where this kind of sloppiness would summon the wrathful ghost of Walt Disney himself, it was hard not to notice.

There was sloppy caulking around the fixtures, ill-fitting pieces, and patches that needed maintenance.

When I first entered the bathroom, I couldn’t even close the door at first, as the metal bar that I suppose was the bottom rail was so loose it had shimmied partly off the door. The door could close once I slid the bar back into place.

Food and Beverage

The Disney Hotel Cheyenne had 1 restaurant, 1 bar, and 1 Starbucks. It was a whirlwind trip to Chessy, though, so I only had the chance to review the restaurant.

Chuck Wagon Cafe

I’d declined the Disney meal plan, knowing of the park’s reputation for its food (not great) and thinking we might be able to find a local place to eat instead, but a) the hotel was in a geographic Disney bubble that meant eating anywhere else without a car was impractical, and b) everyone but me slept in late and woke up famished.

So we sauntered into the restaurant relatively late and partook of the buffet.

The Chuck Wagon Cafe, a buffet restaurant, is open for breakfast from 7 to 10 a.m and charges €21 (about $23) for adults and €14 (about $15) for children off the meal plan. It’s also open for lunch from 12:30 to 3 p.m. and dinner from 6 to 10:30 p.m., though the listed prices then were €40 (about $43) for adults and €22 (about $24) for kids.

The Disneyland Paris website and app both urged us to make reservations to eat here, but we were seated immediately as walk-ins, perhaps because we arrived an hour before closing. The restaurant was still busy, though.

There were actual wagons as tables, but we were seated at a regular table for 4.

The buffet was lightly themed as a wagon train-style campfire cookout, with foods ladled out not from chafing dishes or food-service pans but cast iron pots, antique-looking baking pans, and baskets.

I don’t know if they were included because of the whole cowboy thing or because a lot of the guests are probably Brits, but there was a big pot of Heinz-style baked beans along with streaky bacon, scrambled eggs, and potatoes.

And, of course, the bread baskets were on gingham tablecloth, brimming with croissants, pains au chocolat, and rolls. There were also several cheeses, naturally.

There was also a station for boiling eggs to your own preference, but even the eggs that seemed to have been abandoned in the lukewarm were obviously undercooked, and a kitchen employee warned away a couple of tweens who seemed eager to have a go at soft-boiling their oeufs.

More popular was a machine that allowed you to make your own pancakes by pouring the batter in on one end, watching through a window as a conveyor belt conducted your batter through a heating element, and then plopping out a cooked circle on the other end.

I found the pancakes way too sweet and gummy, though, and I only had a bite.

All in all, the food, from the cured salmon to the croissants, was fine and provided us with enough calories to get through another day in a Disney park. And there was a lot of it. On par with the food at other Disney properties around the world, this was mostly a quantity-over-quality calculation. As you might imagine, the restaurant was at its best with its baked goods, though none of it surpassed a morning visit to any neighborhood boulangerie anywhere in Paris.

That hefty price, of course, also went toward the theming, which included the expected miniature Mickey waffles and Mickey pound cake. (I still can’t figure out how they got that pattern in there.)

Red Garter Saloon

Late at night, I popped my head into the Red Garter Saloon, off the lobby and through a hallway between the restaurant and the general store, to find a handful of guests nursing drinks. It would’ve been considered too brightly lit for an American bar at midnight, but I did look in right before closing time. The bar was open from 4 p.m. to midnight.

I didn’t have a drink here.

Starbucks

On the other side of the hotel shop from the lobby was a Starbucks. In case you’re unfamiliar with the brand, Starbucks isn’t a French company but, in fact, a U.S. coffee chain that has expanded to over a dozen locations (!) since its humble beginnings as a java joint in Seattle’s Pike Place Market in the early 1970s, according to my research.

I’m just kidding, you know exactly what this place looked like inside and what was in there.

Service

The service was good at the Disney Hotel Cheyenne. Most of the customer-facing staff were friendly and helpful and spoke excellent English. Many of the rest of the hotel employees, I noticed, did not speak English, as opposed to almost everywhere else in Disneyland Paris, so there was a lot of gesticulating instead of verbal communication in those interactions.

In a weird contrast to the shopworn condition of the property’s structures, the service almost seemed to try to make up for the scuffs and occasional signs of disrepair with constant activity.

For example, the public bathrooms in the lobby weren’t just serviced constantly, they were serviced continuously. We never visited the public bathrooms (and we visited at all times of the day) without seeing cleaning staff in there, making the place immaculate. Since both male and female staff tended to the men’s room, it led to a couple of awkward moments at the urinals (on our part — the staff didn’t seem to care). But it did mean that the lobby men’s bathroom was always spotless when we went to use it.

That said, I never got the message informing me when our room was ready or what room we were assigned. It didn’t affect our plans, since we came back so late anyway, but I never found out whether the staff forgot to assign us a room till we returned, if the staff neglected to send the message that had been promised, or if there was some sort of technical glitch.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to sum up a hotel property after only a few hours of staying there, but the Disney Hotel Cheyenne was a fun property that I wish we could’ve spent a few more hours exploring — particularly outside.

The staff did an admirable job keeping up appearances, but for it to continue being such a popular stay for Disneyland Paris guests, it needs to work on a thorough refurbishment that pays more attention to details.