Aulani Room Review – Deluxe Studio

When booking our Aulani room for our honeymoon, it really felt like buying into DVC was a great choice. We got six nights in an Island Garden view Deluxe Studio for less than our annual points allotment! While we spent most of our week beach-side, let me tell you about the room that served as our temporary home.

Room Options

Aulani offers a LOT of room options. For DVC rooms, guests can reserve a Deluxe Studio (4 adults), a 1 Bedroom Villa (5 adults), a 2 Bedroom Villa (9 adults), or a 3 Bedroom Grand Villa (12 adults) with either a Standard or Ocean View. The Deluxe Studio, 1 Bedroom, and 2 Bedroom also offer Island Garden and Poolside views.

Aulani also offers non-DVC hotel rooms and suites with a variety of bed, capacity, and view options. You can see them all here! As a reminder, the biggest differences between DVC rooms and standard hotel rooms are that DVC rooms offer some level of kitchen/living space (with the larger rooms offering full kitchens, separate living rooms, and even washers/dryers) but they don’t have daily Mousekeeping.

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Room Location

Like I mentioned above, Ben and I stayed in a Deluxe Studio with an Island Garden view. Our room was located on the first floor of the Ewa tower (to learn more about Ewa themeing, click here!). We were situated in the furthest room from the lobby. While this room did have some handy advantages (like easy access for bathroom breaks and forgotten items), I do wish we had requested an upper-floor room (like Ben suggested when we were told we would be on the first floor).

Our patio opened up to a cute garden of leafy green plants, but we faced a wall about six feet away. Not a lot of island to see there…

That said, being furthest from the lobby meant being closest to the beach and the main pool area. We were also right next to ‘Ama ‘Ama, which unfortunately meant we could frequently hear pretty audible music and sometimes machinery running from our room — for better or worse. At night, the room was mercifully silent.

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The lesson here is to not be afraid to speak up and ask for what you want. Sure, it’s possible Disney could have denied our request, but the answer is “no” to 100% of the requests never made.

Aulani Room Layout

For two people, the Deluxe Studio offers a lot of space to spread out. The main area of the room had a queen bed, pull-out sleeper sofa (which we kept in couch mode), table with two chairs, dresser, and television. I found it odd that the couch didn’t face the TV, but it wasn’t a problem for our two-person trip. If this was a future trip with kids, I guess we’d have to pile on the bed for a movie.

The bathroom was off the entry hallway across from a closet and kitchenette. The sink and shower area was separated from the toilet by a sliding wooden door. There was another sliding wooden door to close the bathroom off from the rest of the room.

The kitchenette came stocked with some silverware, glasses, and plates (as well as a few kitchen utensils, including a wine key!). It also had a sink with dish soap and a sponge, coffee maker, microwave, and mini fridge (with freezer) , too.

The Television

Aulani is behind WDW in that it doesn’t offer MagicBands and is behind both mainland parks in not even having its own app. It felt strange to have to collect information about the resort from a variety of locations (including a daily paper schedule of events). The television in the room did have some neat features, though.

From when we entered our Aulani room, the television displayed a personalized welcome message — and it was surprisingly nice to see that every day with my new, married name! The TV also had some on demand features and offered a way for guests to view their PhotoPass photos.

The TV came hooked up to a blu-ray player. If you don’t want to schlep movies out to Hawaii, don’t worry! Guests can borrow two films at a time from the resort library — for free!

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Aulani Room Theming

The beautiful, tropical decor of Aulani bleeds into guest rooms seamlessly. The rich woods and whimsical decor reminds guests from the moment they open their eyes to the second their heads hit their pillows that they are in paradise.

The surfer Mickey lamp (available for purchase in the gift shop), fish painting in the bathroom, and fish carving on the door made me think of the gorgeous ocean that was just steps away, even when I couldn’t see it! The Mickey made of towels was too cute to dismantle, even for a whole week! Indoors and outdoors was connected by hardwood floor hallways and brightly-colored wallpaper that even snuck in some hidden Mickeys along the way!

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Even though the room location wasn’t perfect, Ben and I loved our stay at Aulani. Now, you’ve probably noticed that this post doesn’t have a ton of photos in the room. I considered pretending it wasn’t the case, but the truth is that the photos I swear I took of the room just didn’t seem to make it home with me. I hope my description did the room justice, but if you have any questions, I’d love to hear from you! (I’ll also let you know if any of the room photos from Disney are different from what we saw.)