Disney Cruise Line Guest Letter About Stateroom Decorations and Over-the-door Hanging Organizers

Disney Cruise Line Guests will be greeted with the following letter in their staterooms:

Dear Guests,

We are glad that you have joined us aboard the Disney (Choose Ship)!

As you may be aware, it is important to us to keep our facilities looking their best for all our guests.  As part of our commitment to this area of focus, we ask that you do not affix anything to your stateroom door utilizing tape or any adhesive, including removable gel adhesives.  We have found that these adhesives damage the finish on our stateroom doors; therefore we ask that you limit door decoration to those of the magnetic variety.

Concurrently, we ask that guests not use over-the-door hanging organizers as they have been found to scratch and/or disfigure stateroom doors and trim.

Guests found with damaged doors are assessed a $100 damage fee per incident to cover the cost of repairs.

Your attention to this matter will greatly assist us in keeping our shipboard environment looking ship-shape.  Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact Guest Services, Deck 3 Mid-ship.

If interested, magnetic door decorations are available for purchase in our merchandise area.  For your convenience, magnetic strips are also available at Guest Services.

We appreciate your cooperation and hope you have an enjoyable sailing.

Sincerely,

What is the Williams Family “take away” from this letter?  We knew and understood the no adhesive rule for decorating stateroom doors—click here to read more—and had been following that rule since we started decorating our stateroom door.  Yet, still saw guests taping items on their doors or door frames.  The letter is a less confrontational way to remind guests of the rules rather than sending a stateroom steward to remind a guest. 

Having magnet strips available at Guest Services is a nice touch, though it doesn’t say if there is a charge for those strips or not.  If someone sails and obtains magnetic strips from Guest Services, please let me know if there is a fee.  I may want to take advantage of this particular service.

Offering guests the opportunity to purchase magnetic door decorations is also another great idea on Disney’s part.  I haven’t seen the selection but am various curious.  And now the dilemma. . . do we make our own door decorations and bring them with us or wait and purchase on board?

What strikes me as the most unique part of the letter is prohibiting the use of “over-the-door hanging organizers” which can be found as a traveling tip in almost any cruising guidebook to maximize storage space and help organize guest belongings.  We have used an over-the-door hanging shoe organizer for one trip to store toiletries on the top and shoes on the bottom.  Guests needing this type of system will now need to get creative and find a way to hang it in the closet.  Better yet, find a hanging organizer for use in a closet.  While those exist, they are more “shelf” like and would be okay, but the movement of ships and need to store smaller items other than just shoes may open the market for a hanging system ideal for a closet but with more pockets than shelves. 

I appreciate Disney Cruise Line being upfront and proactive by informing guests of the expectations.  I also appreciate how they offer guests an alternative such as being able to purchase door decorations or obtain magnet strips.  As always, Disney Cruise Line is finding ways to enhance the cruising experience which is one of the many reasons we keep coming back.

Have you cruised with Disney recently?  If so, did you receive this letter in your stateroom?

Decorating Your Stateroom Door

As if wearing matching shirts every day while on a Disney vacation isn’t enough to stand out in a crowd, we also decorate our stateroom door while sailing the high seas with Disney.  Please know, we aren’t the only ones, and our door is decorated less intricately than many others. 

To decorate our door, we find images that we like or create images that represent us or our vacation.  Magnets are used to attach the images to the metal door—no tape!  We find magnetic tape that comes in a roll very helpful, but magnets can also be purchased in strips or there is magnetic paper that can go through your printer, then just trim the image with scissors.

Hanging the decorations is one of the first things we do when our stateroom is ready.  I pack the door decorations in our carry-on bag that goes with us onto the ship in the zipper pocket on the inside of the lid.  This way the decorations stay flat.  Unzip, stick, and I’m done.

Some people rotate their decorations or add new daily.  It is fun to walk the corridors of the ship and see the various decorations.  It also makes finding our stateroom easier in a hall where the doors look the same.

Now, back to the “no tape” rule which is a long standing expectation from DCL.  It is my understanding that if a guest uses tape and peels off paint, they will be paying for the paint job.  Well, just a few doors down from us a couple must have been celebrating an anniversary and taped balloons around their doorway.  Those balloons stayed taped the entire cruise.  So, while I don’t recommend using tape to secure decorations and I don’t want to be responsible for paying for a paint job, just know that no one is going to rip the decorations down or ask you to take them down—as far as I know.

On another note, those metal doors sure do come in handy!  We also packed magnetic clips that we hung on the back of the door and on the bathroom door that kept track of lanyards, Navigators, excursion tickets, etc.  Horizontal space is at a premium in a stateroom, so using the magnetic clips to hang and display needed items was a helpful organizational tool.

Made Stateroom Door Decorations for Our Next Cruise

A map of our itinerary!

We are counting down the days until our Holiday Cruise on the beautiful Disney Dream, so I decided to design some decorations for our stateroom door.  Yes, you can decorate your stateroom door—click here to read more.

We use magnets to attach our decorations to our door, as it is metal.  I use the peel and stick magnetic tape on the back of the decorations.

I had fun creating the designs and it is even more fun to see how others have decorated their doors.  It also helps you find your stateroom in a corridor filled with doors that all look the same.

To make our designs I used Word and inserted images as well as word art, changing the font to Waltograph which can be downloaded onto your computer, playing with color, and layering the images.  Since this was done in Word, I had to then take screen shots of the pages, paste them into Paint and convert them to jpeg format for uploading into the blog so you could see.  I was also able to edit the images just like I would a photo.  So, I learned more technology today in making the designs and getting them ready to share in this post.

Our door designs get packed in the carry-on bag that goes onto the ship with us, as I want to get the door decorations on as soon as we get to our stateroom.  The decorations fit nicely into the zipper pocket located on the inside of the bag’s lid or top.

Made one of these for each of us--Donald and Captain Mickey are used for the other designs.

How do you decorate your stateroom door?

Planning Our Next Disney Vacation--Decorating Our Stateroom DoorI

Image of our Disney Cruise Itinerary

We are counting down to our next Disney trip even though we are still in triple digits!  The upcoming Disney vacation will include a 5 night sailing on the beautiful Disney Dream followed by 3 days at Walt Disney World.

One thing we look forward to is decorating our stateroom door on the ship.  Guests are allowed to use magnets to hang pictures, etc. on their stateroom door.  One thing I like to add to our door decorations is a map of our itinerary.  Those same maps can be used in scrapbooks and photo books and can be found and “saved as. . .” from the Disney Cruise Line web-site and is okay to do for personal use. Here's the link where I found mine.

Decorating the stateroom door is a fun way to personalize your stateroom and makes it easier to find in the long corridors lined with stateroom doors.  We found others taking a peek at the various pictures, etc. hung on our door.  And, it was fun for us to see how others had decorated their doors.

Magnetic strips or magnetic tape with peel off backing that stick directly to your decorations work great as the magnets can be cut to size and some guests print images on magnetic sheets.  I attach the magnets before we leave home and pack the decorations in the zipper pocket inside the lid of a carry-on suitcase so we can decorate as soon as we have access to our stateroom.

My favorite part of the map image is the loop at Castaway Cay which represents two stops at Disney Cruise Line’s private island in The Bahamas.  Castaway Cay is a bit of paradise and never fails to amaze and delight.  After our last cruise, our 4^th, we could boast four stops at Castaway Cay, but after this next cruise, hopefully we can say we’ve been to Castaway Cay 6 times!  I say “hopefully” as Castaway Cay is the most often missed port due to wind/weather.  I’m keeping my fingers and toes crossed!

The Disney dreaming continues as plans come to fruition and the days draw closer to our trip.  Yes, I’m definitely much happier with a Disney trip in our future, definitely! 

Click here to read about our stateroom for our next Disney Cruise.

Disney Cruise Line--Did You Know You Can Decorate Your Stateroom Door?

With multiple decks of staterooms with similar doors other than the side of the hall or the number, it can be easy to overlook your stateroom while traversing the hallways on the Disney Cruise Line ships. Magnets. . . and your creativity to the rescue!

The stateroom doors are metal and guests are allowed to decorate using magnets. (No tape allowed.) We have decorated our stateroom door for each of our three cruises. This has helped us locate our stateroom and show off if we are celebrating anything special.

In the photo above, we found balloon cutouts at our local dollar store and decorated them with stickers. One balloon announced who we were, while the other told that we were celebrating a very special birthday. We used magnetic clips, also from the dollar store, to secure them on our door. The magnetic clips can also be used on the other side of the door to hold meal tickets, Personal Navigators, or any other paperwork you want to keep handy. (Horizontal space can be a premium in staterooms, so utilizing vertical storage means more room for everything!)

For this cruise, we used printed photos of us at Disney as part of one display and the other was a map of our itinerary along with dates we were in each port. We used magnetic tape to stick to the back of the photos and then posted them on our door. These were all pre-made prior to our trip, so all we had to do was display them. Voila! We would often discover other guests browsing at our stateroom door. And, we would often take various routes back to our stateroom just to view how other guests had decorated their doors.

So now it is just you, your imagination, and a bit of creativity able to design your own decorations for your stateroom door. I'm already planning for the decorations for our next cruise--using scanned images of things we have received in the mail. We have extra reason to celebrate, as it will be celebrating our anniversary on our next Disney Cruise.