Hong Kong Disneyland Review: Our 5.5 Hour Day + Was Premier Access Worth It?

We like Disney, but I wouldn’t say we are massive Disney fans. We’ve been to Disney World in Florida, our son has grown up watching plenty of Disney movies, and obviously we know all the characters. But we’re much more likely to get excited about a good rollercoaster than meeting Mickey Mouse.

So when we planned our trip to Hong Kong with our 9 year old son, Disneyland wasn’t the reason we were going. It was more a case of, well, we’re going to Hong Kong and there’s a Disneyland there. Of course we’re going to spend a day!

We bought Premier Access tickets, rode most of the rides we really wanted to do, wandered through the different themed areas, stopped for lunch and somehow managed to fit a surprising amount into the day.

Then we left at about 3:30pm. Five hours at Disneyland. Who does that?

Apparently us.

We visited in October 2025, and the heat and humidity eventually wore us down to the point where even the promise of World of Frozen couldn’t convince us to stand outside in another queue.

I still have mixed feelings about leaving. We definitely hadn’t finished. We missed rides in Toy Story Land that we wanted to do and our son has still never seen a Disney parade or fireworks show.

But we were also SO relieved to leave.

How to get to Hong Kong Disneyland by MTR

Getting there turned out to be part of the fun. We caught the MTR out to Disneyland and I had somehow completely missed in my research that the final part of the journey is on a special Disney train, which was a super cool surprise!

The Disneyland Resort Line has Mickey-shaped windows, Mickey handholds and little Disney character displays inside the carriages. Even the station is themed.

From Kowloon we took the orange line out to Sunny Bay Station, then switched to the Disneyland Resort Line which took us direct to the theme park. We’d actually planned to arrive a little after opening because we thought we’d avoid the initial rush to get inside. Somehow we ended up arriving fairly early anyway.

The entrance was also our first warning about something that was going to become increasingly important as the day went on. There was very little escape from the sun.

Most people around us had umbrellas for shade and we very quickly realised they were onto something. Once we’d passed through security, we could choose our line carefully and stay mostly in the shade, but the queue outside was completely exposed.

We also watched the family ahead of us get almost to the front before discovering they hadn’t sorted out their tickets and park reservation and being sent over to the ticketing area.

Hong Kong Disneyland currently requires both a valid park ticket and a Park Visit Reservation, so this is definitely something to organise online before you arrive.

If you haven’t bought your tickets yet, you can check current Hong Kong Disneyland tickets on Klook.

It took us roughly 20 to 30 minutes to get inside. If I was going back in hot weather, an umbrella would absolutely be coming with me.

Hong Kong Disneyland Premier Access: Should you buy it?

Most of my research beforehand had been around the rides and Premier Access. We worked out which attractions we particularly wanted to do, downloaded the Hong Kong Disneyland app and spent the weeks before our trip randomly checking wait times at different times and on different days.

Basically, I was stalking Disneyland queues from Australia.

One of the big questions I was trying to answer was whether Premier Access was worth paying for.

For us, it was.

When we visited in October 2025, we paid HK$429 each for the eight-attraction pass. We didn’t use every inclusion, and there were some rides I would have preferred to see included instead, but it saved us a lot of time standing in queues and helped us fit most of the rides we wanted to do into the five and a half hours we ended up spending at Disneyland.

Our pass covered eight attractions: five rides, two gentle boat rides (it’s a small world and Frozen Ever After) and one show (Mickey’s PhilharMagic). We rode all five of the rides, a couple of them twice, but skipped the other three. I’d have preferred a package with more rides, particularly as the Toy Story Land rides weren’t included. Even so, it saved us a lot of time standing in queues and helped us fit most of what we wanted into five hours.

Premier Access options and prices change, and there are different packages depending on how many attractions you want priority access to and whether additional shows or special events are included. So while I would buy the pass we had again for HK$429, I’d check the current options and what’s actually included before deciding.

Other than that, we hadn’t mapped out our day. We knew which rides we wanted to do, but we were mostly going to turn up and figure it out as we went.

For the first little while, we didn’t need to use Premier Access at all. The crowds spread out quite quickly once we were inside, so we joined the normal queues for our first couple of rides and were on within about five minutes.

In hindsight, I probably would have used those short early queues for rides that weren’t included in our pass. That’s probably where the crowd dispersed to… But it did mean we could come back and ride some of those first attractions again later without the long wait.

After the obligatory castle photo, we headed towards Tomorrowland. We were already HOT by this point and couldn’t find anywhere open yet to buy drinks. Eventually we found a drinks and popcorn cart and bought three bottles of very expensive Disney water for something like HK$90.

Desperate times.

Our first Hong Kong Disneyland rides: Hyperspace Mountain, Iron Man and Ant-Man

Our first ride was Hyperspace Mountain.

It’s dark, fast, twisty and much scarier than I was expecting. It seemed to go for ages too.

My husband and son both loved it. Our son thought it was scary, although his bigger complaint was being seated on the side that seemed to lean into most of the turns.

I’m not particularly into Star Wars, so the theming wasn’t the main attraction for me. I was much more interested in trying to see ahead and work out what the rollercoaster was about to do to us (I simultaneously love, well, like and hate rollercoasters).

Next was the Iron Man Experience, and this was one of my favourites of the day. You sit in a moving theatre with 3D glasses and the storyline takes you out of Disneyland and flying above Hong Kong which was very cool from a tourist perspective, getting to see things that we had already experienced like the foreshore and Victoria Peak.

I’d happily have done a version without Iron Man and just gone flying around Hong Kong for a while.

Ant-Man and The Wasp: Nano Battle! was completely different again. You get a laser gun and spend the ride shooting targets and trying to build up your score.

I love the interactive elements of rides like this and the competitiveness that added to the fun. Unfortunately, I was not the winner.

Food at Hong Kong Disneyland

Food was one area where we hadn’t done much research, assuming we could just grab something as we went.

Disney does such a good job of theming everything that we were wandering around trying to work out which buildings were actually restaurants. By lunchtime, the restaurants were also getting busy and seats were hard to find.

We ended up at Royal Banquet Hall.

Our son had a meat lovers pizza combo for HK$150. My husband had pork belly ramen in pork bone soup for HK$160, and I ordered the baked pork chop with rice combo for HK$160.

Mine was actually delicious. The pork was juicy and perfectly cooked.

It was also a huge, hot, heavy meal on a huge, hot, humid day.

I really wanted smaller, lighter lunch options and we struggled to find them. Something simple like a slice of pizza and a drink would have been perfect.

Our total was HK$470, which was about what I expected to pay for theme park food. Expensive, yes, but not shockingly so.

If I was planning the day again, I’d probably spend a little more time looking at the food options beforehand, particularly in hot weather.

Toy Story Land, Mystic Manor and some very welcome water

After lunch we slowed down a little and explored more of the park.

We stumbled across Fairy Tale Forest, which was a nice escape from the busier areas, although once again there wasn’t much shade. There are miniature Disney scenes throughout the gardens, with little interactive elements where you can turn handles and make things move.

Then we wandered into Toy Story Land.

This was probably my favourite area purely for the theming. Everything is oversized so you feel like one of the toys surrounded by giant pieces from a kid’s bedroom. It was really cleverly done.

Unfortunately, we didn’t ride anything there.

Our son was VERY focused on finding the next ride included in our Premier Access, so we kept moving towards Mystic Manor, thinking we’d come back later but we didn’t.

I still wish we’d done the Toy Soldier Parachute Drop.

Mystic Manor is fantastic before you even get inside. The building itself is incredibly detailed and I loved looking around it, although I had absolutely no idea what it was about.

Somewhere along the way I also convinced myself it was going to be a haunted house, so I spent most of the ride suspiciously looking around corners waiting for someone to jump out at me.

Nobody did.

Eventually I relaxed enough to realise this was very obviously not that kind of ride.

It is a really cool ride though. Your vehicle moves through different rooms while artworks and objects come to life around you, with some great special effects.

Possibly even better when you’re not unnecessarily preparing yourself for a jump scare.

By this point, the heat was really starting to get to us, which made Geyser Gulch particularly welcome.

There’s a water play area with a giant tipping bucket and water pistols set up between the buildings so people can spray each other across the area.

On a cooler day I might not have cared much about it. On this day, being able to get wet was brilliant.

And then we found my favourite ride of the day. Big Grizzly Mountain was SO good. It was probably the biggest surprise for me.

It starts fairly tamely and I remember thinking, oh… is this it?

Then you head up a bigger hill and suddenly you’re flying backwards. Fast.

Then it changes again and you’re shooting forwards even faster.

It felt like three different rollercoasters had been stuck together. I loved it.

I’d gone into the day expecting Iron Man or Hyperspace Mountain to be my favourite, but Big Grizzly Mountain beat them both.

The heat eventually won

After Big Grizzly Mountain, we headed towards World of Frozen.

And this is where our Disney day basically ended.

The queues were long by then and we were faced with standing outside in the sun again. We just couldn’t do it.

It wasn’t that Hong Kong being hot and humid had surprised us. We’d already spent several days walking around Hong Kong in that weather.

The problem was that Disneyland didn’t feel particularly well designed for coping with it. There were long exposed sections without much shade, and some queues were outside in direct sun. Even walking between attractions had reached the point where it wasn’t particularly enjoyable anymore.

We were all exhausted.

We could have found an indoor show, sat in the air conditioning for a while and possibly stretched the day out. Looking back, that might have helped break up the day and the heat.

But standing there contemplating another long outdoor queue, we’d had enough.

We had a 10 min air con break wandering through the souvenir shops as we headed for the exit, and we were out.

Did five and a half hours feel like enough?

Yes and no.

We’d ridden the premier pass rides (a couple we rode twice!), eaten lunch, explored the different areas and had a great day. Our son had enjoyed himself too. He was excited about Disneyland, but much more interested in what he could do there than meeting Disney characters, and by mid-afternoon he was hot and tired enough to be completely fine with leaving.

I still felt a little guilty about leaving early and missing the parade, the fireworks and the Toy Story rides we all wanted to try.

In cooler weather, we absolutely would have stayed longer. On that particular day, staying just so we could say we’d had a “full” Disney day wasn’t going to make any of us enjoy it more.

And the rides were excellent. There was enough variety to keep three people who are much more interested in rides than Disney characters very happy, and Big Grizzly Mountain alone was fantastic!

The park was a really manageable size. It didn’t feel overwhelmingly large, we never felt as though we were constantly backtracking, and even when ride queues became long, the walkways themselves didn’t feel particularly crowded.

For us, Hong Kong Disneyland worked really well as one day within a bigger Hong Kong trip. I just wish someone had built a lot more shade.

And next time, I’m bringing an umbrella.