We stayed at Shades from 6/24 until 7/3. We have stayed prob close to a dozen times at this point as we tend to stay 1 or more nights when passing through Orlando or coming to WDW for a trip.
Rooms, prices, hotel, staff, and generally everything we love and that won't change, but the walking path closure is a huge con for us. It felt like we were on an island of sorts. We missed the Disney transportation options, walking paths (where can you go for a decent walk/run at Shades that is a continuing path?), and the additional dining options. While we like SOG dining, it felt limited in contrast with pre-pandemic with a lot of overlap take out menu with the evening Garden Gallery takeout with Evergreens and Manginos.
During this trip we also learned just how much we hate, hate, hate dealing with parking at the TTC. We had a large party and almost everyone traveling with us was not crazy about Shade's buses after our first park day experience using them, so we drove 4 out of 5 days with some of our party using the bus mid-day to get back to the resort for breaks. It did seem as if Shades was running more buses in the a.m. for TTC as they said they would and this was smooth, but didn't seem as if they were running more buses in the evenings and it was a cluster if you stayed past park close. That experience pretty much shut down the option of our party wanting to use SOG buses for the rest of the trip.
I also don't think it was realized just how many people used the monorail and Poly buses. The AK/DHS first or second bus line was crazy long the day we took the other bus to the TTC. Hopefully, they were running more buses there too at rope drop time.
Honestly, I think it's time to separate the AK/DHS bus route.
My next WDW trip is for
MNSSHP and I'm going to stay at Coronado for that one since I'll be by myself for part of the trip. I think we'll probably continue to do split stays with SOG/Disney resorts for annual trips. It does feel "home" to us as we love the resort but it's not the same for us without the walking path on how we like to experience Disney.