Melia Celebration Orlando - a week of sun and fun in Florida

Our family trips to Florida are some of our favourites. Visiting in October half term when it’s decidedly cold and grey in the UK fills us with happiness. Some sunshine, some autumnal fun and family time always makes this a great trip. On our recent family holiday to Orlando we spent a week at the Melia Celebration Orlando. This medium sized resort gave us a great base to visit the parks and sights of Orlando while giving us plenty of space to relax outside of that.

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Table of Contents

Melia Celebration Orlando – location

The Melia hotel in Orlando is based on the edge of the town of Celebration. This is a town we love – designed by Walt Disney it has an old school America feel.

The hotel is also close to the parks – around 20 minutes from Universal and about 10 minutes from the Disney parks.

Our room

We had one of the resort’s two bedroom suites which was perfect for our family of five.

We had two double bedrooms with really large beds that were very comfortable. The master bedroom also had an en-suite with separate bath and shower and plenty of space.

The bedrooms also had desk areas which our children made good use of as they spent a little time each day revising for exams they had. This gave them plenty of space to have room to focus.

In the centre of the accommodation was the main living area. This had a good sized lounge with large sofa. There was also a kitchen area with big fridge freezer, dishwasher and microwave oven.

All of this provided an amazing amount of space, particularly as the sofa converted easily into a sofa bed in the evening.

We did feel the kitchen could have been a little better equipped with more utensils and supplies. But it didn’t detract from our stay and we loved having the option to cook meals in.

There was plenty of room throughout the apartment to unpack and spread out.

The facilities

The Melia Celebration Orlando had plenty to keep us occupied during our stay.

To start with the pool area here was great. A large horse shoe shaped heated pool we spent many afternoons splashing about here.

There was an area specifically for younger children and lots of things to play with. At times there was a Montessori supervised kids area with crafts occurring which was great to see.

Also within the pool area was a hot tub and also a mini golf area. There were always lots of sun beds with sun umbrellas to enjoy here too.

There is a complimentary bus to the Disney parks which runs once in the morning. This needs to be booked in advance.

Food at Melia Celebration Orlando

There is one restaurant at the Melia, The Wilson. This is open throughout the day for breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner.

Breakfast

Breakfast at The Wilson is largely centred around eggs. There were scrambled, fried and poached eggs available alongside omelettes.

We also enjoyed some pancakes with berries and there was toast, juices and coffee and tea also on offer.

This was a nice spread of food to set us up for the day.

Dinner at The Wilson at the Melia Celebration Orlando

We had an evening meal at The Wilson which was really enjoyable.

The meal began with some starters of tortilla chips and guacamole and a quesadilla.

We had a mixture of main courses including fish and chips, a prawn linguine and a very good grilled mahi mahi.

For dessert we loved the cookie dough skillet and a very nice cheesecake.

Exploring the area around the Melia Orlando

We took a number of trips out from the Melia to explore the local area.

The town of Celebration

Celebration has always been a town we’ve loved and we’ve visited it nearly every time we’ve been in Florida.

Designed by Walt Disney to be the perfect town it has all the elements to make it picture perfect including art deco style cinema, a huge fountain kids can play in and lots of little shops and cafes.

This is somewhere to really enjoy. There are rocking chairs around the lake so you can stop and relax.

The Parks

We love our time at Universal Orlando Resort and we spent a number of days here. We drove ourselves as we had hired a car, and the hotel has a bookable bus too which leaves early in the morning each day.

It was really nice heading to Universal’s CityWalk area – which is free to enter – which has some fantastic restaurants in it too.

Beaches

We loved driving out to some of the nearby beaches. One of our favourites is New Smyrna Beach which is real old school America.

One of the best things we did was head out to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of one of Space X’s rockets. There’s also a very nice sandy stretch of beach here.