Vacation Homes Near Disney That Sleep 20 or More

The Orlando rental market is built around groups of six to eight. Once your party passes about twelve people, the search gets much harder — and the usual answer is to book two smaller houses on opposite sides of a subdivision, which defeats the point of travelling together.

Our three Kissimmee homes were bought to solve exactly that. Magical Retreat sleeps 24 across seven bedrooms and five and a half baths. Sunset Isle sleeps 22 in seven bedrooms. Knight Castle — the original, bought in 2005 and the house the business grew from — sleeps 20 across seven bedrooms and four and a half baths.

The number everyone searches on is bedrooms, but the number that decides whether a big group trip feels civilised is bathrooms. Twenty people sharing two showers on a 7am rope-drop morning is a genuinely bad start to the day.

That's why our large houses run four and a half to five and a half baths. As a rule of thumb, look for at least one bathroom per four guests if you're trying to get a large group out the door at the same time — and check whether the count includes half baths, which don't help at all in the morning.

"Sleeps 24" can mean twelve real beds, or it can mean eight beds plus sofa beds and an airbed in a loft. The two are very different trips, particularly if the sofa beds are in the living room where the group congregates at night.

Before booking any large home, ask for the bed configuration room by room. You want to know how many bedrooms have king or queen beds, how many are bunk rooms, and whether any of the advertised capacity is in shared living space. For a multi-family group it also determines something socially awkward if you leave it late: who gets a real bedroom and who doesn't.

Every one of our homes has a private or communal pool, a game room, and air conditioning; most have a hot tub, and several have a home theater. Those aren't luxuries so much as the things that make a rest day work — on a seven-day trip with children, you will not spend seven days in the parks, and the down day has to happen somewhere.

The kitchen does the heaviest lifting. Feeding twenty people three meals a day in the parks is a significant cost; cooking breakfast at the house and a few dinners changes the budget more than any other single decision on the trip.

There are only so many seven-bedroom houses within fifteen minutes of Walt Disney World, and they are the first thing to go for school holidays, spring break, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. A group of twenty has very little flexibility to shift dates once flights are booked.

If your dates are fixed by a school calendar or a family reunion, treat the house as the first booking you make rather than the last.