For years the Anaheim Resort Transportation buses ran a loop that most visitors never had to think about: you booked a hotel on Harbor Boulevard, you bought a wristband, you got on. That system is gone. What has grown up in its place is a set of separate services that happen to cover overlapping ground, and two of them will refuse to sell you a ticket if you booked the wrong hotel. Working out which bus is yours belongs at the start of the trip planning, not the end.
What replaced ART, and why it matters before you book
ART was a network. What replaced it is a set of closed clubs plus a public bus. Two hotel-cluster shuttles are restricted to guests of specific named properties. A theme-park parking shuttle will take anyone with a parked car. One hotel runs its own bus and always did. The county bus service, which nobody advertises to visitors, is by some distance the cheapest way along Harbor Boulevard. Rideshare absorbs everything the others cannot, at a price that climbs sharply at exactly the moment everybody wants it.
So a hotel's distance from the gates is no longer the only number that matters. A property fifteen minutes' walk away with a bus can be an easier stay than one ten minutes away without one. If you are still choosing where to sleep, read this before you filter by price on a Los Angeles hotel search.
Four convention-centre hotels and one bus
HMR Bus — Anaheim Resort Campus Shuttle (Anaheim Resort, around the convention centre) is the service most write-ups still describe incorrectly, usually by listing hotels it does not serve. It serves exactly four. The Sheraton Park Hotel at the Anaheim Resort is the first stop; the Hilton Anaheim, the Anaheim Marriott and the Clarion Hotel Anaheim Resort are then collected from a shared pickup point at the Marriott. That is the whole route. If your booking is not one of those four, no amount of standing at the stop will change that.
The buses are 28-seaters, wheelchair accessible, and run 365 days a year from 7:00am until thirty minutes after park close, dropping at the hotel shuttle boarding area on S Harbor Blvd. Fares are per head: $6 for an adult day pass, $4 for seniors 65 and over, $3.50 for children aged 3 to 10, and under-2s free. You can buy online, scan the QR code in your hotel lobby, or pay as you board. There is no group booking process to negotiate, so a convention block of forty people simply buys forty passes. All sales are final, so do not buy three days of passes on arrival day and then decide to drive.
For couples and small groups staying at those four hotels, it removes the single most tedious part of the day, which is the walk back at closing time with tired legs. For families, the child fare makes it cheaper than a single rideshare hop in each direction.
The Garden Grove cluster runs its own three routes
Grove District Transit (the Garden Grove hotel cluster, west of the resort) launched on 31 March 2026, run by the City of Garden Grove together with its Tourism Improvement District. It is built for families and hotel groups, and riding is restricted to guests of the participating hotels: you show a room reservation to buy a pass.
Three routes cover the cluster. One links the Residence Inn, the Sheraton Garden Grove and Great Wolf Lodge. The second covers the Delta, Anaheim Marriott Suites and Homewood Suites. The third takes in the Embassy Suites, the Hilton Garden Inn and the Hampton Inn. Service runs from 7:15am to 12:45am at roughly half-hourly intervals, the buses are ADA accessible, and the operator's site carries a live bus map, worth having open on your phone rather than guessing at a stop.
Passes are $7 for a day of unlimited riding and $21 for three days, with under-3s free. Set against a sixteen-hour operating span, that is the better value of the two hotel shuttles for anyone planning a late evening, and the 12:45am finish is later than anything else on this list. The restriction is the same as with the convention-centre bus, and it is absolute: if your hotel is not on one of those three routes, you cannot buy a pass at any price.
The park kept its parking shuttle in-house
When ART stopped, the Disneyland Resort did not lose its own transport, because it never depended on ART for the satellite car park. The Disneyland Resort Toy Story Parking Area shuttle (Anaheim, off Harbor Boulevard south of the resort) is operated by Mosaic Global Transportation, the same contractor that runs the resort's cast-member buses. It carries an unlimited number of riders, being the park's own mass-transit link rather than a boutique service. It is free with Toy Story lot parking, though the parking itself is charged separately.
It takes wheelchairs and scooters. Strollers must be folded before boarding, which is worth knowing before you arrive with a loaded double buggy and a queue behind you.
This is a shuttle for people who drive. If you have a car, because you flew into an airport and rented one or because you are coming down from the city for the day, parking at the Toy Story lot and taking the bus in is the most dependable of the resort-area options, and it is the fallback if your hotel has no shuttle at all. You cannot walk up to it from a hotel and ride.
One hotel never lost its bus
Anaheim Majestic Garden Hotel (Anaheim, east of the resort) runs the Dream Machine Shuttle, which came through the ART shutdown untouched because it was never an ART hotel in the first place. It is a dedicated six-to-ten minute run to the Disneyland esplanade, roughly every thirty minutes, free for guests.
Before 2026 this was a pleasant extra. Now it is a reason to book the hotel. It is also genuinely group-friendly in a way the paid cluster shuttles are not obliged to be: large family blocks and youth-sports groups are the property's core trade, and the bus is sized around them. Couples get the same benefit incidentally. The trade-off is location. You are further out than the Harbor Boulevard strip, and walking is not a realistic alternative if the bus is full, so check the shuttle's last run against your park-close plans.
The two-dollar spine along Harbor Boulevard
OC Bus, run by the Orange County Transportation Authority, is the piece most visitor guides skip, and it is now the budget backbone of the whole resort area. Route 43 runs the length of Harbor Boulevard to a stop about two minutes' walk from the gates, with routes 47, 50 and 543 filling in around it. There is no restriction of any kind: no hotel list, no reservation, no wristband.
Fares are $2 per ride, capped at $4.50 a day with a Wave card, or $5 a day paying with contactless. The Wave card itself costs $2. One change catches people out: paper day passes were withdrawn in April 2026, so it is Wave card or contactless only. If you are travelling with children old enough to have their own fare, sort the cards out on arrival day rather than at a stop with a bus pulling in.
In practice this suits couples, solo travellers and small groups. There are no luggage racks and no reservations, so a party of eight with suitcases will have a miserable time; a party of two with day bags will spend $4.50 each and think the whole ART question was overblown.
Rideshare and the hour after fireworks
Uber (resort-wide, same pickup points as before) is the non-partner alternative, and it is worth stating plainly what it costs rather than recommending or dismissing it. A local hop within the resort area runs roughly $15 to $30. From LAX, expect around $70 to $120, and more when surge is running. UberXL takes six, and Uber Car Seat exists for young children; anything larger than six means multiple cars and the coordination problem that comes with them.
The weak point is the window after the evening fireworks, when several thousand people want a car within the same fifteen minutes. This is precisely the demand ART used to absorb, and its removal is felt most here. Three things help: check whether your hotel shuttle runs until thirty minutes after close, in which case use it; walk a few minutes clear of the designated pickup zone before requesting; or wait out the first half hour somewhere with a seat, by which time prices have settled.
Getting in from the airport
Karmel Shuttle, trading as Karmel Connect (Anaheim-based), is the operator most hotels now point at, and the strongest group option on this list for capability rather than price. It runs private vans, SUVs, mini-coaches and 23- or 55-seat coaches, plus hourly charter, and covers LAX, John Wayne and the harbour cruise terminals, with runs out to Universal and the Catalina ferry. Shared LAX to Anaheim service is around $120 per person; a private van for up to nine is around $209; coach charter is quoted. Reservations are required at least 48 hours ahead, which makes it a plan-in-advance option and never a walk-up one.
LAX FlyAway (from the airport) is the cheap first leg for anyone willing to make a connection. It is walk-up with no reservation, has proper hold luggage space, and handles medium groups well. Posted fares run $9.75 to $12.75 one way and vary by route, so check the board before boarding. Only the Union Station and Van Nuys routes still run; two others were cut and have not come back. For Anaheim the pattern is FlyAway to Union Station, then Metrolink or the Surfliner south.
LA Metro matters for the city half of any trip and is now reachable from the airport: the LAX/Metro Transit Center opened in June 2025 with a free shuttle to the terminals. Fares are $1.75 a ride, capped at $5 a day and $18 over seven days with TAP. A TAP card costs $2, and because the cap applies per card, every traveller in your party needs their own TAP or contactless card. One caution: the SkyLink people mover was still in testing and not carrying passengers in 2026, so plan around the free shuttle and treat SkyLink as a bonus if it happens.
The cheap way down from the city
FlixBus (kerbside near Union Station) is the least expensive scheduled link between the city and Anaheim, at roughly $6 to $15 one way, about six departures a day, and around 85 minutes end to end. Reserved seats mean groups can sit together. The warning is about the stop rather than the bus: boarding is kerbside with no waiting room, and the Union Station stop is a car park across the road from Patsaouras Plaza, not the plaza itself. Arrive with time to find it, and do not stand in the plaza waiting for a coach that will never enter it. If you are building the city end of the trip around this, the Los Angeles guide covers what is worth the daylight hours before you head south.
Practical notes
Decide the shuttle question at booking. The two hotel-cluster services are closed to non-guests, so a room at a participating property is effectively a transport purchase. If you are not in either cluster, your realistic pairing is OC Bus by day and rideshare late, or a car plus the Toy Story lot shuttle.
You need a Wave card or contactless for OC Bus and a TAP or contactless card for Metro, one per traveller, since fare caps do not pool. HMR sells passes online, by lobby QR code or onboard; Grove District requires a room reservation at the point of sale. Karmel needs 48 hours' notice. Nothing here rewards leaving it to the morning.
On timing, Grove District runs latest, to 12:45am. HMR stops thirty minutes after park close. Rideshare pricing peaks in the twenty minutes after fireworks and eases afterwards. Build your evening around whichever of those three applies to you.
A couple riding OC Bus spends about $9 a day between them. A family of four on the Grove District three-day pass spends $84 for the stay. A shared airport transfer for two costs roughly double a FlyAway-plus-rail connection but removes a change with luggage. All three are defensible; the mistake is assuming a bus will be there because there used to be one.
