Is it possible to to go Disney World without breaking the bank? Should you even try?

If it were up to me, all my family’s vacation time and money would be spent in the mountains, preferably snow-covered ones with chairlifts to bring myself and my skis to the peaks.

My wife enjoys our ski trips a bit less enthusiastically than I do. During our trip last winter she laid down the law.

“The next trip’s going to be somewhere warm.” I gave some sort of “OK fine, you win” reply.

We contemplated the beach. Boring, I said. Plus, with two young kids sitting in a lounge chair and relaxing is well, not so relaxing. We considered a cruise but decided that it would be too tight with the four of us (boys ages 4 and 1) in one room. Then we started talking about Disney World.

I’m not going to cover every detail of our trip. The goal of this post is to walk you through the financial aspects from our trip so you can take away a strategy or two to save if you decide to go.

Why Go To Disney World?

Many of you Mickey lovers may think this question is silly because there are thousands of reasons to go and for everybody it’s slightly different. If you’ve never been before, let me share some of the top reasons for my family.

We generally like to be active and a Disney World trip, at least the way we do it, is really active. My ideal vacations involve seeing, doing, experiencing, eating and exercising. I want to get out there, put in some effort and make memories. I don’t know if there’s a better place than Disney for a family to create those memorable moments and come back both exhausted and mentally rejuvenated. We wanted a trip that would have something for adults, a preschooler and an infant all at the same time. That’s not an easy task.

Is It Possible To Go To Disney World Without Breaking the Bank?

I’m a personal finance blogger, after all, and nobody thinks it’s more important than I do not to overspend. So how do you go on a notoriously expensive vacation on a budget? With careful planning. See below for how we visited Disney World without going broke.

Flights

In early 2018, I opened two Southwest Airlines Credit Cards from Chase. Just by putting my normal everyday spending on these cards, I earned over 110,000 points. PLUS, I earned the companion pass allowing me to bring a companion on any southwest flight for just the cost of taxes and fees.

So for the four of us to travel, I cashed in 12,158 points for myself, my four-year-old son is listed as my companion so he traveled for free and I used another 12,158 points for my wife’s flight. Our youngest son (age 14 months) flew free as a lap child.

The total out of pocket costs for the flights was $33.60 cash and used less than a quarter of the points I’d earned from my sign up bonuses.

Note that I did pay a small annual fee for each of the cards initially.

Park Tickets & Hotel

I’ve heard of a few ways to save money on Disney World tickets and hotels.

You can get a discount off face value by buying with ParkSavers. To save on lodging, a well known strategy is to rent points on a Disney Vacation Club timeshare.

We did neither of these things. Nope. We paid full retail for 8 nights at the Disney All Star Music Resort and 7-day Park Hopper tickets for two adults and one child (the baby was free).

Disney Costs $$$

The cost was $2,834.42. That’s a big number but it’s not bad for everything we received. Thankfully, as you’ll see below, we actually spent even less than this invoice amount out of pocket.

I’ll explain why we chose to skip the discounts in the Free Disney Quick Service Dining Plan section below. (you can probably guess where this is going though.)

Value Hotel For The Win

Our hotel choice was a pretty easy decision. We wanted to stay on Disney property to have early access to Fast Passes. Staying off site was a deal breaker for my wife who’s a Disney fanatic. The cost for the All Star Music hotel (even at full price) was very reasonable.

The package even includes free airport transportation on the Disney Magical Express. Our bags magically went from the airplane to our room without us having to touch them. This was such a nice touch when traveling with children.

The package also includes free transportation around the Disney resort, which we believe is far more convenient than staying off site. Between the two of these perks, there was no need for a rental car.

The hotel we chose is considered a “value” property. The grounds were quite nice and pool looked beautiful. The room itself was a clear step down from a standard Holiday Inn and certainly would not confuse anybody as a luxury room.

We chose not to splurge at all on the hotel as we expected to spend almost all of our waking moments in the parks. And we pretty much did.

Shopping Before The Trip

I’ve never been one to buy souvenirs or other junk myself. It’s a little bit harder when you have kids who want EVERYTHING.

We attacked this potential minefield from the start. Before we arrived, my wife picked up a bunch of Mickey paraphernalia and ears (of course) for the boys and herself at Target and other retailers.

I ended up with two new Disney themed t-shirts that I could not convince her to return. While I don’t have a running tally of the exact costs, I know that she was getting some items for about 80%-90% off the retail price at the parks. The kids will wear most of the clothes until they grow out of them so at least they will be re-purposed.

We had a couple of light up toys from, well, raising children. We packed two in the suitcase and handed them out each night. This prevented any new $30+ light up toy requests.

On the first day of our trip, we gave our four year old a budget of $30 to spend on souvenirs for the whole week. He did not really know the value of a dollar before the trip so I figured this would be a fun experiment. And it was.

We ordered some breakfast staples from Amazon Prime Now to have in our room in case we wanted to save time (and meal credits) by not sitting down to a big breakfast. These were delivered right to the concierge and we picked them up on our first day.

Finally, we bought and packed insulated water bottles. We topped them off after each meal and were able to keep hydrated all day. This let us avoid buying or using a snack credit on overpriced bottled water.

Souvenirs

The day we arrived was not a park day and we ended up in a shopping area called Disney Springs. It was cool hearing my son ask me how much each item cost and watch him deliberate if any of the items that were under $30 were worth his precious budget.

He ended up buying a tie-dye Mickey t-shirt that he was able to create himself the first day. On our fourth park day he choose to spend the rest of his money on an Elsa spinning light up doll. I think the total cost of souvenirs was $34 but we let him slide on the slight overage.

He did understand once his money was gone that he was done buying stuff. I thought the approach to let him make his own decisions worked out really well and that it was a really fun educational experience for both of us. We tried to guide him in buying something useful while giving him the final call. It was a nice role reversal for both of us.

I did become a shopping sucker with one extra purchase. Since my younger son was too small for the “real” rides, we took advantage of the rider swap, which allowed my older son to ride each of them twice, once with my wife and then with myself.

After riding the Tower of Terror with my wife, he was not interested in a second trip on a broken elevator. I calmly and quickly talked him into a second ride and he liked it even less the second time. Oooops.

As I’m carrying him away from the exit in tears, I offered to buy him an overpriced t-shirt to lift his spirits. Ooops again. That was guilt spending at it’s finest.

Free Disney Quick Service Dining Plan

Okay, so here’s where we won big. We booked the trip during a period that Disney offered a free Quick Service Dining Plan with a full price hotel/park ticket package.

Throughout the week we were entitled to 48 quick service meals including drinks (alcohol can be included as your drink) and 48 snacks. It worked out to two meals and two snacks for each ticketed person per night.

The pricing to purchase this plan today is $52.50 per adult and $21.74 per child. So the free dining plan saved us $1,013.92 on the week as compared to buying it at full retail price.

To be clear, some of this savings is offset by paying full price for the hotel and a Park Hopper ticket. We’d have been fine with just visiting one park per day and would not have paid the extra for the park hopper unless it was required to get the free dining.

To book it, we stalked the Disney Undercover Tourist Blog Free Dining Page until they posted when 2018 dates were available. (Note that 2019 free dining is available now.) We set an alarm early in the morning to book the package we wanted and we got it! From what I recall, the packages were sold out for the room we wanted by the end of the day. If you have your heart set on a free dining package, book ASAP.

Other Savings

My wife and I each opened a Barclaycard Arrival+ credit card. We paid a portion of our balance with each of them. We applied our everyday spending to earn the sign-on bonus on each card. Then we were able to use the points earned to erase some of the vacation charge. This strategy reduced our cost by a total of $1,375.

We used the rotating Bonus categories on our Chase Freedom card to buy Disney World gift cards. This earned us 5 Ultimate Reward points per dollar spent, which will be used for some future travel. We applied the gift cards to our outstanding bill by phone before our balance was due.

Lastly, around Thanksgiving time when everything in the whole world was on sale, BJ’s Wholesale Club had Disney World gift cards for sale at a 8% discount. Using our Chase Freedom card and earning an extra 5 Ultimate Rewards Points per dollar, we purchased $250 worth.

We used them for any extra spending during our trip which left our final hotel bill at $0. That one felt wonderful. Nothing makes a great vacation even better than knowing you successfully stayed within a budget.

Conclusion

If you’re a busybody like myself and want a family vacation to be active, exciting and memorable, Disney World needs to be on your list.

Just because a trip can be crazy expensive does not mean it has to be if you plan ahead.

We plan to go back for sure but not next year. We’ll wait until our boys are a few years older and will look at the parks with a different perspective.

You can go to Disney World without breaking the bank.

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