How I saved over $1000 on my Walt Disney World Vacation

It’s no secret that a trip to Walt Disney World is expensive. For an explanation of just how expensive it can be, see this post for a detailed breakdown. Disney often offers discounts on resort stays or vacation packages, but other than that you’re pretty much on your own to find creative ways to save more. In this post we’ll walk through a case study of how I employed strategies discussed in this post to save well over $1000 on my upcoming trip.

Resort Stay

Saving money on your Walt Disney World hotel stay is the most straightforward. Disney has a near endless cycle of discounts they offer throughout the year if you’re able to choose when you travel. If you’re forced to travel at only the most popular times you may find it difficult to take advantage of the offers Disney provides. In our case, we were able to take advantage of an up to 25% discount offer to book Port Orleans French Quarter at a 20% discount. Note that the advertised savings rate is always showing the greatest discount and the reality is that there is a sliding scale across the resorts. Usually it’s the deluxe resorts offering the greatest savings, moderates will be slightly less, and value resorts lowest of all.

With the discount, our Garden View room at French Quarter was an average of $238 a night before taxes and fees, and $266 a night all in. With this discount we saved approximately $350 across the 5 night stay right off the bat.

As I’ll explain later in the article there are even more savings available that you can unlock depending on how you pay for these costs. Those take a little more effort than just getting something on sale but nothing too crazy in my opinion.

Tickets

Saving money on theme park tickets may not be an option for you if you book a vacation package through Disney. Disney will sometimes release room-only discounts and vacation package discounts for the same time period. I’m all about doing whatever is easiest, but would urge folks to run the numbers before jumping into the vacation package deals. By using a reputable ticket reseller like Undercovertourist.com (my preferred vendor) you can realize savings of $45-$60 per ticket.

That’s exactly what we did, saving $90 on our 3-day base tickets for our upcoming trip. That’s not a big number but it will pay for quite a few EPCOT food booths or a couple quick service meals. For a family of four or more the numbers are even more enticing.

The process of purchasing and applying discounted tickets is so simple that it really is a no-brainer to take advantage of this whenever possible. In the case of UndercoverTourist, they send you an email with a link to access your ticket. Open the ticket, locate the ticket number, go over to your Disney Account and link the ticket. Takes literally 2 minutes. Well worth it.

For a running tally we’re up to $440 saved – $350 for the resort, $90 for the tickets.

Flights

Full disclosure, some of these savings strategies will require the use of credit cards. If you’re someone that doesn’t like to use credit cards you may still pick up some tidbits but the biggest savings will only be available if you’re willing to leverage various credit card programs. As long as you pay off your statement balance each month these strategies are well worth it. But please read that again, it is only worth it if you’re able to pay off the balance each month. If not, the insane interest rates will quickly outpace any upfront savings. Ok, now back to the program.

Last February, I took advantage of a credit card sign up bonus offered by Southwest Airlines with Chase bank to secure the Southwest Companion Pass through 2/28/2025. The companion pass allows you to bring a companion along on any Southwest flight with available for essentially free – you just need to pay mandatory fees. In our case those fees were about $5 one way. So one person’s flight was essentially $10! You can’t beat that with a stick.

The way these offers work is that you have to meet a minimum spend limit within a certain timeframe after opening your card to qualify. I’ve seen this as low as $2,000 over 3 months and as high as $8,000 over 3 months. Make sure you to verify that you can meet this minimum spend within your financial means before signing up. If you can’t it’s never worth it. And again, don’t rack up debt to do this. That’s also never worth it.

One useful byproduct of these purchasing requirements is that you’re accruing points on the credit card as you work towards this spend. In the case of the Chase Southwest card these points can be used to book flights. That’s exactly what we did. We used the points accrued meeting the minimum spend requirements along with some other points we already had to book the flights with points. The companion pass doesn’t care how you pay for the paid fare, so we booked the “paid” fare with points then received the companion pass fare on top of that. Our flights were effectively free. Really $20 worth of fees across the 4 flights, but that’s like 99% off!

Looking at the cost of flights between my home airport and Orlando for our travel dates shows that nonstop flights are $114 or $179 there and non-stop flights back are $89. Those are pretty low prices, but even so still represent a minimum savings of $400 for this trip. If you’re travelling during busier periods the savings can incredible – easily over $500 per person – using this approach.

Running total $840 – $400 on flights, $350 for the resort, $90 for tickets.

Spending Money

So far we’ve been able to save a significant amount of money on the things you need to get to and experience the parks. But what about the costs you accrue while at Walt Disney World? The restaurants, the merchandise, the tours?

For these expenses the best thing to do is look for savings on Disney Gift Cards and start hoarding them ahead of your trip. The super useful site DisneyGiftCard.com allows you to transfer funds from one gift card to another, up to $1000 per card. You can use the gift card like cash once on property so if you save on the cost of the gift card you’re essentially saving on everything you buy! What a deal!

Saving on Disney Gift Cards isn’t always easy but there does always seem to be a way to save. Often times, wholesale clubs like BJ’s and Sam’s Club will offer savings on gift cards to their members. If you have a membership or even know someone who does, this is an easy way to save what is usually 5% off the gift card value.

If you stay tuned into these things you can also find sites offering Disney Gift Cards for as much as 10% off. That’s exactly what I was able to do for this upcoming trip. Between a 10% off offer from GiftCards.com and a $50 gift card for $45 offer that BestBuy.com was running I was able purchase $1600 in gift cards for 10% off. That’s a savings of $160 just for buying gift cards!

That brings my savings for this trip up to an even $1000. But wait! There’s more!

Next Level Savings

Your mind may have wandered during the discussion about using credit cards to pay for flights and maybe your wandering mind ended up asking “Hey, can’t you use these reward credit cards to pay for these Disney related expenses and then use those points to pay for things like these fancy flights”? Give your wandering mind a treat because that’s a very clever observation. Nice work!

There are rewards cards for every occasion and every kind of purchase. I won’t get into all the options here, there are literally entire businesses centered around explaining how to best earn, burn, and churn those points. Suffice it to say though, rewards cards can generally offer 3-5% additional savings on every Disney related purchase. So doing nothing else but putting the purchases on a credit card and then paying that credit card off can equal some big savings.

In this example I not only used creative (actually not even that creative!) use of credit card rewards to get effectively free flights, I also used a bonus category on one card to an additional 5% off of all the gift cards I purchased! I’ll use those 15% off gift card balances to get everything I pay for on-site at a big discount! Note that you can even pay off resort room balances with gift cards, just visit the desk before they close out the account and ask them to apply a gift card.

When on property I always make it a point to ask about Disney Visa Card discounts. Some merchandise and food locations offer discounts if you use a Disney Visa Card. Though this card is objectively very poor on the rewards earning front when compared to other cards, it’s very tough to beat 10-15% discounts for no effort.

The total added savings here is TBD, but I do know I saved another 5% off the gift cards, after initial savings, for another $72 in savings.

Final Tally

So that’s how I saved over $1000 on my upcoming 5 night stay at Port Orleans French Quarter with 3-day Base tickets. Keep in mind that most of these approaches scale, so the actual dollar savings will grow with more people in your party. It takes a little planning and attention, but the minimal effort is worth the big savings!

How do you save money on your Walt Disney World vacations? What do you think of my approach? What am I missing out on? Leave a comment below!