Any tips on how a family for four can do Disney as reasonably cheap as possible?
Best sites to help you save:
http://www.allearsnet.com/ is also a helpful Disney resource, with actual visitor tips (unbiased, unlike the official Disney site) and price information.
Do you have a Costco near you? They have passport books which will easily save you nearly $200.00 per person. We used them and they saved us a lot of money.
Cut out your own ears out of black construction paper, load the kids in the car and drive past the State Fair. With the first peep from anyone, turn around and shout, “Thats it! We’re going home!”
If at all possible, go in the off-season. Standard hotel rates are substantially lower and you have a much better chance of getting a discount on top of that.
I’ll see what else I can remember from our trip, but that one thing saved us more money than everything else combined.
Unless you’re totally set on Disney, you could go to Universal Orlando instead. I took my family this past summer and had a blast. It costs less, has fun rides and 3d stuff, and my kids were more familiar with and into the their characters than Disney’s. No weird Stepford-y vibe, either.
Universal is a perfectly nice place, but US and IOA have about as much in common with Disney as your local county fair has with Universal and IOA. In other words, if you have time or want rides, US/IOA is a great place to spend time (its arguably a better place for people with pre-teens and teens - much more amusement park), but you haven’t been to anything like DisneyWorld.
Bring as much of your own food as possible. When I was forced to go, I couldn’t believe how much the food costed there (on the upside, all the walking and lack of food buying caused me to lose 5 pounds in 4 days! :p). If you’re going in a warmer season, definitely bring your own water bottles (unsurprisingly, they charge an arm and a leg for those, too.)
September is usually the season of Disney specials. But most people need to pull their kids from school, and its often still cheaper if you stay offsite because the specials are often on packages.
Skyauction has TONS of Orlando rooms available for a fraction of the price of staying on property (I like staying on property, but it isn’t cheap). Especially if you drive down anyway, this is a deal. If you don’t drive down, this means renting a car, which may eat up savings. If you stay offsite and drive, you will pay for parking, but the offsite savings will probably make up for it.
Food - Disney doesn’t care if you bring some in. We find food at Disney to be fairly reasonable when you compare it to other similar entertainment locations. But its still cheaper to eat offsite, grocery shop, and pack in sandwiches than to get a $7.00 burger and fries. (Skip the fries and the burger is $1 or more less, but Disney puts the “package” up on the menu boards, not the individual items.)
Its nearly impossible to save significantly on tickets. If you follow that mousesavers link and sign up for the newsletter, there will be a link in the newsletter for a ticket broker that gives mousesavers subscribers an additional discount. I’ve used them several times without any issues at all. But its a relatively small discount - there is no such thing as cheap Disney tickets available to the general public.
Thanks all…it’s Disney or bust!
Here is a helpful thread from last year.
Disney World resorts - any way to go “cheap”?
I was able to go for practically nothing back in the 90’s:
You didn’t ask for dates but if I was to pick the best time to go it would be the first week of November. By then the weather has gone from hot and humid to nice and warm. Crowds are also very very low. So much so that the parks close early. Which really isn’t a problem if you get there when they open since you can see everything so quickly and probably don’t want to stay more than 7 hours anyway.
That was going to be my question - what’s a good time for a group of adults to go? (No kids in our group)
I know about staying away during Spring Break season to avoid teenage mobs. I’ve heard that early February’s good, but that we could expect to find rides down for maintenance. (Boo!) How about the latter half of February? Or, how about early or mid-June?
Hmm. I may have answered my questions with some digging into the resort hotel rates - January 1 through February 13 are “value” price season, but on Feb 14, it jumps to Peak season rates through March 29, with an extra-high “Holiday” jolt on Presidents’ Day weekend. June and July are Summer season rates.
OK, so early February is cheap, but rides may be down. Is early June still a good compromise on rates vs crowds vs everything running?
The first week in December, for several reasons:
- Historically, the lowest crowd levels of the year.
- The parks are all decorated for Christmas, and special holiday events and parades are happening in every park.
- The weather is wonderful – usually low- to mid-70s in the day, and high 50s/low 60s at night.
- Most rides will be operating, because this falls between two mega-attendance periods – Thanksgiving and Christmas. That’s not always the case in January/February, when a lot of maintenance down-time is scheduled.
- Because the crowds are so low, you have a much easier time touring the parks. You don’t realize how much energy and effort it takes weaving around people, stopping and starting, dodging and evading, until you don’t have to do it.
- You can usually do almost everything you want to do in a given park in a single day (which is next to impossible during higher-attendance periods), so you save time and money.
That’s just way too hot and humid for me. And you have the summer vacation family crowds as well as international traveler crowds. The smell of hot sticky people crammed in one place just doesn’t do it for me.
You’ll end up bailing early to hang out at the pool at your hotel. And then find out everyone else had the same idea.
Maybe you could handle it but I surely couldn’t.
I have also stayed at Motels on the Kissimmee strip. Eat off ptoperty at a cheap Indian Buffet. But then we went to Universal.
Universal is great! Best park in the world after Cedar Point. And I should know, I’ve been to CP over 20 times.
I also went to the original Universal Studios LA tour back in the 80’s. That was amazing. I lifted a Van like Steve Austin. Got caught in a real laser crossfire between early robotic/animatronic cylons. Saw the Red sea parted. Got genuinely scared of Jaws. And saw Norman Bate’s House.
Saw Michael Jackson’s 3-D film with ambient effects at Epcot. I’ve never had a more immersiveholographic experience.
Tunnel through the ground of your hotel and emerge somewhere in the small world ride. If a small child points you out to his parents, just start screaming “IT’S FREAKING ABOUT DIVERSITY! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!” Then steal the costume from a nearby robot and start singing the small world song. If security shows up, give no indication that you are not in fact a Dutch milkmaid.