How Our Family of 5 Took A Dirt Cheap Disney Trip!
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This post has been a long time coming! A couple years ago I stumbled across this post on Pinterest about how a family took a Disney trip nearly free. They erased their major costs with credit card rewards. I saved that pin but thought it was too good to be true, plus credit cards are bad anyways, right? Well. Our family of 5 took a Disney trip back in May of 2016 that we paid over $5000 for. I knew I wanted to go back one day when the girls were just a little bit older, so I revisited that article and started doing my research when we got home. I took the free Travel Miles 101 course by Richmond Savers and it was extremely helpful! I didn’t start right away with cards because I was still skeptical. But after reading about using credit cards responsibly and the positive effects it can have on your credit, I decided game on! If you haven’t yet, read this post I made to understand travel hacking as a beginner!
I started actively using credit cards about 18 months prior to our trip. Thanks to the rewards we generated, here’s the cost of the 3 big parts of our trip… 7 nights at The Polynesian Resort for our family of 5 – FREE. Roundtrip flights from MSY to MCO for our family of 5 – FREE. 6 day base park tickets for our family of 5 – $297. CRAZY! In this post I’ll break down exactly what I did to accumulate rewards and cover these costs, plus a huge mistake I made that cost us in our final trip expenses.
STAYING ONSITE AT DISNEY
We are big fans of staying on Disney property! On our previous trip we stayed at Port Orleans Riverside and it was fantastic. On that trip we did a breakfast at Ohana at The Polynesian, and we were sold. We knew we had to stay there one day! We made it happen and prior to our trip, I wrote this post with all the details on how we stayed there for free. We had a great experience with DVC Rental Store and I highly recommend them! We elected not to get the meal plan but I have been asked many times, YES you can get the meal plan when renting DVC points! I’d definitely suggest checking out their FAQ page, you’ll get all your questions on renting DVC points answered!
FLIGHTS
How can someone possibly fly for free? It is so possible and not even hard to do! We love flying Southwest Airlines. It is easy to book, budget friendly, frequent fare sales, and they have a consumer friendly cancellation policy. They also have family boarding (if you have a child 6 or under in your party) which is a nice perk since the seats are not assigned.
Now onto why I REALLY love Southwest. They offer a Companion Pass for Rapid Rewards members, meaning once you earn it, you can have a companion fly with you for FREE for the following 12 months and the rest of the following calendar year after. Let’s say you earn it in January, that is 2 full years of one person flying free!
There are two ways to earn this. One includes 100 one way flights in a calender year… ain’t nobody got time for that. We want to get this bad boy as quick as we can! The best way is to accumulate 110,000 Rapid Rewards points in a calendar year. How do I do that Courtney? Well I’m glad you asked! You can get 2 Southwest credit cards under your Rapid Rewards number and the points from those bonuses apply to what you need for the Companion Pass!
The Southwest Rapid Rewards Plus card (referral link) is the personal card I started with. The current offer through this link is 40,000 points for spending $1000 in the first 3 months. You also earn 1 point per $1 spent on top of that. However, they do have offers throughout the year for 50k or even 60k points after the same minimum spend! There is a $69 annual fee with this card, but that has already paid for itself after just one trip! The second card I used to reach the point total needed is the Southwest Rapid Rewards Premier Business card. The current offer is 60,000 Rapid Rewards points for spending $3000 in the first 3 months, plus 1 point per $1 spent with a $99 annual fee. If the current offer doesn’t quite get you to 110k points, you can earn the rest through Southwest partners & retailers! I was able to get the 50k offer on the Plus card which got me where I needed to be!
SO… we earned the Companion Pass AND over 110k Rapid Rewards points in the process. We did this by putting all our regular spending on these Southwest cards and paying them off in full every month. Not only does the companion fly free, but the Rapid Rewards member (AKA me) has 110k points to use towards flights! Since one flew free, we only had 4 flights to cover. We watched fares and ended up using 72,144 of the Rapid Rewards points we had earned for ALL of our flights from New Orleans to Orlando and back! Rewards travel is still subject to a $5.60 per person one way government fee. We had extra points on our Capital One Venture to erase those fees, so our flights were ZERO cost!
PARK TICKETS
For our park tickets, we made several purchases to cover as much of the cost as possible. 4 of the 5 tickets were bought from Undercover Tourist. They are an authorized discount ticket broker for Disney World tickets, so not only are they legit but they also offer a little savings from buying tickets direct through Disney! To cover these tickets, we opened 2 Capital One Spark Miles Business cards and earned those bonuses, which were 50,000 miles with $4500 spend in 3 months. Including the 2 miles per $1 earned the bonus gets you $590 in totally flexible travel! Undercover Tourist codes as travel to credit card companies, so these purchases when charged to those cards can be erased. For 1st transaction, we bought 1 adult and 1 child 6 day base ticket. We had 60,076 points to erase part of cost leaving $175.97 for us to pay. For 2nd transaction, we bought 2 child 6 day base tickets. We had 63,627 points on other Spark card to erase part of cost leaving $121.19 for us to pay. This was 4 out of 5 tickets done!
For the 5th ticket (the other adult ticket) we took advantage of using Chase Ultimate Rewards points to cover that full ticket cost. It is my understanding that this no longer works, but for a time, you could call Chase and speak with a representative in the “Cruise” department of UR Travel customer service. They could quote you a price in Chase points for a Disney ticket, which ended up being the same price as Disney’s website. BUT, because we were using points on our Chase Sapphire preferred card (referral link), they are worth 25% more when booking through Chase so the point value was better than using them as cash back! We were able to get an adult 6 day base ticket for 34,507 Chase UR points. FYI the Chase Ink Business Preferred (referral link) will give you the same benefit if you’d like to accumulate even more Chase points to use at that higher 25% value. Chase is currently revamping their Ultimate Rewards website, so hopefully we will see an option to get Disney tickets directly through the portal once it all rolls out!
STROLLER RENTAL
Our kids are 5, 7 & 9 and YES I still rented a double stroller for our trip! It is SO much walking, we wouldn’t get near the things done that we did if we made them walk the entire time. They would rotate sitting and taking breaks. I cannot recommend Kingdom Strollers enough! For a 7 night stay the cost to rent a nice, collapsible double stroller is only $75! We were able to use leftover points on our Capital One Venture card and only pay $4 for the rental! If you rent a stroller in the parks at Disney, you get one of those awesome, hard plastic ones and it has to stay in the park. With Kingdom Strollers it is delivered to the bell stand when you check in and you leave it there when you check out, so you have it not only in the parks but getting to buses, between resorts, etc.
GROCERY DELIVERY
Another perk of renting through Kingdom Strollers is that they give you a code for free grocery delivery through Orlando Grocery Express. This is so handy to have drinks, snacks, breakfast foods, beer or wine delivered right to your room for you when you’re at Disney without a personal vehicle! We spent about $90 and it was worth it!
FOOD
Alright folks here it is. I messed up big time with this. I knew that with our other costs so low, dining at Disney would be our biggest expense. I opened a Citi Thank You card and found out that the rewards can erase dining purchases. I earned the bonus and had $560 to use towards food, and figured the rest we’d pay out of pocket. Guys. I read over the fine print a little too quickly. If we would’ve swiped the card at every restaurant we ate at, this would have worked. BUT instead we charged all meals to our MagicBands. We made a payment with that Citi card thinking we could erase those charges, but it coded as “lodging” instead of “dining” because we put it on our Magic Bands instead of actually scanning card. I was SO mad at myself. But it was a learning experience and I hope it helps you, make SURE you know how your charges will code before assuming anything! We do still have those rewards on that Citi card. Our daughter does competition cheer and we have several weekend trips coming up (which hotels were booked on points, duh) we will be sure to use those Citi Thank You points for dining on those trips. But ANYWAYS… back to what we actually spent. We elected not to get the dining plan because we knew we didn’t want to do as many character meals as we did on our previous trip, and our kids are picky eaters. As it turns out, we would have been better off with the Disney Dining Plan. Our total food cost for 5 people staying 7 nights came to $1,177. Which is just a little more than we would’ve paid with the dining plan. We didn’t say no when the kids wanted a pretzel, ice cream, or anything else. The majority of this cost came from Cinderella’s Royal Table breakfast ($249), Garden Grill breakfast ($153) and Ohana breakfast ($183). The rest was quick service meals, drinks & snacks. Did I mention we were there during Epcot’s Food & Wine Festival?! I hope this helps give you a picture of what food can potentially cost at Disney. Do your research to decide if the dining plan is right for you or not! Had we been able to use our Citi Thank You Points, we would’ve have been much better off without it. Whatever, I’ll get over it eventually, ugh! Even with my big mess up – I still met my goal. I wanted to keep the major expenses of the trip under $1500. Food, flights, hotel & park tickets put us at $1,474. Not bad considering its DISNEY!
This trip was incredible. We made so many wonderful memories and I’ll have more posts to come about it in the future. I hope this helps you to realize that travel does not have to be expensive! I opened my heart & mind to something new and it gave us one of the best vacations we’ve ever had. It simply takes some strategy and responsibility. And now, it makes me dream bigger! Our next family trip I want to tackle as cheaply as possible? COSTA RICA next year!