Travel Planning Archives - Page 4 of 9

Aug 19 2015

Delta Skymiles are not Useless

Delta gets a bad rap, and rightfully so. Delta miles are difficult to use, they switched to a revenue based system first, etc. etc. yada yada yada. Despite all that, I’ve been bullish on Delta miles and stockpiling for the past year or so with the specific goal in mind of getting three business class seats to Europe for summer 2016. This post is living proof that all is not lost with the Delta program, no matter how bad things have seemed. And I’m not even talking about the award sale that’s been going on (which is pretty great too!). Delta Skymiles are not useless!

A bit of quick background – I’ve always been keenly aware that Boston is a great place to live if you have Delta miles. BOS-AMS and BOS-LHR are routes that often have business class availability. While BOS-AMS tends to have more availability, BOS-LHR makes up for this with the fact that there are two frequencies: one Delta operated flight and one Virgin Atlantic operated flight. Virgin Atlantic has been historically pretty decent about award space.

My goal had always been to get a family of four to Europe in business class for summer 2016. Planning wise, I made a few changes – I’ve decided to be a little less adventurous with a 3.5 and 1 year old in tow next year. What that meant is finding flights that are more convenient, and paying more for them if necessary.

Bottom line: 62.5K per person might not sound amazing for a 7 hour TATL flight in business class, but that’s what we’re booking. On top of that, we’re leaning towards visiting Scotland (haven’t booked a return yet), which means we’ll eat the UK departure tax. Still, shorter flights with two kids and being able to converse in our native tongue is probably gonna win out over “maximizing” our miles and money on this trip. And if Disney World is a total bust I’ll even eat the cancellation fees if I need to.

I ended up booking 3 business class seats on Delta’s direct flight. I really wanted to fly Virgin Atlantic, but ultimately decided on Delta because

Booking infant in arms tickets with Delta partners can sometimes get annoying (I’ll deal with that when plans firm up more), and
The Virgin Atlantic flight leaves at 9:50 PM so I think leaving at 7:10 PM will be better for the kids.

Of course, that might totally backfire if the kids are overstimulated and don’t sleep on the plane, which is a distinct possibility but a gamble that I’ll take.

So here’s what I’ve noticed. There are at least four seats in business class on a bunch of flights from Boston to LHR/AMS. I’ve attached a bunch of screenshots below in case you don’t believe me. I even did two searches out of JFK – not as good, but still pretty good. There are still four seats on the flight that I booked three seats on, which means there were at least 7. I guess typing that out loud makes me wonder if it’s some sort of glitch, but you know what, Delta doesn’t have an award chart so who knows. Regardless, if you’re on the east coast thinking of traveling to Europe next summer in business – Delta might not be the worst currency to have. At least at this 11 month out kind of moment. Oh and economy has a ton of space too, if that suits your needs better.

P.S. – I got tired of screenshotting, but DTW looked pretty good too and I even found five days in July with seats to London from LAX.

Hey, Amsterdam for four looks pretty good too

There's even space from JFK — There’s even space from JFK

And if you search for only two people - even better — And if you search for only two people – even better

Jul 29 2015

Daring to Disney: Saving Money on Disney Tickets

This is my third installment of my Daring to Disney series, chronicling my planning of my first Disney trip as an adult. To see how I booked flights, car, hotel, and dining, click! In today’s post I’ll discuss saving money on Disney tickets.

After grabbing all my dining reservations at 180 days, the next step in my plan to conquer Disney was getting tickets. Now I don’t actually need to buy tickets 160 days before, but, you know, I’m crazy. Here’s how I ended up saving money on Disney tickets and why I didn’t think it was really worth it in the end.

Ticket Options: To Park Hopper or not to Park Hopper?

The first thing I needed to decide was what kind of tickets to buy. Basically, after you buy a four day ticket, each subsequent day on top of that is $10, so the number of days I was buying was pretty straightforward. I decided to buy two 7 day tickets for Jess and myself and two 6 day tickets for my parents. We’re planning a day at Sea World, but I figure the 7 day ticket for Jess and me might be able to get us a date night. A $20 risk I’m happy to make. I don’t need to buy tickets for my kids because M is turning three a few weeks after we go and H is tiny.

As I mentioned when talking about dining reservations, I was considering whether to get the park hopper option for our tickets. That would give us the flexibility to visit a second park in the afternoon post nap and/or go to Epcot for dinners. The park hopper option was about $64/ticket, around $10/day average. Ultimately I decided against getting the park hopper for now for two reasons. First, I’m realizing that I’m overestimating the stamina of a two year old – I’m basically projecting a 34 year olds’ stamina potential onto my daughter. Heck, I’m likely overestimating my stamina as well. Secondly, if I change my mind, I can always add the park hopper option on at a ticket kiosk once we’re there, so I have that insurance.

Apparently, according to the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2015 (which my mother in law graciously got for us from the library!), you can still pay for a “no expiration” option on your tickets if you buy them at the World. Though the guide itself is even unsure. Regardless, I decided it wasn’t worth it – I’d likely physically lose my tickets plus Disney has priced things so you’re only hedging against future price increases.

Looking for the Cheapest Price

Disney is a bit like Apple – you can get little to no discount off the sticker price most times (unless you are buying secondhand but I didn’t really want to deal with that). Still, I was looking to save whatever I could.

The very first thing I did, naturally, was plug in my preferences at the Walt Disney World website to see what showed up. Searching for the tickets I was looking for resulted in an overall price of $1405.82.

Next, I went to touringplans.com and used their handy ticket calculator. Think of it as the Kayak of Disney World tickets. There they list a few options and conveniently calculate how much you save off of the Disney price. The best rate I found was the Undercover Tourist rate coupled with signing up for the free Mousesavers newsletter (which I recommend anyway). This would have saved me about $50 off of the Disney price (total, not per person).

saving money on Disney tickets — The options from Touring Plans ticket calculator

A note on tickets sold by authorized dealers such as Undercover Tourist. You might be tempted to think they don’t convey the same benefits as tickets you get from Disney World, but that’s not the case. The only real difference as far as I can tell is that you need to link the tickets you buy from retailers to your account while tickets you buy from Disney are linked automatically.

The only thing you should be concerned about is if a retailer asks you specifically what dates you will be using the tickets for. If you buy from these kinds of places, make sure your dates are set in stone and you won’t deviate, otherwise you might find your tickets expire before you think they might (normal tickets expire 14 days from first use). You can read all about that in the Unofficial Guide if you’d like.

Ultimately, I decided not to buy from Undercover Tourist because I planned on…

Utilizing my 5% Target Redcard Discount

July was a good month for me. Stop and Shop was offering 2X gas points on Visa gift cards so I used that to save some money on gas and top off my Target Redcard. As you probably know, the Redcard offers 5% off of any Target purchases. This includes Disney gift cards! So I crunched the numbers – if I bought from Undercover Tourist, the cost of our tickets would be $1358. If I bought tickets from Disney proper using Disney gift cards purchased at Target with my Redcard the cost would be $1335.82, a savings of $22.18.

So I decided to buy 28 $50 Disney gift cards. 28! Of course, it’s not that simple. You can’t use more than two gift cards to buy Disney tickets online – which would seem to render 28 gift cards useless. You can use them to buy at the park but that’s a major pain.

There is a workaround. I signed up for a Disney Vacation account. These accounts are designed to help families save money for Disney – you can direct deposit to them, set up monthly payments, etc. You’re supposed to make a goal for yourself and theoretically when you hit that goal you can plan your trip. Everything is self directed so it’s not like you’re locked into anything.

The great thing is you can add Disney gift cards to your account. So I loaded all 28 cards into my account – $1400 total. You can then use your account number to pay for your park tickets. I used the $1400 plus an extra $5.82 that I put on my credit card. Money saved!

That last statement is a little bit tongue in cheek, in the end, I didn’t think it was worth stocking up on all those gift cards to save twenty bucks. Typing in all the gift card numbers was mind numbing – next time I’ll probably just go with Undercover Tourist. But if you want to make every dollar count, that’s how you can do it!

Final Thoughts

There aren’t a ton of ways to save money on Disney tickets, but you can shave off a few dollars here and there. Using my Target Redcard, Disney gift cards, and a Disney Vacation account, I managed to save some money. In the end, I probably would have done it differently. In terms of tickets, I think the most important thing is to decide what kind of tickets you want – that’s the most complicated part! But I think you can “add on” when you get to Disney if you like, so in my mind booking less is more, at least at the beginning.

Other Posts in this Series

Flights, Hotel, and Car

Making Disney Dining Reservations

Saving Money on Disney Tickets

Using Touring Plans (the non-touring plan parts)

Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Saving money by staying off site

When a Disney annual pass makes sense

Touring Epcot attractions with a toddler

Touring Animal Kingdom with a toddler

One perfect day at the Magic Kingdom

Dining Reviews

Tips for parents of toddlers and infants

Things I wished I knew before I went to Disney

Jul 21 2015

On Children, Convenience, and Being Cheap

I’ve spent the last two podcasts talking about how I was going to write this post but it took this from Matt to finally kick my butt into serious gear.

Thanks to our latest major life change (family size increase of 33%), I’ve been thinking a lot about how to balance the following three things: children, convenience, and being cheap. I realize this is an oversimplification but that’s the way my brain best processes things. By being cheap I more mean “saving money” but saving money doesn’t start with the letter C, so…anyway.

Back when it was just the two of us, I was all about maximizing the travel experience. I was happy to take an extra connection if it meant another first class cabin or I’d book a longer layover if it meant a chance to try out a cabana. Ever since M was born, my mindset has slowly begin to change and with H in the mix now it’s just going to get more interesting.

M and her little brother - wait till they get on a plane together — M and her little brother – wait till they get on a plane together

Points with a Crew once wrote a post on the Traveler’s Triangle, positing that out of time, price, and location, for any given award ticket you usually can only maximize two of the three (to this day I still don’t get why that post didn’t gain more traction). At first, I thought children, convenience, and being cheap was like that – you can usually get two out of the three square. On further reflection, I actually don’t think these three things form a triangle – usually what’s best for your children is what’s most convenient and often that prevents you from getting things for cheap. It’s more like an acute angle…or something.

The bottom line is, kids, even the well behaved ones, are more or less completely unpredictable wildcards. That means when I am planning our family travel, I need to minimize all other possible wildcards that can be thrown into the equation. Every extra connection is a potential wildcard, every extra piece of luggage, flight times, or even gambling on grabbing an empty row. Obviously, travel disruptions are something you can’t account for, but you can minimize their potential hazard by doing things like scheduling a nonstop flight.

So I’ve started to come up with some general rules of thumb for myself until my kids are old enough to handle more. I of course reserve the right to break all of these rules to get into the Lufthansa First Class Terminal.

1) One layover maximum – stringing together two smooth flights with one child is pretty difficult. My guess is stringing together two smooth flights with two children is an even rarer occurrence (remember I’m dealing with an infant and a toddler). Three smooth flights with two children seems like a statistical impossibility. Luckily we can fly direct to both Europe and Asia now, which leads to my next rule.

2) No one night stays, unless being used to break up the journey – at this point, I think a one night stay is just crazy. By the time you finish loading everything into your hotel room (and we try to travel pretty light even post family expansion), it’s time to load it back again. I can see us doing this if we have to string two long flights together in a row, but if we’re already in our final country of destination, two nights per hotel minimum. Can’t mess around checking into the hotel across the street to accrue stays with toddlers in tow.

3) For now, traveling as a family, not the destination, is the priority – this is tough and I’ll probably get push back from my wife about this, rightfully so. Personally, I just want us to go somewhere, and I’d rather prioritize that (and, say, take a direct flight) than prioritize where we are going. My wife’s counterpoint likely will be that if it’s not a destination worth going to then what is the point of going through all the trouble in the first place? Which is a fair point – I’m not going to take my kids to the opera just to take them there (extreme example).

I bet M misses drinking in the First Class Terminal too — Preferably our one layover gets us into the FCT

4) Points “maximizing” will have to take a seat on the backburner for a little while – I’m no longer going to try to squeeze every cent of value out of my points. You have to understand, I kind of have a backwards philosophy when it comes to my points. Like, if I spend 62.5K to fly with a connection to Hungary I tell myself that’s more valuable than spending 62.5K to fly direct to London. Yes, that’s a stupid way to look at things, and I’ll need to stop doing that. It also means that if I can grab two saver seats and pay for one standard to keep the family together, I’ll do that (I fully believe in “splitting the team”, but that’s when the team is a bit older). It also means that I’ve been focusing more on cashback so we can buy coach flights to domestic destinations instead of focusing my game solely on premium international redemptions.

5) If I have to pay a change fee to make things work better for us, I’ll do it – this is kind of a weird one. But the question is, is it worth a couple hundred of dollars to have a less stressful flight? Three years ago I’d have said no way – now? I think it can definitely be worth it. A lot of times, a flight can set the tone for your entire trip, a rough outbound journey can set you back mentally on your vacation for days. With two kids, nobody can take a break since it’s almost always 1v1. So if at any point I think the itinerary we’ve strung together is too stressful, and paying a little bit of money can offset that, then that’s probably what I’m going to do.

Final Thoughts

As always, I recognize that we are blessed with two solid paying jobs and the ability to take these luxuries. Ultimately, what I’m saying is this. For our family, if we want to prioritize traveling with our children, we’re going to also have to prioritize convenience for the time being. That might mean not being able to emphasize being cheap for awhile. In the end, that’s something I’m happy to live with if it means I get the chance to broaden my kids’ horizons.

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts about how they balance cheapness and convenience once they have children in the mix. And of course, the biggest problem a lot of people might have with all of this is – why bother dragging your kids around the world in the first place? But more on that later.

This is crazy enough. Might as well make our travel more convenient

Jul 15 2015

Daring to Disney: Making Disney Dining Reservations

Until FT4RL2, I didn’t even realize that making reservations at Disney World was a thing people did (thanks to Leslie from Trips with Tykes for giving me one more thing to obsess about!). So I’ve been anxiously awaiting the 180 day mark to make dining reservations. In preparation I enjoyed reading my favorite food blogger’s Disney series, though in the end I had to make decisions based on a party with a 6 month old and a 3 year old (and two grandparents!).

I started this series as a first time Disney planner – this is the first time I’m going as an adult in charge of the itinerary. I learned a few things along the way to making dining reservations (I started out doing things the hard way), so this post is about how I went about making Disney dining reservations and some ideas I have to streamline the process for beginners.

Deciding where to eat

I’ve honestly forgotten all of the links that I’ve read to figure out where to eat. I started just by googling “Disney dining toddler” and went from there. I basically just wanted to get a feel for what was out there and which restaurants are the toughest to make reservations at.

What I ended up doing was just deciding what types of meals I was looking for and choosing places to eat based on that. I considered putting it out to Twitter but decided against it – when I get inundated with stuff on my timeline I have trouble processing it. Instead, feel free to inundate me in the comments with recommendations!

So these were my priorities – a character meal (or two), something fun at Epcot, a date meal for my wife and myself, and other than that overall fun experiences for M. I figure H, the six month old, isn’t going to care.

Looks pretty nice! (Matt Stroshane, photographer | wdwnews.com)

I ultimately decided on Chef Mickey’s for the character meal – I’m sure there are less crowded meals but I think the combo of a monorail ride plus meeting characters is going to be big for the toddler. Also, Jess and I are slightly concerned that she might be scared by them (she loved Hello Kitty at LAX but was younger then). What I did was book Chef Mickey’s for lunch on our first day and then I also reserved a breakfast at Chef Mickey’s towards the end of our trip. That way, if she keeps bugging us about seeing characters we can go back. Right now she only really knows who the mice are, so it’s not like I have to take her to see princesses or any other random characters – so I decided tried and true is the way to go. Apparently Chef Mickey’s features the Fab Five – Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Pluto, Goofy.

For a fun meal at Epcot, I booked a lunch for us at the Biergarten in the Germany pavilion at Epcot. This was mostly for nostalgia reasons, a throwback to our time in Germany this time last year. The Biergarten features a live music show which I figure M will be into and it should be loud enough to be suitable for H. It was a toss up between this and Via Napoli – I ultimately decided that the Biergarten will be a more fun experience overall for everyone. I ended up making a dinner restaurant at Via Napoli for another time just in case.

For the date meal, I went with Le Cellier in Epcot – a steakhouse featured in the Canada pavilion of all places. I really went for this just because everyone seemed to say it was really difficult to get reservations at. What can I say, I’m a sucker for a challenge. I booked a 7 PM dinner for us in the hopes that we can step out at 9 PM to see the Illuminations show. I figure you can’t really screw up a steak, right? I also thought that out of all the fine dining experiences available, avoiding a tasting menu could save a lot of time. Finally, this is a good way for me to spend more time at Epcot nerding out.

I booked a couple of other random reservations – T-REX and Wolfgang Puck Grand Cafe for a couple of dinners and Be Our Guest for lunch. Out of those three, I’m only really wed to eating lunch at Be Our Guest – I think M will really enjoy eating in a castle (and I know Jess will enjoy the Beauty and the Beast atmosphere). Overall I’m just trying to eat at Disney branded places that will blow M’s mind.

Balancing dining reservations with an overall itinerary

If you’re thinking “Man, he seems to have made a lot of dining reservations”, you’re right. The issue is, 180 days out, I still don’t have a clear picture of what parks we are going to be in on what days. You can’t double book reservations, so what I tried to do was spread out reservations to give us maximum flexibility when I finally drill down what parks we’ll visit on what days. So for example I have two reservations at the Biergarten for two separate days. You have to cancel before 24 hours in order to avoid a $10 charge per person.

There was one decision I made before making dining reservations. I had to decide whether to book restaurants at parks on Extra Magic Hour days or not. The benefit of Extra Magic Hours is obviously the time in the parks for people staying at Disney Resorts only, the drawback is in general those days tend to be more crowded overall (or so I’ve read). Ultimately, I decided to avoid Extra Magic Hour days. My reasoning is, with two kids under the age of three it’s going to be tough to get to the early morning hour, and with bedtimes at 8 PM (which we’d push for like fireworks maybe one night), it’s pretty much pointless for us to stay in the parks until 10 PM.

Chef Mickey’s looks like an awesome place to meet characters and grab a meal (Matt Stroshane, photographer | wdwnews.com)

I am still deciding, however, about whether to get park hoppers on our tickets. We don’t really need it by any means, I’m likely seriously overestimating M’s stamina, but spread out over a six day ticket it’s only $10/day. Would it be worth $40 (4 adult tickets) for Jess and I to go to Le Cellier on a day we’re not at Epcot? Or to sneak into the Magic Kingdom just for the fireworks at 8 PM? Something I’m still deciding and the subject of another post one day.

I also didn’t make any reservations for Hollywood Studios – I’m starting to lean towards not going at all. The kids are just too young at this point (though that’s another argument for park hopper – I could just run over there and ride the Tower of Terror, the only ride at that park I remember from my childhood, haha).

Why I shouldn’t have made reservations online and just called

OK, so I’m kind of stupid. For a few nights, I was logging in at midnight every night to make dining reservations. This is a great time for me to mention that Disney’s website sucks, at least for me. I get all these timeout issues and half the time I tried to make reservations I’d get this error:

I’d have to keep refreshing and trying again until available times showed up. I also am stupid in the sense that I really, really hate talking to human beings. This is kind of unfair to the “magical” Disney staff since every time I’ve called they’ve been amazing, but I really didn’t want to call and make reservations.

So, 180 days before the first night we are going to be at Disney, I logged in and made a reservation. The next night, I logged in and made reservations for the next day of our trip. I did this for four days straight, but I noticed that some restaurants were already booked or only had weird times (like 1:20 PM at the Biergarten).

Pros like Dia and Haley already know what I did wrong. If you have a reservation at a Disney property, you can make dining reservations for your entire trip starting 180 days from your first night. Woops! Now, I’ve since realized that when logged in, you can see this online:

It's possible to make reservations more than 180 days in advance as long as you are 180 days from your first night in a Disney property — It’s possible to make reservations more than 180 days in advance as long as you are 180 days from your first night in a Disney property

I took this screenshot on July 14th, so technically I should have only been able to book up until 1/10. Now the kicker is, I always thought I was logged in, but my session just kept timing out and the Disney website doesn’t prompt you to log back in.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and just do what I did when I figured this out. Bite the bullet and call in. A friendly representative helped me book four dining reservations in about ten minutes for the entire back end of my trip. As long as you know what restaurants you are looking for and what times, this is a much more streamlined process.

Final Thoughts

I think I’ve probably overbought into the hype of Disney dining. I’m likely going to cancel some reservations before we get there, but it was an informative experience to book dining to say the least. I think this is really helping me to frame our trip – I’m starting to drill down on which parks I want us to visit on which days. Just don’t do what I did and book day by day – call in and do it all at once!

Other Posts in this Series

Flights, Hotel, and Car

Making Disney Dining Reservations

Saving Money on Disney Tickets

Using Touring Plans (the non-touring plan parts)

Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Saving money by staying off site

When a Disney annual pass makes sense

Touring Epcot attractions with a toddler

Touring Animal Kingdom with a toddler

One perfect day at the Magic Kingdom

Dining Reviews

Tips for parents of toddlers and infants

Things I wished I knew before I went to Disney

May 27 2015

Daring to Disney: Flights, Hotel, and Car

We're fixing to see the Orlando version of this — We’re fixing to see the Orlando version of this

If you follow me on Twitter or exist within a 50 mile radius of my location, you probably are annoyed by the fact that I’ve been all Disney all the time. I will not deny or apologize for my obsessiveness – it pays off – but I will give a couple reasons for my Disney obsession in this case.

1) I’ve loved Disney World since I was a kid – my parents took me four (or five?) times but I haven’t been since I was a teenager.

2) The way I operate is I need to plan vacations far out in advance, otherwise I panic and overpay.

3) After August, for various reasons, I likely will not step foot on another plane until this trip which is scheduled for January. That kind of layoff is something I cannot abide so I need to make sure this trip happens.

4) It took six years of being my annoying, childish, “Can we go, mom?” self (and 1.5 kids) to convince Jess to go to Disney. I would have gone for our honeymoon if allowed (okay that’s a bit of hyperbole).

Anyway, as I started planning the trip I’ve been receiving a lot of tips and help on Twitter and elsewhere – Leslie, Dia, Haley, and Franklin’s Dad in the forum have been particularly helpful.

Processing all the options at Disney, at least for someone obsessive like me, can be a bit like drinking from a firehose, so I thought I’d write a trip report about planning Disney for a family as a first-timer. I’ll check in from time to time about the planning process – hopefully it will help others save some time! I’m also going for a personal record for trip report length – 7 months. That’s a poorly formed joke in case that wasn’t clear.

BTW, this is what I aspire to – the real pros:

@asthejoeflies @TheDealMommy @TripsWithTykes I can do a full itinerary in a day. The trick is you need to plan at least 6 months out
— Resist Vote Vaccinate not feeling calm rn (@BachFancy) May 9, 2015

Flights

Booking flights was easy this time. I set up a Kayak alert for our dates with a target in mind – <$250 for a nonstop flight. When I first set it up flights were pricing out at $280.

You know how to set one of these up, right? — Kayak alerts are still one of the easiest ways to monitor airfares

Now normally I might set my ceiling lower, like $225 or something, but like I said above, I wanted to lock something in as soon as possible. Sure enough a couple weeks back the price dropped to $250 so I pulled the trigger on three cash tickets. I paid for them with my Citi Prestige – splitting things up so that I could get the $250 airline credit on one ticket and use points for the rest.

In terms of planning, I set it up so we’d arrive at noon and depart at noon – ideal times for flying with our toddler (who, by the way, is also anxious to get back in the air!).

Hotel

There are a ton of options for hotels – enough to make your head spin. Originally, I booked a room at the Swan (or was it the Dolphin?) using my SPG points, but Dia convinced me otherwise (via this post and Twitter). So it was back to the drawing board.

Basically the main deciding factor for hotels, in my mind, were convenience/theming vs. price. If you stay on-site, you can sign up for Fastpass 60 days in advance (instead of 30), you can ride free shuttle buses (including to/from the airport), parking is free if you rent a car, you get more of a Disney “experience” due to hotel theming (and the promotional materials they send you).

The welcome package really builds excitement (Image via Touring Plans)

On top of that, there’s this (which will matter since we’re going in January):

@asthejoeflies all disney pools are heated to 82 year round. Benefit on staying on site
— Dia Adams (@TheDiaAdams) May 9, 2015

Righty-o. Of course, you’re going to be paying a premium of 40-50% or more as opposed to staying off site. And if you stay off site you can get Air BnBs or condos or all that.

Ultimately, however, I decided to book two rooms at the Port Orleans Riverside (my parents are coming with). We got a rate of $190/night – not amazing but I plan on waiting to see if they post any hotel deals since we’re going in a fairly dead time. At this point we are so far ahead of the game that you can’t even book the hotel online right now (I had to call, the phone agents were lovely FWIW).

I had to make a one night deposit on each room but the hotel is fully refundable so if a deal comes along I’m just going to cancel and rebook (Hotel Strategy 101).

Here’s my thinking. The value properties are probably too motel-y for us to stay in. The deluxe ones are way too baller – I can’t justify $300/night even though I would love to step out of my room right onto the monorail.

Still, I want to stay on-site to get 60 day Fastpass. I also plan to take advantage of the free shuttle – we are renting a car and will use that mainly, but only one car for all of us so if split up it will be useful to have transportation to and from the parks.

Why Port Orleans: Riverside? Well, Dia and Franklin’s Dad both recommended it, plus I liked this website. I like that it has a ton of pools, a food court, and M will love the boat to Downtown Disney. Plus, again, it’s nice to have transportation options beyond our rental car.

So that’s my decision for now but we’ll see how things change. Leslie did tell me this when I asked her if it was cheaper to get a Disney package or buy piecemeal:

@asthejoeflies @TheDealMommy @BachFancy depends. package deals can be good value. Disney travel agents can actually be really good choice
— Leslie Harvey (@TripsWithTykes) May 8, 2015

Packages for January won’t be open until mid-June (according to the phone agents) so I’ll re-evaluate then. Until then, I’m happy with my decisions! And Jess is happy I have stopped bugging her about whether I can book or not. And M is happy she gets to visit the “little mouse”. Everybody wins.

Car

Just a short note here – for now I have a minivan Autoslashed from MCO. We’ll see how this changes as things get closer in.

Final Thoughts

Even though Haley can do it in a day, it took me almost two weeks to put together this tentative itinerary to Disney. Disney can be super intimidating, at the same time, I like type A-ing this stuff. Hopefully the trip is as fun as the planning – January can’t come soon enough! I’ll update every once in awhile as my itinerary evolves and changes. Until then, feel free to shoot me advice in the comments or on Twitter – would love to hear it!

Other Posts in this Series

Flights, Hotel, and Car

Making Disney Dining Reservations

Saving Money on Disney Tickets

Using Touring Plans (the non-touring plan parts)

Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Saving money by staying off site

When a Disney annual pass makes sense

Touring Epcot attractions with a toddler

Touring Animal Kingdom with a toddler

One perfect day at the Magic Kingdom

Dining Reviews