Continuing the fun at the Family Travel for Real Life (#FT4RL) conference, and continuing the live blogging! I hope that you will follow along with me as we learn about family travel, and how those of us with families can take part in it with their families. See below for the lineup of speakers and follow us throughout the day with hashtag #FT4RL on Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest.
- Family travel conference this week (introduction)
- Dan from Points With a Crew: Panning for Gold in Category 1: Hotel Tips, Tricks, and Steals
- Trevor from Tagging Miles and Kenny from Miles4More on Creative Ways to Earn Miles and Points
- Jeff the Wanderer on getting the most out of your miles
- Haley Bach on Disney Debunked: Making Friends with the Mouse
- Rich Kerr on Asian Destinations with Families
- What you missed by not attending #FT4RL this weekend
Haley is another speaker that I had not yet met in person, though we had “talked” via Twitter, and she did once comment on my blog that if she was “sitting next to [me] during an evacuation and you go for your bag under your seat I will smack you upside the head. Hard.” (and she was correct to say so – I have rethought my airplane emergency stance). Leslie from Trips with Tykes gave a good presentation on Disney last time, and I’m definitely taking notes as our family (hopefully!) has a Disney trip in our future within the next year or two.
I am not a Disney expert by any means, so please forgive any transcription errors as I try to take notes here 🙂
Going to Disney
Before the presentation started, Dia and Haley spoke a little to the Disney naysayers – just commenting that if you’re not a Disney fan, to at least keep an open mind
Going to Disney is not unlike other vacations – you have to plan your transportation, lodging and other things – the only real difference is that you do need to be a bit more organized in planning your activities
Walt Disney World is big (about the size of Paris or Washington) and a trip to Disney requires a good plan and deserves a full week
Disney Planning 101 (travel hacker style)
- Create 2 MyDisneyExperience accounts – the goal with this is to get 2 sets of Disney Bands – in order to get a full set of Magic Bands
- Under Account A book 65 days out
- Under account B book the real dates, hopefully over 181 days out
- Once your Magic Bands arrive for Reservation A, then you can cancel the reservation
Planning when to go and where to stay
Haley was a proponent of taking your kids out to go to Disney (I know some others disagree, though I agree with her). She suggests the April-May timeframe.
Here’s the Disney Swan – bookable with SPG points
There is also a big running debate of whether to stay onsite or stay offsite, but is swinging back to staying onsite because of the benefits that Disney offers when you stay onsite (like being able to book your FastPasses 60 days in advance instead of 30 days. If you want to see Elsa or Anna, or ride the Mine Train, you pretty much have to stay onsite, because those FastPasses will be gone at the 30 day mark.
Off-property – some options are:
- Swan / Dolphin bookable with SPG points
- Good Neighbor hotels
- Every big hotel chain
- Many non-chain hotels
- Rental homes
- Timeshare units.
- etc. etc.
Using Manufactured Spend on Disney Gift Cards
One strategy is to use manufactured spending on Disney gift cards. Recently there was an Amex Sync offer for $30 off a $150 purchase and Lowe’s sells Disney gift cards. Even if you get Disney STORE gift cards, the Disney store sells Disney park tickets. Haley also shared a way to do a Disney gift card “merry go round” which would let you purchase Disney gift cards with a HUGE discount.
But then you’ll end up with a lot of small Disney gift cards – the easiest way to consolidate all these gift cards is to open a My Disney Savings Account and load the cards into the account
Then planning
At 181 days out, you can make your dining options
60-30 days out, you can book your Fast Passes
Then plan out your touring plans. Depending on how meticulous you want to be, there are a few sites out there that can help with creating a touring plan
Ride priority should be 100% about how fast the line builds. Rides or attractions that take longer to get people onto have the longest lines. Then, the next are rides that are popular and have a fixed number of riders per hour. Last (shortest line) are the less popular rides or attractions with huge capacity.
There is really SO much information about Disney out there!
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
Having gone to Disney World 3x’s this year and preparing for my 4th trip in Dec, I live in Philadelphia, u will save yourself so much grief if u take your kids out of school and go the last week in April or the Tuesday after thanksgiving or during the months of Jan – early March, zero waits in line and zero heat. I was there for my son’s 4 birthday and on his actually birthday April 22, the longest we waited was 5 minutes for a ride and booking restaurants was easy bc the parks were not crowded
I have to agree about taking the kids out to go to Disney. It is insanely busy during Christmas and spring break or other holidays and you pay top dollar on top of it. Most people who complain about Disney are the ones who suffered through that experience.
Maybe I missed it but the other reason for booking far out with fake dates it for the dining reservations. If you are in a disney hotel you can book 180 days out and you can book starting 180 days from the first day of reservation. Since you can book up to 10 days then effectively you can book up to 190 days out. I usually don’t go through the trouble of 2 different reservations though. If you book closer in be persistent and check every day(more than once!) because slots open up a lot as people change plans.
I would also add it pays to be a planner and an early riser. I find the lines are shortest during the first one to two hours. Nowadays it gets bad on weekends and towards evening(for the fireworks and the temperature) because of all of the locals with their annual passes showing up which is why I think Disney jacked up the price of annual passes recently.
I take full advantage of the sync offers for gift cards but I am curious about the merry go round method that you referenced. Care to share?
BTW a couple of tidbits you can just go online to disneygiftcard.com to consolidate gift cards. Any gift card can hold up to I believe $1000 even if you bought it for a fixed amount. I would hesitate to have that much on one card for security reasons after all its like cash. Also, the cards I usually see in the store are good for most things disney including disney cruise line, disneyland, disney world, etc. It should say on the back of the card.
Sorry Dan – it was decided that the Disney gift merry go round should stay off of blogs (in the interest of not killing it). You might have luck reaching out to Haley directly on Twitter (@BachFancy)
Understandable. I wasn’t expecting you to post it otherwise you would have done it already. I’ll give it a try although I am not holding my breath!
Good post. One correction. The Swan and Dolphin, while not Disney owned, are indeed on property. They are situated right in between EPCOT and Hollywood Studios and are about a 10 minute walk away. They share many of the same benefits as Disney owned hotels, but not all.
I am on a Disney saving Facebook group, and one thing they do is buy Target gift cards on Raise, and then use them to buy Disney gift cards online to get an additional 5% off from their REDcard. While I don’t do the Raise step, I collect Target gift cards from in store promotions, Swagbucks, Shopkick, and Louder to essentially stockpile Disney gift cards for free.