We downgraded to regular and got citi double cash which is fee free and pays 2% on all purchases. What's the point of having DV with no perks!
I want this deal!$3,000 is a fantastic price for a BC/Poly split stay, by the way.I would not touch this deal. You are doing to have a great time. Those two resorts are awesome. Truly - this is a good deal.
Okay, so I tried to price out your trip dates and both the Poly and the BC are sold out for your dates, unless you want to switch to Poly club level for $736 per night. Free dining requires you to pay rack rate for your room, so staying at a deluxe resort isn't always worth it with free dining.
If you switched to a standard view room at CBR then it would cost you $3,719.68 to get a free dining reservation.
Its $19.57 per adult per night and $3.81 per child per night to upgrade. Do I win?!
Then I will adopt you to be my planning buddy
Here are some other things....mini fridge is smaller at the values and beds have cheaper pillows, blankets, and maytresses as well as smaller beds.Opinions please - it would be about $370 more to stay at CBR for our dates vs staying at All Stars and upgrading the FD to the regular plan (which is what we did last year)
We've only gone once before - last October and stayed value (pop) and it was fine. Good bus service, used the pool only 1x. DH Thinks the increased cost is worth it to have a bigger room and better pools for a second trip. I'm just seeing $$ add up and want to keep costs low
Anyone want to chime in and sway me one way or the other?
Sorry for the late response, it took me awhile to catch up with the posts! This thread will be the death of me. Also sorry because this is going to be a long post.
How many people do you have in each room and how long are you staying? I am going on my first solo tripbut just for kicks and future planning I decided to price out a trip with 2, 3, and 4 adults in each room to see where the break even point would be. The results were pretty crazy in favor of the military discount. This is for a 5 night/6 day trip with the 4-day Armed Force Disney ticket at ASSports. I also priced out 7 night stays adding in Universal tickets and the results were basically the same.
For the FD promotion, you have to pay the regular price for tickets and rack rate for the rooms and then of course get your food for free. For OOP, I priced out buying cereal and bowls/spoons at home, milk at the hotel store, one QS breakfast, an average QS lunch (no dessert), a snack, and an average QS dinner (no dessert). This is how I eat, I wouldn't be getting a dessert at every meal. Basically I allocated $35/person/night for food.
For a solo trip, I am saving $213 using the military discount.
For 2 people, the military discount saved $333 over a 5 night trip.
For 3 people, the military discount saved $391.
For 4 people, the military discount saved $449.
It's all about the huge savings from that military ticket. If you book a longer trip and need two AFS tickets per person, the savings go down. In that case, I started seeing FD having the advantage once I booked 4 people per room. If you stay at SOG everything gets even more skewed because you can get a huge room for very cheap but you lose out on some of the benefits of staying onsite. If you needed more than 8 days of tickets, you would probably be better off going with FD. And of course your results will vary based on how much people eat, whether you are willing to eat breakfast in the room, and which resort you stay at.
I hope this helps! There are a lot of factors when you start comparing normal discounts to military discounts, but the military discount is sooo generous that I think it's worth doing the work. Good luck!
One of the possible additions is my brother, who has colon cancer, and his going depends on his health at the time. 
Maybe we can start our own therapy and help threadI think we do too
Opinions please - it would be about $370 more to stay at CBR for our dates vs staying at All Stars and upgrading the FD to the regular plan (which is what we did last year)
We've only gone once before - last October and stayed value (pop) and it was fine. Good bus service, used the pool only 1x. DH Thinks the increased cost is worth it to have a bigger room and better pools for a second trip. I'm just seeing $$ add up and want to keep costs low
Anyone want to chime in and sway me one way or the other?
I used to mess around with the various "quarterly" 5% promotions on all of my various cards. In Oct/Nov of 2014 we got the Citi DoubleCash card and have not looked back! Love it! No jumping from one card to the other chasing the promos... Just straight 2% back on everything (if you pay it off each month, which we do)
Wow, thanks! You have really done your research
Right now, we have two rooms. Two people in one room and two adults/1 child in another. But we will be adding another room and two more adults into that room;the CM said we could have up to 3 rooms with the military discount.
Its very *possible* that there will be one other person added to the first room and another added to the third room as well, taking our grand total of people to 9. It makes me nervous thinking about planning for that many people.
So, with my dad being the military person, we only get 6 tickets. Three will be used by he and my mom and my brother. The other three will be for my son, daughter and her bff. But that leaves myself, dh and if she comes, my other daughter buying a normal ticket. This is where its confusing, because we are all benefitting from the room rate, but only half of us are benefiting from the ticket. I think I will sit down this afternoon and just run the numbers and do a cost analysis of each. We would definitely want to upgrade to the regular dining, I don't mind QS meals, but we do want some sit down meals during the trip. In that case, it might be worth the money to just upgrade to a mod.
Thanks so much for your detailed help!!
but I suspect you will come out best if you use military room + AFS ticket discount for two of the rooms and FD discount for one room (the one with the most people, especially Disney adults). If your brother were going and could buy the extra tickets, I would go with just using the mil discounts.
yes unfortunately you will have to switch to the updated pricing if you apply the free dining promo.
