Disney E-Gift Cards

[mab2012]

Not sure whether this is already widely know or long it's been available (it is listed on the website as "New and Exciting"), but Disney is now offering the option to purchase electronic gift cards at www.disneygiftcard.com. I know that the physical cards can't be shipped to Canada, so this might be of interest to some.

Paired with a no-forex credit card (eg. Amazon Visa), this offers a way to secure funds in advance at a more-or-less known rate while still avoiding a foreign exchange markup.

Usually I just charge my resort bill to the Amazon card, but I'm not confident that the CAD is not going to drop further before (or during) our trip in a couple of weeks, given the anticipated US rate hike at the March 15 meeting. So today I bought a gift card and will use that to pay for our meals and incidentals. Exchange rate isn't exactly fixed since I can't control when the charge is posted, but hopefully there won't be any significant downward move in the meantime.

Should have done this when I first thought of it a few weeks ago - I would have saved a few bucks!

 

[amw]

For those interested, I was able to order the e-gift card (birthday present for my daughter for when we go in August) with a little bit of tweaking:

You have to put in a shipping address even though its email delivery. It will reject the order at the last stage if Canadian address so I put in our hotel address. Then I tried to pay via PayPal. That also gets rejected since they recognize it's PayPal from Canada. SO i paid by credit card - making sure the shipping address was the US hotel, but the billing address was the correct Canadian one associated with the credit card -- and it worked! Received by email within a couple hours. It's a bar code gift card.

Seems like a lot of work but it's a gift from the Grandparents and she will love it way more than just getting cash.