Disney Gift Card Deals

[havaneselover]

Went to Alaska on a cruise with NCL a few years ago. Are you going DCL and getting Dis GC's for that?

Depending on the cruise line you might find it a lot cheaper to book excursions on your own as some lines mark them way way up. On 2 excursions alone we saved a total of $300 for 3 of us (2 adults and 1 child) by booking ourselves. One was the train/shuttle combo to the Yukon in Skagway, we used an outside vendor, and the other was the Aleutian Ballard Deadliest Catch Crab Boat tour in Ketchikan and we booked directly with them

We had a blast in Alaska and want to go back and do it again.

We're doing all of our excursions independently except for the Tracy Arm excursion which has to be booked through DCL. For the three of us it's $780 (which is a huge splurge for me). We did book a float plane to Misty Fjords and whale watching in Juneau independently and are renting a car in Skagway. Value is so much better than going through Disney.

 

[bbsearchlight]

I booked my trip though a travel agent that offers
Special discounts. Way way below anything I could get with orbitz, which has otherwise been my go to booking method. The TA takes disney gift cards as payment.

This quarter my chase freedom card is offering chase pay as a bonus category, 7500 points worth 75 dollars in cash, or as I plan to use them with my other sapphire reserve card to buy my disney tickets at 1.5 cents per point, $112.50. This is on $1500 worth of disney gc purchased at Best Buy.

I also do the Swagbucks thing- 600 Swagbucks per $50 purchase. So a total of $180 on the $1500 in disney gift cards.

So I’m getting $212.50 back on my $1500 purchase. That’s 14%. Its 112 dollars toward my tickets and enough sb cashed out to pay for my ohana dinner and a few drinks or snacks.

It’s worth it to me. It’s not that much work. I did it over 5 trips to Best Buy, 6 separate transactions each time

thanks so much for the breakdown, it really helps so I (and everyone else) can understand how you get these ndiscounts and then see if they would apply in our situation.

 

[pillow]

@bbsearchlight is right in that fuel points are not really travel hacking. If anything, this could be "life hacking". Need to buy a grill? First get Visa gift cards at Kroger and then spend those at Home Depot. Need to buy a car? First buy gift cards then use those on the spend. The problem with these is that they're very capped. @FoxC63 you said buy $250 in GC and you'll save $35 (14%!) but that's not realistic. Unless you're regularly filling an RV, you're not going to buy 35 gallons at $1 off. And you've only accumulated $250 for the effort involved. A more realistic fill (and saving-sites recommend) using a value between 15 and 20 gallons, whatever you typically fill. This could make the savings only $15 or 6%.

Point is you should do this in everyday life. If you weren't taking a Disney trip, you should still do this to get enough gift cards to fund your daily life. Since this is capped at a level where you cannot fund your entire life, allocating the savings to Disney instead of whatever else you bought is simply claiming you saved on Disney trips when you would have saved this anyways on something else.

Last, these savings are only valid if Kroger has the cheapest fuel in town. $1 off at Kroger may only be $.80 below a cheaper stations' prices.

Life hacking - yes! My goal is to save as much as possible. But life includes travel. I think @bbsearchlight makes a good point about the Visa gc at Kroger. That discount is locked in. You can choose to purchase gift cards at BB with your "discounted" Visa cards or you could go get a haircut. If you purchase BB cards instead of your haircut, you are basically opting not to get a discount on "life" but to get a discount on travel. So, that isn't really saving anything is it? Since the opportunity cost of using the discounted gc at BB is to pay full price for your haircut. Unless of course, one has a plethora of Visa gift card and can do BOTH, which is entirely possible! To save the most on a yearly basis, I think it makes sense to use cards with bonus category spend where you can, then use whatever "discounted" Visa/MC gift cards you have on everything else. I think we're pretty much saying the same thing.

I will disagree with your statement that the 14% gas savings is unrealistic. Like @havaneselover, I do it most months. We take the minivan to fill and then use gas cans for the remaining - so we always get 35 gallons. Our local Kroger does not cap fuel redemptions at $1. On our last fill-up we used 270 fuel points for gas that cost $2.75. Kroger isn't the cheapest gas near us, and I do take that into account when calculating savings. However, the difference is very small.

@bbsearchlight - I don't think there is anything wrong with someone posting about their own savings rates. They are personal, true, but they give others ideas on how they could save, which is the entire point of this thread. We should all learn from each other. If something isn't realistic for me, then I move on. But I will say that I've learned a lot here, and many posts (including yours), make me think differently. It would be a shame if people stopped sharing just because they thought their situation might not apply to someone else.

 

[Limes96]

@bbsearchlight is right in that fuel points are not really travel hacking. If anything, this could be "life hacking". Need to buy a grill? First get Visa gift cards at Kroger and then spend those at Home Depot. Need to buy a car? First buy gift cards then use those on the spend. The problem with these is that they're very capped. @FoxC63 you said buy $250 in GC and you'll save $35 (14%!) but that's not realistic. Unless you're regularly filling an RV, you're not going to buy 35 gallons at $1 off. And you've only accumulated $250 for the effort involved. A more realistic fill (and saving-sites recommend) using a value between 15 and 20 gallons, whatever you typically fill. This could make the savings only $15 or 6%.

Point is you should do this in everyday life. If you weren't taking a Disney trip, you should still do this to get enough gift cards to fund your daily life. Since this is capped at a level where you cannot fund your entire life, allocating the savings to Disney instead of whatever else you bought is simply claiming you saved on Disney trips when you would have saved this anyways on something else.

Last, these savings are only valid if Kroger has the cheapest fuel in town. $1 off at Kroger may only be $.80 below a cheaper stations' prices.

This is all very true, but it does happen to be the way I save for our Disney trips. It doesn't seem that far fetched to me to use the fuel points for $35 off per fill up (the full amt possible) but then I live in a rural area with lots of grass to cut and four drivers in the family. I wouldn't bother with the method if I didn't save a lot. But even for us, I can't use more than 3,000...4,000 at the most in fuel points each month. And I'd certainly continue doing this even if I weren't planning a Disney trip though we tend to use enough gas that we do both - gift cards for Disney AND gift cards for other stuff we need/use. So it's not necessarily either/or. Like most things, there's no one plan that will work for everyone in saving money on Disney. We all have our favorite methods.

I don't think we want to discourage anyone from contributing their thoughts/ideas/info to this thread. We all just take from it what is useful for us personally and hopefully we can all help each other out. I've benefited from everybody's input and I particularly am interested when bbsearchlight posts because it seems to always be solid info that has been helpful to me in the past. No fluff, just the facts. Anyways, thanks everybody for your info!

 

[MrInfinity]

In my area, you are not limited to $1 off / gallon. So right now I can use 2,700 fuel points / fill up. I easily fill up three times per month, so I have no problem spending 8,000 fuel points a month. So for me, these limits don't really apply. Again, I've never seen anyone claim their situation isn't unique.

Even so. You would do this anyways even if you weren't taking a trip. It's savings. But it's not Disney-savings.

Say in a month you bought the Kroger deal 4 times. So $1000 in GC. And you got, as a result, $1 off gas 4 times. Say you fill $20 (or $35 whatever it doesn't matter). $20 saved 4x is $80 saved (or $140). Fine.

Now in that month say you bought...
Disney for $1000
Food worth $1000
Shopping worth $1000
Bills worth $1000

And your monthly spend is maybe $4k. Out of those, do you claim the $80 or $140 saved toward your Disney spend? If so why? There is no compelling reason to. You would still do the savings if not going to Disney World at all, and you'd have saved 14% on maybe Food that month. Right? Or you saved 14% on your bills. Whatever you spend. There is no reason to call this "Disney savings" except that you are choosing to allocate the savings there and therefore saved less on other stuff. It's simply shuffling savings to make it look like your trips cost less (but daily life cost more). This is not what I look for in savings, and the point (I think) @bbsearchlight was making. I don't want to take savings I'd otherwise get and allocate them to Disney just to make it look like I got my Disney trips cheaper. I want to actually get my Disney trips cheaper on top of things I'd do otherwise.

You can choose to purchase gift cards at BB with your "discounted" Visa cards or you could go get a haircut. If you purchase BB cards instead of your haircut, you are basically opting not to get a discount on "life" but to get a discount on travel. So, that isn't really saving anything is it? Since the opportunity cost of using the discounted gc at BB is to pay full price for your haircut. Unless of course, one has a plethora of Visa gift card and can do BOTH, which is entirely possible! To save the most on a yearly basis, I think it makes sense to use cards with bonus category spend where you can, then use whatever "discounted" Visa/MC gift cards you have on everything else. I think we're pretty much saying the same thing.

Yep.

 

[pillow]

Even so. You would do this anyways even if you weren't taking a trip. It's savings. But it's not Disney-savings.

Say in a month you bought the Kroger deal 4 times. So $1000 in GC. And you got, as a result, $1 off gas 4 times. Say you fill $20 (or $35 whatever it doesn't matter). $20 saved 4x is $80 saved (or $140). Fine.

Now in that month say you bought...
Disney for $1000
Food worth $1000
Shopping worth $1000
Bills worth $1000

And your monthly spend is maybe $4k. Fine. Out of those, do you claim the $80 or $140 saved toward your Disney spend? If so why? There is no compelling reason to. You would still do the savings if not going to Disney World at all, and you'd have saved 14% on maybe Food that month. Right? Or you saved 14% on your bills. Whatever you spend. There is no reason to call this "Disney savings" except that you are choosing to allocate the savings there and therefore allocate having saved less on other stuff. It's simply shuffling savings to make it look like your trips cost less (but daily life cost more). This is not what I look for in savings, and the point (I think) @bbsearchlight was making. I don't want to simply take savings I'd otherwise get in life and allocate them to Disney just to make it look like I got my Disney trips cheaper. I want to actually get my Disney trips cheaper on top of things I'd do otherwise.


Yep.

In other words, its an opportunity cost thing. I agree with you. However, I think the scenarios you've described above actually does fulfill your goal of getting Disney cheaper on top of things you'd do other wise. In your scenario, monthly life budget is actually $3K. The extra $1K for Disney cards is extra.

 

[havaneselover]

Even so. You would do this anyways even if you weren't taking a trip. It's savings. But it's not Disney-savings.

Say in a month you bought the Kroger deal 4 times. So $1000 in GC. And you got, as a result, $1 off gas 4 times. Say you fill $20 (or $35 whatever it doesn't matter). $20 saved 4x is $80 saved (or $140). Fine.

Now in that month say you bought...
Disney for $1000
Food worth $1000
Shopping worth $1000
Bills worth $1000

And your monthly spend is maybe $4k. Out of those, do you claim the $80 or $140 saved toward your Disney spend? If so why? There is no compelling reason to. You would still do the savings if not going to Disney World at all, and you'd have saved 14% on maybe Food that month. Right? Or you saved 14% on your bills. Whatever you spend. There is no reason to call this "Disney savings" except that you are choosing to allocate the savings there and therefore saved less on other stuff. It's simply shuffling savings to make it look like your trips cost less (but daily life cost more). This is not what I look for in savings, and the point (I think) @bbsearchlight was making. I don't want to take savings I'd otherwise get and allocate them to Disney just to make it look like I got my Disney trips cheaper. I want to actually get my Disney trips cheaper on top of things I'd do otherwise.


Yep.

The opportunity cost is not relevant to me because I can use so many fuel points and my expenses are fairly low. That’s my personal situation.

 

[Texans_loyal]

I guess it depends on the situation, but I personally don't feel it is worth it to buy the gift cards from Best Buy. Many Disney hotels can be gotten cheaper using promo codes on Orbitz and park tickets can be cheaper through Undercover Tourist. Only thing left is food and I can cover that with gift cards from Target at the 10% off day in December or gift cards that I get through Amex offers.

In the situation above, the person said they were planning a last minute trip - In that situation, the small savings from Best Buy might be worth it.

Every situation really is different. If Orbitz is offering a better discount than my AP then I will book with Orbitz. In this case, MNSSHP AP price is cheaper than UT and orbitz. I saved $225 with BB, It was the best option.

 

[grumpy28]

I'm sitting here feeling like Patrick Star reading some of this.

 

[kristenrice]

I save 100% on my Disney gift cards....I never buy them. I always redeem Swagbucks, MyPoints, Shopkicks, Fetch rewards, etc for gift cards or PayPal and then turn those gift cards into Disney gift cards. So my out-of-pocket cost for my Disney gift cards is $0.

If you want to get even more technical, I actually "make" money! I can redeem 2200 SB (which only have a value of $22) for a $25 Target gift card and I turn it into a $25 Disney gift card. I can also redeem $50 in SB for PayPal, buy a Disney gift card from BestBuy with that money, using the QR code and earn $6 back in SB plus $3 in BB rewards as an Elite Plus member.

So everybody's scenario is definitely different. I have not taken money out of my bank account to buy a Disney gift card and I have almost $1200 ready to take on my trip in October. I've been saving since I got back from my last trip in October 2017.

 

[havaneselover]

I'm sitting here feeling like Patrick Star reading some of this.

I had to google that

 

[Carrie Ellis]

I save 100% on my Disney gift cards....I never buy them. I always redeem Swagbucks, MyPoints, Shopkicks, Fetch rewards, etc for gift cards or PayPal and then turn those gift cards into Disney gift cards. So my out-of-pocket cost for my Disney gift cards is $0.

If you want to get even more technical, I actually "make" money! I can redeem 2200 SB (which only have a value of $22) for a $25 Target gift card and I turn it into a $25 Disney gift card. I can also redeem $50 in SB for PayPal, buy a Disney gift card from BestBuy with that money, using the QR code and earn $6 back in SB plus $3 in BB rewards as an Elite Plus member.

So everybody's scenario is definitely different. I have not taken money out of my bank account to buy a Disney gift card and I have almost $1200 ready to take on my trip in October. I've been saving since I got back from my last trip in October 2017.

I just started SB and I am only at 750 (about 1 1/2 weeks). How do you ever get enough? I let the videos roll everyday until I hit my max for the day. I do a few surveys but many end up only giving me 1 SB. I don't buy a lot of stuff so really no reason to shop a lot. Most groceries I buy is at Kroger but maybe I should do groceries through Walmart through SBs for now on?

I am trying! I just can't spend hours and hours, I have to work too!

Carrie

 

[Carrie Ellis]

Another question...can you use Walmart gift cards at Sams to buy the Disney gift cards? Asking since the Walmart one only requires 2200 SB.

 

[FoxC63]

@bbsearchlight is right in that fuel points are not really travel hacking. If anything, this could be "life hacking". [/QUOTE

Nope! How frustrating to read your thoughts about my business on this thread. You don't know me and I sure don't know you.

As stated on this thread many times over my husband and I fill up at the same time so we get the $35 in savings - all the time. I don't drive an RV I drive a Ford F150 and if we have to bring gas cans with us we do. I don't know where you get a savings of $0.80 vs a $1.00 it's never been that much of a difference.

The purchases I make at Kroger then at BB using SB plus being a member of BB and earning reward certificates are a huge savings and works for us just fine. For a single person with a small tank or a couple with small tanks I agree this method is questionable. If you fit that description then use yourself as an example and leave me out of it. Thanks!

 

[FoxC63]

I'm sitting here feeling like Patrick Star reading some of this.

Wanna share a bucket

 

[FoxC63]

On a happier note:

You Can Get $1.50 Ice Cream Cones at Baskin-Robbins All Day Today Thursday, May 31st and every month that ends with 31 days in 2018.

Link: https://hip2save.com/2018/05/30/baskin-robbins-ice-cream-scoops-only-1-50-may-31st-only/

 

[kristenrice]

I just started SB and I am only at 750 (about 1 1/2 weeks). How do you ever get enough? I let the videos roll everyday until I hit my max for the day. I do a few surveys but many end up only giving me 1 SB. I don't buy a lot of stuff so really no reason to shop a lot. Most groceries I buy is at Kroger but maybe I should do groceries through Walmart through SBs for now on?

I am trying! I just can't spend hours and hours, I have to work too!

Carrie

I work as a paramedic so when I am just sitting point (which can be for just minutes or hours on end), I use the mobile app to try the surveys. I can usually get one a day. I took advantage of the coupon print bonuses which got me about 1000 SB over just a few days. I play SwagIQ and earn a few bonus SB ( I only rejoin if it costs less than 10). I participate in SWAGO and the team challenges. I do the nCraves, daily poll and I print and use a few coupons. I do some of the offers but only if they are products or services that I am actually going to use. For example, the Pura d'Or shampoo offer was a product that I actually needed so I bought it for $15 and got 2000 SB for it. I was able to do that offer twice. My husband signed up using my referral code so he does surveys and videos and I earn 10% of his earnings. When he does an offer (he did Dollar Shave Club) I get the 10% on those too. I really only "actively" participate in Swagbucks for about an hour a day. It's usually while I am watching TV or before I go to bed. The app has come in handy...nothing like doing surveys while sitting at a 3-hour track meet waiting for your child to run a 30-second race.

Let me clarify too...the $1200 is not ALL from Swagbucks. I also have a BestBuy Visa that earns 2% rewards on gas and dining and that lands me $10-$15/month alone. I also save my free-with-purchase gift cards from Target (about $5-$10/month) and I also scan my receipts with Fetch rewards (only have $15 total so far). I do MyPoints, but since they are owned by the same company that runs Swagbucks, I mainly just earn points with the paid emails.

For the most part, it's about staying consistent and keeping to a "schedule". Every morning, I get up and check my videos. I try to get a "set" running and while they are going, I do my daily poll and print a few coupons. As soon as I get some down time, I try to get a survey completed. I try to hit my first goal every day and then stretch it to 100 if I can. Just keep at it and remember that just 75 SB per day is enough to redeem for a $25 gift card every month.

 

[mum22girlz]

Another question...can you use Walmart gift cards at Sams to buy the Disney gift cards? Asking since the Walmart one only requires 2200 SB.

Yep - you sure can. I also used Walmart gift cards to purchase Southwest gift cards from Sam's Club this morning.

 

[pillow]

I had to google that

So did I - lol.

 

[grumpy28]

So did I - lol.

I had to google that

I hope y'all at least searched through SB to maybe earn a few SB!