TIMLEO007
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2003
- Messages
- 225
Hi everyone, I have been neglecting writing this after returning from our Jan 2014 trip as work family and life gets busy as we all know.
First of all as the title states, we are a family of eight.....yes thats right, so planning a trip to WDW, you can only imagine how much it would cost. I will try to be as detailed as possible, but remember this was almost 2 months ago now, so hard to remember specific meals etc.
Well here we go, hopefully this can help out others, not just large families. I am very budget oriented...not CHEAP, but love to get the best for the $$$.
Resort: Here is what we did. After figuring out that we would need 2 rooms at just about every resort to accommodate, I used this as leverage to sway my GF of 6yrs towards purchasing DVC( a long time dream of mine).
We have rented DVC points before as well and figured with ~$2200 to rent the points and nothing to show for afterwards, that pushed us to make the leap. We shopped DVC resales for a couple months and found the perfect contract. 289pts up front and 160pts/yr at SSR which seemed to have the best value/maint pts of the resorts, and home resort was not a big issue to us either. Our kids are 9-16yrs old so many years of DVC enjoyment to come. ~$13,000
Transportation: We live in NC so the next thing we needed to look into was transportation to FL. We have a large SUV that seats 8 of us, but no additional room for luggage and the thought of being in the car with all of us for 11hrs is not my idea of a "vacation". Flying is another option, but way too much $$$. Well unless you have the Southwest Chase Visa card and got 50,000 pts when you signed up. We had around 90,000 pts after 1yr and booked the flight the first week it was available on southwest. I would then check our flights about every other day after we booked and if the prices went down, rebooked and had the difference credited. I am not sure of the exact amount, but feel it was about 45000 pts for round trip airfare for us all!
Disney magical express for free......wow!!! not too shabby. FREE
Tickets: Tickets were the next expense. With 6 "kids" in the real world, and only one of those being Disney "child" age 3-9, we would need 7 adult tickets and 1 child ticket park hoppers of course, for 5 days. We did research and found about the Disney YES individual enrollment program and signed up for a class for us all. This did two things for us, not only the discount on the ticket which was nice, but all students, under 18 are able to get student tickets instead of adult tickets.....so only 2 adult tickets, and 6 students.....PLUS....the Physics, properties in motion class was amazing! The kids still talk about it and say how much the loved it.....~$2200
Food: Now onto the food.....we ended up staying in a 2bdrm at Beach Club Villas, which was plenty of room for us all. Everyone loved it. We planned out to eat at least one meal a day in the parks. We loaded up a suitcase with breakfast foods, cereals, breakfast bars, snacks, etc and ate breakfast in the room each morning. We bought $1000 worth of Disney gift cards using the Target red card with 5% discount ahead of time. We would charge everything to the room using the magicbands and I would go to the lobby every night or two and pat down the balance with the gift cards.
There is a disney gift card app that i had on my iphone which allows you to track the balances in real time on every card. I labelled each card with a number "1, 2, 3, .....etc" and label it as so in the app so i knew exactly which one had money left on it.
We came home with about $80 left over too, for another trip!
We also snacked a lot throughout the trip as well, just dont recall every single purchase, but we were never hunrgy either. Keep in mind as well that we were within 5 minutes walk to Epcot entrance so coming back to the room was not a big deal. Room 124 at the Beach Club Villas in case you are wondering is the closest DVC room to the entrance and was amazing!
We also gave each child a $50 gift card to use for whatever snacks they wanted in addition to the $1000....
Day 1
Arrival day we had reservations at Beaches and Cream for a late lunch and then the Electric Umbrella for dinner.
Day 2
Breakfast in the room (bought milk in the Beach Club grocery store) then ate Be Our Guest for lunch (was amazing btw). Stopped for ice cream later in the day at the Plaza and then sandwiches in our room for dinner.
Day 3
Breakfast in our room.....lunch at the Lunching Pad in MK tomorrowland, great toppings bar! and snacks in tomorrowland. Dinner was at Pecos Bills, crazy toppings bar as well!!! Very nice!
Day 4
Breakfast in our room.....lunch was frozen pizza and snacks in the room as the kids wanted to swim too. Dinner was at the Land in EPCOT, very good! Plenty of snack stops in EPCOT for schoolbread in norway, and german pretzels and beer for the adults! Caramel popcorn in Germany!
Day 5
Breakfast as above....snacked at Liberty tree snack area....lunch was the Boardwalk pizza window pizza. Dinner at Germany restaurant (not the buffet) Snacked a lot at DHS in the afternoon and everyone loved the Carrot Cake cookies!
Day 6
Breakfast at Kona cafe was great and then left to the airport afterwards.
I hope this helps at least one person! Feel free to ask anything!
thanks,
Tim
First of all as the title states, we are a family of eight.....yes thats right, so planning a trip to WDW, you can only imagine how much it would cost. I will try to be as detailed as possible, but remember this was almost 2 months ago now, so hard to remember specific meals etc.
Well here we go, hopefully this can help out others, not just large families. I am very budget oriented...not CHEAP, but love to get the best for the $$$.
Resort: Here is what we did. After figuring out that we would need 2 rooms at just about every resort to accommodate, I used this as leverage to sway my GF of 6yrs towards purchasing DVC( a long time dream of mine).
We have rented DVC points before as well and figured with ~$2200 to rent the points and nothing to show for afterwards, that pushed us to make the leap. We shopped DVC resales for a couple months and found the perfect contract. 289pts up front and 160pts/yr at SSR which seemed to have the best value/maint pts of the resorts, and home resort was not a big issue to us either. Our kids are 9-16yrs old so many years of DVC enjoyment to come. ~$13,000
Transportation: We live in NC so the next thing we needed to look into was transportation to FL. We have a large SUV that seats 8 of us, but no additional room for luggage and the thought of being in the car with all of us for 11hrs is not my idea of a "vacation". Flying is another option, but way too much $$$. Well unless you have the Southwest Chase Visa card and got 50,000 pts when you signed up. We had around 90,000 pts after 1yr and booked the flight the first week it was available on southwest. I would then check our flights about every other day after we booked and if the prices went down, rebooked and had the difference credited. I am not sure of the exact amount, but feel it was about 45000 pts for round trip airfare for us all!
Disney magical express for free......wow!!! not too shabby. FREE
Tickets: Tickets were the next expense. With 6 "kids" in the real world, and only one of those being Disney "child" age 3-9, we would need 7 adult tickets and 1 child ticket park hoppers of course, for 5 days. We did research and found about the Disney YES individual enrollment program and signed up for a class for us all. This did two things for us, not only the discount on the ticket which was nice, but all students, under 18 are able to get student tickets instead of adult tickets.....so only 2 adult tickets, and 6 students.....PLUS....the Physics, properties in motion class was amazing! The kids still talk about it and say how much the loved it.....~$2200
Food: Now onto the food.....we ended up staying in a 2bdrm at Beach Club Villas, which was plenty of room for us all. Everyone loved it. We planned out to eat at least one meal a day in the parks. We loaded up a suitcase with breakfast foods, cereals, breakfast bars, snacks, etc and ate breakfast in the room each morning. We bought $1000 worth of Disney gift cards using the Target red card with 5% discount ahead of time. We would charge everything to the room using the magicbands and I would go to the lobby every night or two and pat down the balance with the gift cards.
There is a disney gift card app that i had on my iphone which allows you to track the balances in real time on every card. I labelled each card with a number "1, 2, 3, .....etc" and label it as so in the app so i knew exactly which one had money left on it.
We came home with about $80 left over too, for another trip!
We also snacked a lot throughout the trip as well, just dont recall every single purchase, but we were never hunrgy either. Keep in mind as well that we were within 5 minutes walk to Epcot entrance so coming back to the room was not a big deal. Room 124 at the Beach Club Villas in case you are wondering is the closest DVC room to the entrance and was amazing!
We also gave each child a $50 gift card to use for whatever snacks they wanted in addition to the $1000....
Day 1
Arrival day we had reservations at Beaches and Cream for a late lunch and then the Electric Umbrella for dinner.
Day 2
Breakfast in the room (bought milk in the Beach Club grocery store) then ate Be Our Guest for lunch (was amazing btw). Stopped for ice cream later in the day at the Plaza and then sandwiches in our room for dinner.
Day 3
Breakfast in our room.....lunch at the Lunching Pad in MK tomorrowland, great toppings bar! and snacks in tomorrowland. Dinner was at Pecos Bills, crazy toppings bar as well!!! Very nice!
Day 4
Breakfast in our room.....lunch was frozen pizza and snacks in the room as the kids wanted to swim too. Dinner was at the Land in EPCOT, very good! Plenty of snack stops in EPCOT for schoolbread in norway, and german pretzels and beer for the adults! Caramel popcorn in Germany!
Day 5
Breakfast as above....snacked at Liberty tree snack area....lunch was the Boardwalk pizza window pizza. Dinner at Germany restaurant (not the buffet) Snacked a lot at DHS in the afternoon and everyone loved the Carrot Cake cookies!
Day 6
Breakfast at Kona cafe was great and then left to the airport afterwards.
I hope this helps at least one person! Feel free to ask anything!
thanks,
Tim