Free Dining Saved me a bunch!

[Bibbidi]

I saved $575 by changing our 8 night 40% off Poly ressie to Free Dining today. This included bumping us up from 1 day base tickets to 8 day hoppers too! I am so excited. Yay!

 

[DanielleandBrady]

That's amazing!!! Congrats!!

Do you mind if I ask how many people are in your party? I am planning for next year and hoping for any type of discount..but if I am lucky to be able to choose between room and FD, want to know which is best?

 

[mousegear]

General rule is that more in your party, more you save with FD promotion. If there is just two in your party, you might be better off with room discount promotion.

For example, this coming Sept trip, for right now, it's just me and DS 7 and I booked back March with room discount offer including tix and DDP. When this FD offer came out, it's actually $15 more than our orininal package b/c of Photo Book. I decided to change since it's like getting photo book for $15 and there is high change that my mom/sister might join us (if so our pk price just goes up by their tix price).

So it really depends on your situation.

 

[DanielleandBrady]

thank you so much! I really appreciate the help!

 

[Bibbidi]

We have 3 adults (DH, me and my mom) and 2 kids (DD10 and DD8), so the older daughter is essentially an adult for Disney pricing.

Our situation is a little bit unique in that all 5 of us are running in the AK 5K on Saturday, October 1st. As a result of that, we are eligible for 7 day park hoppers&more tickets that would have cost us $1362.20 for the 5 of us. We planned to purchase those special tickets about a month prior to our trip.

Originally we booked for 8 nights with a public 40% off code, Garden View Poly.
We upgraded it to a package, to include insurance, dining, and 1 day base tickets. Total for that package was $4,955.25 (and we still would need to buy the special 7 day tickets for an additional $1362.20). Therefore this grand total would be $6317.45 after all was said and done.

When I called today to get a quote on the same package, but with Free Dining the total became $4979.57 but included two park days instead of one. So if we did nothing more than switch to free dining, it would have cost about $24 to add one park day to everyone's ticket. Not bad. After adding in the special 7 day tickets separately the new total would be $6341.77

To see if we could save any money, and not just get an extra day for $24, I asked about doing the Free Dining, but upgrading the park tickets to 8 day hoppers so we wouldn't have to buy the other tickets separately. That new grand total became $5,738.92 for a grand total savings of $578.53!

Now, I do realize that our new 8 day hoppers do not include the water park option, so if we were really set on that, I think that would actually cost us about $250 for the 5 of us, so you could say for all things being completely equal we saved more like $328.53, but the water park option was not something that we really cared about with the special tickets we were considering anyway, so for us it feels more like a true savings of $578. Oh yeah, and we also now get this memories Photo Book included in our package, that I must go find out more about...

Now, as a general rule of thumb, if you are staying Deluxe and sometimes moderate, a room only discount is usually your better savings. Whereas Free Dining is usually better than a percentage discount at Values and sometimes Moderates. However, when you start getting older kids or more adults in your party, sometimes (like in our case) the Free Dining wins out. I am quite frankly shocked that it save us as much as it did, but you won't get any complaints from me

 

[Bibbidi]

That's amazing!!! Congrats!!

Do you mind if I ask how many people are in your party? I am planning for next year and hoping for any type of discount..but if I am lucky to be able to choose between room and FD, want to know which is best?

Just so you know. I booked a room only reservation initially last fall because I wanted to be absolutely certain that I'd at least get that discount--and 40% isn't too shabby either
However, I knew that if I wanted to upgrade it to a package, I could certainly do that, even if no other discounts became available. I truly called today just for kicks to see if I could save any money, and was astounded when I found out how much. The best 15 minutes I've spent on the phone in a long time

 

[AmberHeartsDisney]

Yeah we only travel with 2 adults i would take free dining over nothing tho hah

 

[hotcarib]

Thank goodness for free dining!!!
Saved us $$$$