second guessing gift card buying...

[disneyfantotheend]

Just be careful not to get too much in Disney gift cards. Otherwise, if you come home with cards your options will be...

Wait until your next trip- for some this would be within a few months, but MANY it would be years.

Go to Disney Store- Don't know about you, but I never have luck finding much I want at the Disney Store.

Order online Disney- Might be good if it is at Christmas time or you like a lot of Disney apparel. I don't care for the quality of the stuff.

Think that is it, any options I am forgetting?

 

[AngiTN]

We are on the Dining Plan for our upcoming trip... how does this work with the new Magic Bands and charging to your room? I was under the impression I could charge the tips back to the room and pay off those charges before we check out (well at least 24+ hours before checkout) with the gift cards.

That is what I've always done. The MB is no different than the old KTTW card in that aspect. They even had PIN added to those before they stopped using them.

 

[MichelleVW]

Just be careful not to get too much in Disney gift cards. Otherwise, if you come home with cards your options will be...

Wait until your next trip- for some this would be within a few months, but MANY it would be years.

Go to Disney Store- Don't know about you, but I never have luck finding much I want at the Disney Store.

Order online Disney- Might be good if it is at Christmas time or you like a lot of Disney apparel. I don't care for the quality of the stuff.

Think that is it, any options I am forgetting?

I just save them for the next trip......They don't expire.

 

[SUSIEQ]

I just save them for the next trip......They don't expire.

Same here. If I die before I get back to WDW, my heirs can do what they want to with my Disney gift cards.

 

[bluezy]

Same here. If I die before I get back to WDW, my heirs can do what they want to with my Disney gift cards.

Ditto.

 

[Didi8367]

I just bought $750 worth of Disney gift cards at Target for $585. I used $75 worth of $5 gift cards that I've accumulated over the past several months (they often have deals where if you buy, say, three bottles of shampoo, you get a $5 gift card) as well as $60 in redeemed "Shopkick" points (it's a mobile app that gives you points for walking into certain stores and scanning bar codes of items with your phone, etc.). That brought my total down to $615, then I got the 5% Red Card discount off of that, which left me with $584.25. It's a little over 20% off. I'm pretty excited about it.

We're going the week between Christmas & NY, and there are absolutely ZERO discounts given at that time, so it's totally worth it to me. We plan to charge everything to our magic bands and then use the cards to pay down our balance each day. I'm sure we'll end up spending more than $750, but I figure having that much paid for in advance (and at a discount to boot) should help soften the blow somewhat.

 

[giginator]

I buy gift cards at my local SAMs club. I get 150 dollars for 141.00. I also buy a walmart gift card using my disney visa to get my points and then turn around and use that to buy the disney gift cards at SAMs. This is going to save my quite a bit on our upcoming trip in November. Any little bit helps.

 

[lisaj68]

I read through the posts here, but still not sure if you can use disney giftcards for CS food? TIA!

 

[supersnoop]

I read through the posts here, but still not sure if you can use disney giftcards for CS food? TIA!

Yes. If they take credit cards, they'll take gift cards.

 

[joannjoe]

Ditto.

True!!

 

[Kimi313]

They take them at all CS, I take my stack and number them that way I'm not always fumbling around if I've used this one or how much does this one take. Love them!

 

[k5thbeatle]

To OP; we have never had any issue whatsoever in using Disney gift cards at WDW. Restaurants, shops, F&W kiosks...everything. Never a problem in all the years we have been going and using them.

 

[bocaj1431]

Sorry repeay

 

[bocaj1431]

What do you mean by getting a savings for purchasing the gift cards at BJ's? How does that work?

 

[IrishNYC]

What do you mean by getting a savings for purchasing the gift cards at BJ's? How does that work?

BJs and Target sell Disney gift cards at a discount. Target's catch is you have to use Target RedCard (credit or debit), but you get 5% off the cards. I believe BJ's savings is 4%.

 

[Violet Parr]

I have, largely inspired by people mentioning it on these boards, started to buy Disney Gift Cards for our upcoming trip in September.

Planning to use them for anything we will want/need at the hotel and parks as well as some extra ADR's not covered by out dining plan. To me, it is so much easier to grab a $50 gift card at Target than to put $50 into a separate account...

I am starting to wonder if anyone had issues with any gift cards before?
(I keep my receipts just in case)
Have you not been able to use it at a certain place? Did CM's become annoyed when you handed them 3 $50 Disney Gift Cards when paying for your breakfast?

Anything negative you can thing of / have gone through?

We've done this before and we've never had trouble. We actually set money aside for a trip for a year once using gift cards.

I know it is easy to pick them up at Target, but to make it fun for the kids, we order from Disneystore.com. They have a huge variety of cards and the kids love picking them out. Sometimes we surprise them with gift cards.

The selection is huge, and having all of the cards look different from each other really helped us to keep track of which ones had been used and which had not.

http://www.disneystore.com/gift-cards/mn/1001267/

 

[Violet Parr]

Okay, now reading through the thread, I see that I could be using my redcard to get 5% off. I only got a Red card this year, but this is genius. I guess we will be buying all of our cards there then!

 

[laurenfratt]

I have, largely inspired by people mentioning it on these boards, started to buy Disney Gift Cards for our upcoming trip in September.

Planning to use them for anything we will want/need at the hotel and parks as well as some extra ADR's not covered by out dining plan. To me, it is so much easier to grab a $50 gift card at Target than to put $50 into a separate account...

I am starting to wonder if anyone had issues with any gift cards before?
(I keep my receipts just in case)
Have you not been able to use it at a certain place? Did CM's become annoyed when you handed them 3 $50 Disney Gift Cards when paying for your breakfast?

Anything negative you can thing of / have gone through?

Appreciate your input.

We didn't have any issues with ours! Over $700 worth and just went down every few days to pay it off. I will say though, if you have an iPhone theres a disney gift card app that will keep your card balances all in one place! It was very helpful for us last trip!

 

[FFMickey]

Nope, we charged everything to our room account and paid the account with gift cards every couple of nights. We could've just taken the gift cards and paid throughout WDW. Since we were staying on-site and had charging capabilities in our magicbands, we felt it was safer not carrying all those gift cards around. No problems handing over 4-5 gift cards, it seems like a lot of people do it, so you are not alone.

 

[bocaj1431]

BJs and Target sell Disney gift cards at a discount. Target's catch is you have to use Target RedCard (credit or debit), but you get 5% off the cards. I believe BJ's savings is 4%.

Every little bit saved is another dollar towards Disney. Thanks for sharing that.