I'm doing a Discovery Cove mini Orlando get-a-way with my son who is 19. We are staying in Orlando for four nights at the Marriott Residence Inn near SeaWorld. And doing the non dolphin swim Discovery Cove package for $199 a person. It covers a day at Discovery Cove and 14 days of unlimited admission to SeaWorld and Aquatica. DH will be coming too.
We are hitting SeaWorld day 1
Discovery Cove day 2
Aquatica day 3 and then going back to SeaWorld for the evening.
We are flying out on a Monday and flying home on a Friday, so it sort of feels like a whole week even though it's really just three full fun filled days.
The day at Discovery Cove day includes all your food too. You could probably get a less expensive hotel. The Mariott Residence Inn though does include breakfast and has mini kitchen facilities that are great for snacks and is a good option for my 19 year old who is a picky eater. And DS really wanted to stay there as that's where he has stayed before at SeaWorld camp (did that when he was in High School).
What we are doing I think would come up higher than your budget and that's even using frequent flyer miles. Anyway, still thought I'd mention this anyway, as for us it's a perfect mini trip / budget get-away and there are ways you could do something like this more economically. And we just love SeaWorld and like the Caribbean beach day feel of Discovery Cove.
Hotel for us is $1050 (double queen room with kitchenette and breakfast)-- you could definitely do better with a different hotel.
Discovery Cove package is $199 (It's $289 if you do the dolphin swim) ($600 for us)
We budget $100 for food per day for the three of us. And $50 for food for the three of us on non-travel days. We don't need to budget anything for food on the Discovery Cove day. We don't do extra spending beyond the food budget. (Food budget is $300)
Cabs to and from airport about $50 each way. Hotel has buses to Aquatica and SeaWorld. We can walk to SeaWorld from there too. We will have to take a cab to and from Discovery Cover $7 each way and figure a $3 tip. (transportation budget is $120) // Usually we rent a car, but aren't doing that this time, given that everything we are doing is so close to our hotel.
And Orlando in particular is easy for us to get to and economical since we almost always use Southwest frequent flyer points to get there.
We also prefer SeaWorld parks to both Disney and Universal. Although we like them all. Doing just one family of parks saves us money.
(Cruising can be inexpensive, but FYI even a free cruise for me usually means budgeting a bit of money for us, as we usually do excursions at every port. And there are tips and taxes etc. to be sure to include in the budget. // So many people love cruising. I think it's OK, but am not a huge fan. I like the dinner concept for a large group when everyone gets together in the main dining room a lot though.) // We did a "free" 7 night cruise balcony cruise out of San Juan last spring break, but my budget for that lol was $5000 for three of us. San Juan though is expensive to fly to. We, though, wanted to do new ports if we were cruising and you can get a lot more places from San Juan than you can from Florida. Again, though, we had the budget for that. Also we upgraded to mid ship balcony and the free cruise was only for front or back balcony for two and we had to pay taxes, so we actually for the cruise part paid about $700 for the three of us (added son, midship, and taxes). And on top of that, of course, we had tips. We also did a two night stay in San Juan before the cruise. And we booked excursions at all five of our ports which ranged from $60 to $130 each per port and per person. Makes packages at theme parks look not all that unreasonable.) // Excursions, airfare, and hotel the night before are items you absolutely need to make decisions on / consider for any cruise. Just saying. If you're happy cruising without excursions it can be pretty inexpensive. Also FYI cruises make a lot of money on alcohol drinks. We never get these, but some people have some pretty big bar bills.
