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Introduction

Starting on October 1, 2021, Walt Disney World in Orlando kicked off its grand 50th anniversary celebration. With the mindset that we might not make it to the next 50th anniversary event (although we did later see many elderly visitors being pushed in wheelchairs around the parks), we used our child’s spring break as an excuse to plan a six-day trip to Orlando, with Disney as the obvious highlight. This series includes three articles:

  • Planning: choosing a hotel, booking Disney tickets, preparing for a long road trip during a period of high gas prices, and getting COVID precautions ready. The focus is on how to make a solid plan and save money by using existing credit card offers.
  • Hotel review: using Hyatt top-tier Globalist status for a 6-night stay at Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress (worth $3,000+).
  • Legoland and Disney review: our experiences at Legoland, Disney Hollywood Studio, and Magic Kingdom.

Planning

A family trip to Disney is both expensive and time-consuming. According to one survey (http://www.dswdgroup.com/nd.jsp?id=20), a five-day Disney trip for a family of four in the US costs $6033, including $2316 for tickets, $2617 for four nights in a budget family suite hotel near the park, and at least $1100 for dining. On top of those fixed costs—tickets, lodging, and food—we now also have high gas prices and the pandemic that has affected us for more than two years. So it is important to plan carefully and put together a trip that is affordable, safe, and still highly enjoyable.

Below, we’ll go over Disney trip planning from several angles:

  • Hotel selection
  • Ticket booking
  • Long-distance driving planning
  • COVID precautions

Hotel Selection

First, here’s a map showing several key places near Disney, such as Universal Studio, the airport, and Legoland.

One important reminder: hotels inside Disney or nearby don’t just charge a nightly rate. There may be several charges involved: room rate per night, parking per night (around $30-50/night), breakfast (if not included, around $30/adult), and some hotels also charge a nightly resort fee (for example, $40/night+tax). So a $100 hotel can easily end up costing $250+/night out of pocket. For families on a budget, it makes sense to prioritize hotels with free breakfast and no or waived resort fees. If you also want free parking, you may need to stay farther away, such as near the airport.

I did some research on hotels inside Disney and nearby, and they mostly fall into four categories:

Disney Hotels & Resorts (non-major-chain hotels)

One important point about this type of hotel is that you need to pay cash; you generally can’t use points from major hotel chains. The advantages of these Disney hotels are that they are close to Disney, offer free buses to the parks, sometimes allow entry to certain parks 30 minutes early, and let you watch the fireworks at night. They may also issue a magic wand, and purchases inside the parks can be charged to your room by scanning the wand (which means that if you have a credit card with elevated travel rewards, you may be able to earn bonus rewards on all those charges). The rooms are very Disney-themed, which kids will love. Prices range from relatively affordable options like Disney’s All-Star Movies Resort ($100/night) to more expensive ones like Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa (>$500/night). If money is not a concern and your kids absolutely love Disney, these hotels are worth considering.

Disney Hotels & Resorts (Marriott hotels)

These include Walt Disney World Swan (part of Westin), Dolphin Resort (part of Sheraton), and Walt Disney World Swan Reserve. In terms of category, they are all Marriott Cat 6 properties. These hotels combine the advantages of official Disney hotels with the ability to book using Marriott Bonvoy points, usually for about 40,000-60,000 pts/night. Spring break is generally peak time, and all the rates I found were 60,000 pts/night. Breakfast is not free unless you have high-tier elite status, which is not very family-friendly. Although I also had 210,000 Marriott points converted from a leftover 7-night certificate from the old Marriott travel package, I still felt that spending 60,000 points per night was too expensive. A friend stayed there on this trip and said the facilities felt outdated—basically two-star facilities with four-star pricing.

Disney Springs Resort-Area Hotels

You can think of Disney Springs as a shopping area just outside and adjacent to Disney. Hotels in this area can also enjoy official Disney perks, such as free shuttle service, more time inside the parks, guaranteed park reservations, and so on. Examples include Hilton Orlando Lake Buena Vista, Holiday Inn Orlando (IHG Rewards), and Wyndham Garden Lake Buena Vista (Wyndham Rewards). At Hilton, if it’s an award stay, breakfast is free for two people. At IHG, breakfast is not free for base-level members.

Other off-site chain hotels

With these hotels, it depends on your other priorities—for example, whether you want to be closer to Universal Studio or Legoland, whether you need free breakfast, whether you have top-tier elite status, and so on.

My choice

I have top-tier Hyatt Globalist status and wanted to stay closer to Legoland. The two Hyatt properties closest to Disney that I found were Hyatt Place Orlando/Lake Buena Vista (Cat 3) and Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress (Cat 3). At the time, both were 15,000 points per night, so I naturally chose the more upscale Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress. I stayed 6 nights at 15,000 points per night, for a total of 90,000 points. If paying cash, the room rate plus resort fee alone would have been $3,000+.

Booking Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress with points was a little tricky. The official website’s point calendar was unreliable (it showed availability on the calendar, but when you tried to book, it wasn’t actually available). You can use other websites to check real availability, such as agoda.com. As shown below, after selecting the hotel and then the dates, it will display daily prices. Some dates (for example, April 3 and April 5) appeared blank, and if you tried to book those dates alone using points on hyatt.com, it would show not available. But if your selected date range spans those dates (for example, a continuous 5-night stay from April 1 to April 6), then it may show available. When I booked, I had bad luck: three consecutive nights from Monday to Wednesday were unavailable (possibly because the hotel had a conference or had blocked rooms for spring break demand), so in the end I was forced to book a continuous 6-night stay spanning those dates...

I’ll write a separate review specifically about Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress later.

Ticket Booking

Ticket booking has changed compared with the pre-pandemic period. Now, besides buying tickets, you also need to reserve the park you want to visit. Some parks, such as Hollywood Studio, are especially popular and can fill up quickly. After buying tickets, it’s best to reserve your parks right away. In addition, the old Fast pass has been renamed lightning lane, and you need to pay for Genie+, which costs $15/person. Personally, I still recommend buying Genie+ because it can save a lot of time in line. However, some of the most popular attractions are not included in Genie+, such as Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance at Hollywood Studios.

As for buying tickets, although I bought them directly with a credit card because I was working on a spending requirement, you may want to consider buying discounted Disney gift cards and then using them to purchase tickets. There are 4 main ways to get Disney gift cards:

1) Sam's Club usually has Disney gift cards at 3% off year-round, and sometimes promotions go as high as 10% off.

2) Kroger basically has 4x fuel points promotions every month. If you can fill up 35 gallons each time, buying gift cards during a 4x fuel points promotion is effectively like getting 14% off. I recently bought a $150 Disney gift card during a 4x promotion, mainly to use for dining and souvenirs.

3) AMEX Offer/Chase Offer cashback deals at certain stores. For example, a recent Chase Offer gave 10% back at Office Depot.

4) With a Target Red card, you can get 5% off Disney gift cards bought in-store. I once saw a white woman at Target buy $1,200 in Disney gift cards in a single transaction. After she checked out, that POS machine stopped working entirely...

There are also some unconventional ways to buy tickets, which I strongly do not recommend trying. But it’s still fine to mention them so people are aware:

Taobao has tickets for 320 RMB; and in Orlando, many roadside shops advertise tickets for just $39.

For our family of 2 adults and 1 child, we spent a total of $981.70 for 2 days of Disney park tickets plus Genie+.

Long-Distance Driving Preparation

Since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, gas prices have surged, so for a long road trip, in addition to safety considerations, you also have to think about how to save on fuel costs. Besides using credit cards with high gas rewards, there are three other ways to save money on gas:

1) Use the current BPme gas offers. There are many BPme offers right now, such as Citi merchant offer ($20-10), AMEX offer ($20-10), and a Simplymiles offer (spend $20 and get 465 AA miles). So you may be able to save as much as 50% on gas. If you have multiple Citi and AMEX cards, you may be able to stack multiple chances to save 50% on gas. This was my main strategy.

2) Use Kroger fuel points at Shell gas stations. Kroger and Shell have a partnership. This usually saves up to $1/gal. With gas prices commonly at $4+/gal right now, that works out to around 25% savings. However, unless you travel with extra gas cans, it’s hard to fill 35 gallons in one go, so using Kroger fuel points this way is not the most efficient method.

3) Shell’s own reward program (Fuel Rewards network, my referral link ). You can link your AA account and earn an extra 2 AA miles per gallon, plus the Fuel Rewards discount itself (for example, my 5c off per gal).

In addition, for driving safety, we had an AAA membership and brought an air pump and jump start cable. Before leaving, we also went to the dealer for an oil change. Unexpectedly, those preparations turned out to be useful later. I’ll cover that in a future post.

COVID Preparation

After checking the COVID situation in the US, there was no doubt that mid-March was a low point in the pandemic, with around 35,000 new daily cases and fewer than 30,000 hospitalizations (keep in mind that the Omicron peak in mid-January was 160,000). That suggested we could consider traveling cautiously.

We prepared a lot of COVID-related supplies: hand sanitizer, N95 and KN95 masks, rapid antigen test kits, Mucinex, Tylenol, multivitamins, and vitamin D. Fortunately, we didn’t end up needing any of them.