Hilton Credit Cards
Citi Hilton HHonors Reserve
Citi Hilton HHonors Reserve
Cruising is a great alternative to a Disney Parks vacation: it’s basically a nice relaxing vacation in a floating Disney resort hotel that takes you to a wonderful set of destinations. Disney offers cruises to many locations including the Caribbean, Alaska, and Europe.
IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) Rewards Club is one of our favorite hotel programs. The IHG hotel family includes the InterContinental, Hualuxe, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Even Hotels, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites, and Candlewood Suites brands of hotels. Other than the InterContinental hotels, I don’t know that I would consider any of those brands to be luxury brands. What IHG lacks in luxury, it makes up for in quantity. There are Holiday Inn Express hotels everywhere across the United States.
One of our favorite travel tools is TripIt. TripIt is a web site (with associated mobile apps) that gathers details of your travel, including hotel reservations, airline tickets, cruise itineraries, rental cars, and other travel information. TripIt then presents you with a comprehensive itinerary in a simplified format that allows you to easily view the information.
One of the tricks I’ve described before is to look at alternate travel arrangements. When considering whether to upgrade our tickets this summer to annual passes, I looked for economical travel/lodging arrangements for other possible trips. We had several school breaks to consider, including a Halloween-based trip (which includes some teacher work days in November) and an early February trip (using teacher work days as well). Since these were “quick” trips to fit into a fixed calendar, we needed to be able to fly down to Florida in order to maximize our Disney time.
There’s great news for those that acquire numerous Disney Gift Cards through discounted means. The disneygiftcards.com website has been updated with additional functionality. Previously, the site only allowed you to check the balance on your Disney Gift Cards, and the interface was a bit clunky and hard to use. Since the site was refreshed, you can store up to 5 gift cards on the site at once. More importantly, you can also combine multiple gift cards together, transferring the balance from one to another. The most you can transfer and store on one card is $1000. You can delete emptied gift cards from the site to make room for adding more. Also, if you fill one of your gift cards up to $1000, you can also remove it from the site. Removing the card from the site doesn’t change its stored balance. You can always add it back to the site later as well. If you lose a card, you can call in and have them freeze the remaining balance on the card.
We are always looking to save money when visiting Walt Disney World. One of the primary expenses to consider when planning your trip is lodging. Any money saved on lodging can be directed to other expenses or set aside to upgrade your lodging on a future trip. Here are various options for getting your lodging costs down:
One of the best kept secrets at Disney World and Disneyland is rope drop (with apologies to Disney Vacation Club for stealing your thunder). Rope drop is the time when the park opens. Arriving at the park for rope drop is one of the best ways to maximize your time at the Disney parks.