Planning

The end of the school year is dangerous for us, mainly because it has us thinking about vacations.  Such was the case in May of 2016.  We were still a month or so away from our great Hawaiian vacation and Disney Cruise Line had just announced the fall/winter sailings for 2017.  After scanning through offerings, I noticed a 5-Night Western Caribbean sailing out of Miami on the Magic.  It would leave on December 24, 2017.  The prices were really high, but that’s to be expected with a holiday cruise.  We had a placeholder available from our Spring Break 2016 sailing, but it appeared that this cruise was blocked out from receiving the 10% discount.  This left us having to pay full price for the cruise if we wanted to take it.  The itinerary was one we have done a few times before.  Departing Miami, there would be a sea day, followed by a stop in Cozumel.  The sailing would then have another sea day followed by a stop at Castaway Cay, then return to Miami.

Further complicating the decision was our plans to eventually get Walt Disney World Annual Passes again.  A quick scan of the school calendar showed that school would let out on December 15, 2017 and come back into session on January 2, 2018.  That gave us about 17 days for potential travel.  Surely there was enough time to get in a decent trip to Walt Disney World and a cruise!  Since we had the time, we could even drive down to Florida and save on airfare.  We could drive to Orlando, go to the parks, then drive to Miami, park the car in the port garage for the duration of the cruise, then retrieve the car to return to Orlando for a few days before driving home.  We would save money on flights and rental cars, plus get in a land-sea vacation over Christmas.

The first step was the family discussion.  I had not even completed the words “land and sea” before everyone was on board.  They were not excited about driving down though.  We would also be getting an oceanview room instead of a verandah because of costs, but that didn’t seem to bother them as much.  We would also be staying offsite at Walt Disney World in order to save money.  We had a number of Hilton Honors points that would get us some free nights as well as Hyatt points we could use.

Cruise

The first thing we did was to book the cruise.  Our initial price was $6,034.52, including the trip insurance.  It did not include ground or air transportation since we planned to visit Orlando first and drive to the cruise terminal.  We reserved stateroom 2512, which is on the starboard (right) side of the ship, all the way forward.  This would also be our first time on the Magic!  I would normally have preferred a verandah but those staterooms were $1500 more.  We have sailed in an oceanview stateroom before and found them to be more than acceptable.  We thought we might try to upgrade when arriving at the port, but we would still enjoy the room if upgrades were not available.

Our first change to this plan arrived with Hurricane Matthew.  Hurricane Matthew impacted the Florida area in October of 2016.  Nancy and I had planned a 20th anniversary cruise on the Disney Dream for October 7, 2016.  A couple of days prior to the cruise, we were notified by Disney Cruise Line that it would not take place because of Hurricane Matthew.  We were refunded the entire cost of our cruise, plus an additional 20% off a future cruise if we took it before the end of 2017.  When we found out about the future cruise discount, we reached out to our travel agent to have it applied to the December 2017 cruise.  It was great that we were able to apply this discount, because holiday cruises are ineligible for onboard booking discounts due to blackout dates.  We ended up saving a significant amount of money on this cruise because of it, with savings close to what we had paid for the canceled October cruise.

Transportation

We had originally planned to drive down on this trip to save some money.  The drive from the Washington DC area to the Orlando area takes us about 14 hours with stops for breaks and lunch.  About nine months out, I started thinking about how the drive back up would work out.  We wanted to stay at Disney through New Year’s Eve, so we would only have New Year’s Day for the return drive.  This meant we would be on the road with everyone else that was attempting to get home on that day.  Plus, if we stayed up till midnight, that would mean we would either get a late start on New Year’s Day or we would be tired while driving.

We decided to look for some cheap/free flights to get us down and back to Florida.  We had a 45,000 United miles and a larger number of American miles.  The relatively small number of United miles we’d saved limited us to a free one way flight to or from Jacksonville, which only costs 10,000 miles per person.  We’ve flown into Jacksonville several times in the past and consider it a hidden gem when it comes to Orlando travel.  Luck was on our side as we found some early morning flights leaving Dulles on the morning of December 16 at 8:20 am — the day we’d planned to start our trip.  We would arrive in Jacksonville at 10:21 am, where we could pick up our rental car and head on to Orlando.

I couldn’t find a free flight back, but we did find a flight back from Jacksonville on New Year’s Day for $120 per person, which isn’t too horrible.  The flight left Jacksonville at 2:00 pm and landed in DC at 4:00 pm, which was pretty good.  We wouldn’t have to rush to get to Jacksonville, and would get home relatively early in the day.

We used Costco Travel to get a rental car from the Jacksonville airport.  We kept checking in after we got the reservation and rebooked it several times to get a lower price. 

Walt Disney World Hotel

We would be visiting the parks from December 16 through December 23.  We would have to leave the afternoon of the 23rd to get down to Miami in order to get on the ship on December 24.  Staying onsite was definitely a consideration for the first week we would be there since we we would qualify for a few different specials they were offering.  The problem was that as we got closer to Christmas, the room rates really started climbing.  We had a number of Hilton points saved up, so we decided to use them to stay at the Hampton Inn & Suites Orlando-South Lake Buena Vista, which is right outside the south end of the Disney Resort area.  We have stayed there before and really enjoyed it. 

I know a lot of people enjoy being in the Disney bubble, but it doesn’t bother us too much to stay off property. We already had a rental car because we were coming from Jacksonville and had to drive to Miami for the cruise.  We wouldn’t have to pay for parking at the parks because of our Annual Passes that we activated in the summer.  The rental car also gave us the opportunity to head offsite to pick up snacks and drinks as well as eat some meals outside the parks.

Miami (Pre Cruise) Hotel

We needed to get a room in Miami for our pre-cruise stay.  Fortunately, because of our IHG Rewards Club Select Credit Card, we had a free night that we used to book the Intercontinental Miami, one of our favorite places. 

Walt Disney World (Post Cruise) Hotels

Once we got off the ship, we would also need some hotel stays in the Walt Disney World area for the days before New Year’s.  We used our free nights from the Hyatt Credit Card to book two nights at the Hyatt Place Orlando/Lake Buena Vista, which is near Disney Springs. 

New Year’s Eve Hotel

Our final hotel stay of the trip would be for New Year’s Eve.  We knew we could see the New Year’s Eve fireworks at Magic Kingdom on December 30, so we wanted to take advantage of that as well as seeing another park’s NYE fireworks.  We decided to spend New Year’s Eve at Epcot, as we did at the end of 2015.  The only part of the evening that we didn’t enjoy that time was attempting to exit the parking lot at the end of the night.  We didn’t leave the parking lot until 2:30 am.  All the parks pretty much let out at the same time, which really clogs the roads up.  In order to avoid all this, we booked a room at the Dolphin for the evening, paying full price with cash to do so.  The cost was fairly significant (in my eyes) at about $430.  Still, that was a good deal cheaper than the prices for other Disney rooms in the surrounding area (that were in walking distance). 

That completed all the planning for the trip, except for a few minor changes to the flight time or rebooking the rental car to save some money. 

Here are the other parts of the trip:

Planning | Travel | Hollywood Studios | Magic Kingdom | Epcot | Animal Kingdom | WDW Part 2

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