Transportation is one of the first things you will want to plan when you’ve settled on Orlando as a destination. There are two things to think about with regards to transportation: getting to Orlando from your home or original destination, and traveling around Orlando once you have arrived.
Our 7 Night Eastern Caribbean Star Wars Day At Sea cruise on the Disney Fantasy didn’t start out as one of our normal cruises. As we discussed in our post about planning an off season cruise, we had originally planned to book our standard spring break cruise for 2017, but finances got in the way. We instead picked a different destination for spring break, and in October 2015 we booked what we thought would be a standard 7 night Eastern Caribbean cruise on the Fantasy. In January 2016, Disney announced new Star Wars Day At Sea cruises for 7 night sailings on the Disney Fantasy — and in March 2016, we received notification that our cruise had been switched to the Star Wars theme. Interestingly, the price of the cruise almost immediately went up by 50%. We weren’t upset that it got changed, but I probably never would have booked it for that price, even with the Star Wars addition.
We eagerly awaited the release of the 2017 Spring Itineraries from Disney Cruise Line. We’ve taken Disney cruises for our past three spring break vacations and have always enjoyed them. We haven’t been too adventurous with the spring break cruises: they have all been 5 night cruises on the Disney Wonder, with two sea days, and port days in Cozumel, Mexico and at Disney’s private Bahamian island, Castaway Cay.
Recently, a co-worker told me he’s planning to visit family in Europe in 18-24 months. We had previously discussed credit card rewards, so he was interested in reducing his costs for the flights. His lodging expenses will be covered since he’s staying with family. He is taking his wife and two kids with him, so he needs a lot of miles in order to get free flights (minus any taxes he would have to pay). With that background in mind, I advised him to accumulate miles via credit card rewards following the path explained below. This plan requires that he and his wife each sign up for the credit cards described to ensure they can collect enough miles for all four people in the traveling party.
Before our summer trip to Universal and Walt Disney World, we started thinking about converting our Disney tickets to annual passes. In order to justify the cost, we needed to see if we could add some additional trips in throughout the year. One way we could keep the cost down for these additional trips was to look at alternate flying locations around Orlando that might be cheaper than flying to Orlando. Thus was born the Jacksonville Special.
Planning 1 | Planning 2 | Planning 3 | Travel | Disneyland (Day 1 – Day 2 – Day 3 – Day 4) | Arrival | Surfing | Aulani | Excursion | Hyatt
We’ve talked before about keeping your travel costs down by using credit card sign up bonuses for free flights. With this strategy, you can reap the benefits of a $500 flight per person and a free flight. The problem we’ve seen is that credit card companies want to hand out as few signup bonuses as possible. How do you get around this limitation? Try another credit card company!
