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!
Making FastPass+ reservations can be an exciting part of your next Walt Disney World vacation. If you are staying at a Disney resort, you can make these reservations 60 days in advance of your trip. If you have an annual pass or a ticket you purchased outside of a Disney World package, you can make your FastPass reservations 30 days from your visit. When Disney says 60 days, they aren’t kidding. You can make these selections starting at midnight if you can stay up that late! Disney has two methods you can use to make your selections, either through their mobile app or their website. We will describe how to use the My Disney Experience website to make FastPass+ reservations.
For a number of years when the kids were young, we never made plans to take a spring break vacation. It’s generally too cold to really enjoy the beaches near us. We knew that Walt Disney World tends to be very crowded during spring break week, so that was out as an option as well. We usually just stayed home and tried to balance who was going to take time off from work to do local activities with the kids.
Although we love Disney trips, our least favorite aspect is standing in lines. One of our favorite tools that helps us avoid lines is Touring Plans — a website and service that helps you plan around the crowds to maximize your time while on vacation. Touring Plans has studied hundreds of thousands of wait times from all over the Disney parks, and has compiled a statistical model of how the parks run. They can predict, with surprising accuracy, what the crowds will be like at different parks on different days. They also have extensive models of what those crowds do in the park, giving you accurate attraction wait times at different times of the day.
After moving through a series of Hilton Credit Cards and using up all the free nights and points you have accumulated, you’d almost think you would have to pay for a hotel room. Luckily, Chase comes to the rescue with the Chase Hyatt Credit Card. This card is an important one to us for a few reasons.
When we first considered a Disney Cruise Line vacation, we had no idea what to expect. Since we are used to very active vacations when we visit Walt Disney World — all that walking! — we didn’t know if we would be bored, stuck on a ship with nothing to do. We couldn’t have been more wrong. From the moment you board the ship, you will find a variety of activities that are far from boring. In fact, you may even find that some Disney Cruise Line vacations are just as active as a Walt Disney World trip; there’s so much to do that you can end up running from one end of the ship to the other if you try to do it all.
Universal Studios has two very popular theme parks in Orlando, Universal Studios Florida and Islands of Adventure. Each has a Harry Potter themed land (The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Hogsmeade at Islands of Adventure and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Diagon Alley at Universal Studios Florida), which continue to drive Universal Studios attendance numbers higher and higher. How can you see these two parks without spending all day waiting in line? Universal Studios has the answer with Universal Express Pass and Universal Express Unlimited Pass.
One way we keep our vacation costs down is to leverage frequent flyer miles to get free flights to our destinations. The cost of the flight to your vacation can comprise a large portion of your overall budget — why not have that cost covered for you?
We’ve previously shared information about the IHG Hotel Family and its loyalty program. The Hilton HHonors program is another hotel loyalty program we like to use. The Hilton hotel family is composed of Hilton Hotel & Resorts, Waldorf Astoria, Conrad, Canopy, Curio Collection, DoubleTree, Embassy Suites, Hilton Garden Inn, Hampton Inn, Homewood Suites, Home 2 Suites and Hilton Grand Vacations. As opposed to the IHG Hotel Family, there are lots of luxury hotels within the Hilton hotel family.
