The morning of disembarkation is usually very sad. Everyone plans their flights so they can leave the ship and head directly to the airport, giving themselves an hour or so of cushion to make their flights. We planned our flights so we had as much time in San Juan today as possible. We got up at 7 am to finish packing the stateroom and then we took our bags with us to Tiana’s for breakfast.
After getting through the holidays, our travel day soon arrived. On January 25th, 2020, we left for our trip. As I mentioned in a previous post, we booked our flights on American Airlines. Normally this would have us traveling out of Reagan National Airport, which is an American hub, but our flights were instead out of Dulles. Since the flights were in the afternoon at 3:40 pm, we had the taxi pick us up around 12:45, which got us to the airport around 1 pm. We dropped off our bags and proceeded through the relatively empty TSA Precheck security lines.
When the Disney Cruise Line Spring 2020 itineraries were released, we didn’t plan to book anything. We had already booked a Spring Break cruise on the new Royal Caribbean Symphony of the Seas and thought that would be our big cruise for the spring. As the winter went on, we got tired of sitting in the cold and looked at what was available. Luckily, I look every month to see the cheapest Disney cruises. There were two cruises that matched up well with a long school break in January and were relatively cheap (compared to other Disney cruises).
On a recent Royal Caribbean cruise, we got a letter in our cabin from Port Valet. This is a service offered by the Port of Seattle to check-in for your flight, receive your boarding passes, and have your luggage sent directly from outside your stateroom to your home airport. We didn’t take advantage of this service on our cruise (because we were staying an additional night in Seattle), but it sounds very similar to a service offered by Disney Cruise Line.
The Disney Cruise Line Spring 2018 itineraries were released near the end of October 2016. We started scanning them as soon as they came out because we knew our Spring break trip for that year would be a DCL cruise. We eventually decided to go back on the Magic as a follow up from our Christmas Cruise planned for December 2017. The cruise we selected was a 5 night Bahamian cruise that left from Miami with stops at Key West, Nassau, and Castaway Cay. We had previously sailed to Key West on the Wonder and loved the port. We were also excited because there would be a sea day after Castaway Cay. All of our other cruises spent the last full day at Castaway Cay, which kind of made the stop bitter sweet.
The cruise would leave on a Friday, thus forcing the girls to miss a half a day of school. We don’t normally like to have them miss school, but this departure date would let us apply an onboard placeholder to save 10% off the cruise.
Since we knew we would have annual passes by the time of the Spring Break Cruise, we needed to add on some additional time at the parks as well.
I sent our request to our travel agent, Michelle McKnight. Michelle said she would book it as soon as the Gold Castaway Club window opened. She booked the cruise and sent us the information. We eventually re-booked the cruise to add an onboard booking that we made during our Star Wars Day At Sea Cruise in January 2017, thus dropping the price of the cruise by 10%.
Flights
We waited until April of 2017 to start booking the rest of our arrangements. We knew we would have annual passes, so we wanted to add in a visit to Walt Disney World. Once the flight booking window opened, I scanned the various airlines sites that we have miles for. The best deal appeared to be to fly American Airlines from Reagan National Airport into Orlando the night before the cruise. The return flight would be on the Monday after Easter, with the girls having to go back to school on Tuesday. That would allow us to maximize our time in the parks as well. The flights were really cheap, so we used the Chase Ultimate Rewards points to purchase them through the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal. I believe we used about 60,000 points to get the round trip flights for all four of us.
The trouble with flying into Orlando is that we needed to get to Miami for the cruise. We would have to get a rental car to get us down to Miami. We would then drive to the Port, park the car and board the cruise. Once the cruise was over, we could grab the car and drive to the parks. We could use the car to get to the parks and eventually to return to the airport.
Hotels
I had initially thought about getting a hotel in Miami for the night before the cruise. Our flights were going to land in Orlando around 8 pm. Once we got our bags and our rental car, we probably wouldn’t start driving until 8:30 pm. That would put us in Miami around 12:30 am or so. After a full day of work, I really wasn’t looking forward to driving 4 hours late at night. I moved the hotel booking from Miami to a Holiday Inn Express in Stuart, Florida. It was about 2 hours or so from Orlando, which meant we could leave around 8 am in the morning and still get to the boat around 10 am for boarding. The hotel was free because we used our free night that comes with our Chase IHG Rewards Select Credit Card. We’ve used this free night on several hotel rooms over the years, thus saving a lot of money.
We would also need a room at Walt Disney World for 5 nights. Spring Break is an expensive time to visit Walt Disney World because it is so busy. We wanted to stay on property, but didn’t want to pay on property rates. Luckily, we had a large pile of Starwood Preferred Guest(SPG) points. SPG is the hotel group that the Swan and Dolphin belonged to. I say “belonged” because SPG was recently bought out by Marriot. We booked the Dolphin for five nights on points and would only end up paying for parking and “resort fees.” We chose the Dolphin over the Swan because I had exactly enough points for five nights at the Dolphin, which is cheaper than the Swan.
Remaining Planning
We got our annual passes a bit early in August 2017. We decided to skip out on excursions through Disney Cruise Line on this cruise to save a bit of money and just planned to do our own thing at each port. After we returned from our Christmas Cruise, we just waited until our cruise documentation arrived in the mail.
Next up, we’ll talk about the trip down to Miami!
Planning | Travel | Boarding | Key West | Nassau | Castaway Cay | Sea Day | Disembarkation
If you have enjoyed this article, please be sure to check out our Disney Cruise Line information page, which has useful hints in addition to our cruise trip reports!
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
We had checked out of our room at the All-Star Movies resort in the morning before we headed off to the parks. We didn’t quite know what to do with our bags though. We could have checked them through to the airlines, but didn’t want to do that because the last time we did it with the cruise line, we got charged for our bags despite having the Citi AAdvantage Executive World Elite Mastercard (it gives us one free bag per person). We decided instead to leave our bags with Bell Services and pick them up when boarding the Magical Express to the airport.
After leaving our bags, we headed to the parks. Our flight was supposed to leave at 9:00 pm, so we had a resort return time of 5:30 pm for the 6:00 pm Magical Express to the airport. However, we were done with the parks around 3:30 pm and decided to return to the resort. Once we arrived, we retrieved our bags and asked Bell Services about the chance to get on an earlier Magical Express bus to the airport. They said we could ask the bus driver and see if there was space.
Once the bus arrived, we asked the bus driver about taking the earlier bus. He had to load everyone that was scheduled for the bus first, but could see if there was space once all the passengers with reservations had gotten on. There ended up being enough extra seats for us, so we hoped on and headed to the airport. Once we arrived at the airport, we checked in for our American Airlines flight and dropped off our bags. Our first stop was for dinner in the food court. The food court in the Orlando Airport has a variety of choices. We each grabbed something we liked and settled in to eat.
About the time we were done, TripIt started to notify us of a delay on our flight home. It looked like it was going to be delayed about 30 minutes. We decided to go through security to enjoy the Admirals Club that recently opened since we have free access with the AAdvantage Executive Mastercard. We got to the club but noticed that it was closing at 8:30 pm. We asked while checking in if they were still going to close at that time, since they tend to stay open later when American Airlines flights are delayed. They said they would stay open until about 9:00 pm. We grabbed some drinks and used the wifi for a while until it was time to board.
The flight home was uneventful. We arrived at Reagan National Airport, gathered our luggage, and headed home. The trip was a nice way to spend our school break.
While the trip was fun, I don’t think we will be staying at a Value resort for a while. I really didn’t enjoy the double beds. I also didn’t really enjoy waiting for the buses. The only park I like taking the bus to is the Magic Kingdom since it lets you avoid the entire Monorail or Ferry Boat transportation. Staying on property without a car also restricts the places we can eat since we are limited to the ones on Disney property unless we are willing to take a cab or an Uber. Most likely we will only do it if we have a rental car or get a free dining plan.
Since we decided to activate our annual passes for a quick weekend trip in the summer, we decided to book a fall trip as well. We planned to travel during a long school weekend in early November. The girls had an early release on a Friday, plus the next Monday and Tuesday off from school. If we could get down there on Friday, we could have four days in the parks!
Flight
Booking the flight portion of this trip turned out to be the easiest portion of the trip. American Airlines had flights at the saver level on that Thursday. The flight left from Dulles and went to Charlotte. We would have to change planes for another flight to Orlando. It was a bit of a long flight (as opposed to direct), but it was free. The main problem was that if we wanted to use this itinerary, the girls would miss two half days of school. We discussed it and decided that it wasn’t a huge amount of time away from school. We booked the flights going down.
In order to get the flight coming back, we looked for one way flights coming back from Orlando to the Washington area. We found a direct flight from Orlando to Reagan National, leaving at 9:00 pm and arriving at 11:10 pm. The cost was just $84 a person. We booked that flight at well. We would end up with five full days in the parks, Friday through Tuesday (we would likely arrive too late on Thursday evening to visit one of the parks).
Lodging
Since we were completely out of hotel points, we considered staying onsite for this visit. Normally we stay offsite with points to cover the rooms (or make them less expensive) but need to get a rental car. Staying onsite would require us to pay for a room, but we could use Disney transportation and avoid the expense of renting a car. I thought finding a room onsite would be really easy, just get a room at Pop Century. We like staying there, it is relatively cheap and its always available.
You could have knocked me over after I put in the first search for rooms. There were NO rooms available at the value resorts. In fact, the only rooms available were very expensive Disney Vacation Club rooms, starting at $500 a night. There were suites available at the Art of Animation for $350 a night. At first, I couldn’t believe I was reading the information correctly. I thought for sure I had entered the dates incorrectly.
I changed the search dates to eliminate the first night, figuring we could stay at the airport Hyatt since we would be arriving late. We could then take Magical Express early the next morning and start our vacation. Using this method, I did manage to find a room at the Art of Animation in the Little Mermaid section. I reserved the room and paid one night deposit. I could always cancel the room and get my deposit back if I d canceled at least five nights before we arrived.
After my initial search, I turned to one of our favorite lodging sources, renting Disney Vacation Club (DVC) points. I placed a call to a friend that is a DVC owner to see if she could check availability for DVC studios before I attempted to rent them. She let me know that it was a race weekend (Disney Wine and Dine Half Marathon) and that was why I couldn’t find anything. She did a quick scan and also couldn’t find anything. That sealed that end of the search.
I checked again on the Disney World web site and finally found a room! It was even offered at a discount. The room was at All Star Movies, which is a location we’ve stayed at before. We really like the theme at this resort, even if I don’t particularly like the two double beds (I prefer queen beds). The price for the room was $650, which isn’t horrible, especially considering we wouldn’t need a rental car. I immediately booked this room and canceled the room at Art of Animation. We had to pay for one night’s deposit. I intended to pay for the rest of the room using Disney Gift Cards, purchased at a discount, of course!
After confirming that our room was set, I went back to our room reservation and added Magical Express ground transportation. I had to put in the airline flight information, but that was pretty straightforward. There is no charge for the free shuttle service.
Since we normally use a rental car to go offsite and get snacks and drinks, we would have to resort to other means to do that. We planned to bring water bottles to the parks and refill them or to take an Uber for a quick trip to a local Target. We would just take Disney transportation around the parks, with an occasional taxi or Uber thrown in if we wanted to get somewhere in a hurry.
After booking the travel portion, we waited to book FastPasses. As Disney Annual Pass holders, we normally only get 30 days in advance to book our tickets. Since we would be staying onsite this time, we get a full 60 days to plan our FastPasses. Once our window was open, we booked our FastPasses, including snagging some for Flight of Passage!
After we got our FastPasses, it was time to sit back and wait for our travel day to arrive!
We are always looking to save money on airfare when visiting our favorite Disney vacation locations. We’ve talked about using points to get free flights, especially through the use of sign up bonuses for credit cards. We have also talked about making alternate flight arrangements, including flying into alternate airports. During a recent search for flights for a trip next summer, we’ve discovered another tip!
We always start our searches by looking to see if we can get a low cost ticket to our destination. We feel that it is better to save our airline miles for more expensive tickets so that we get more than 1 cent per mile worth of value from the airline miles. In order to get a good feel of the price point for the flights we want, we start our searches at one of our favorite websites, ITA Matrix. For this particular trip, I started looking for one way tickets from Washington, D.C. to Orlando, Jacksonville, or Tampa. The cheapest flights seemed to be on American Airlines on Tuesdays for $64 each. This was definitely a great find. Once the day we wanted to fly was available to book, we headed to the American Airlines website to book the tickets. We entered our travel information, selected four passengers and started the search.
Once we got the search results back, we were shocked to see that American Airlines was only showing us options at $94. What happened to our $64 flights? This was going to raise our cost a total of $120.
I decided to redo the search, but this time, only enter in two passengers to see if I could get different results.
Our $64 flights were back, but sadly, there were only three seats available at this price. There was an earlier flight in the day, but it only had two seats available at $64.
Armed with this knowledge, we decided to book two reservations. One of the reservations would be for Nancy and the girls, all of which priced out at $64. I then made a second reservation, on the same flight, at $94. I was able to save $90 by making two separate bookings. Since these flights are only one way flights, we obviously need to book the return trip. I’m going to spend some time looking for free flights back, or if they are cheap enough, paying cash to come back. The nice thing about making one way flights is that I can come back on whichever airline is the cheapest. We could also fly back from or into a different airport if we need to in order to save money.
With the above flights, we could have gotten all the tickets for $64 but would have had to split our party up onto two different flights. We discussed it, but decided against doing that so that we wouldn’t have to try to reconnect at the Orlando airport. It would have involved hanging out for a long period of time or doubling back with whatever transportation method we were going to use. $30 was a small increase in cost in order to travel as a group, in our opinion.
Let us know what some of your best money saving travel tips are in the comments!