As featured in the New York Times, CBS and NBC, here’s our step-by-step guide on how to take a nearly free family trip to Walt Disney World ($4,000+ savings) using credit card rewards points!
Are you headed to Disneyland in Anaheim instead? If so, be sure to check out our guide to visiting Disneyland for free.
What We’ll Cover
Use the links below to jump ahead to a section.
The Basic Method
To make this trip happen Laura and I opened a few new credit cards and used them for our regular spending in order to earn the significant signup bonuses that were offered with those cards. Since we pay these cards off on time and in full every month, this didn’t cost us anything at all. We are both CPAs, so being financially responsible is essential to us and we thoroughly researched this before getting started. If this is a new concept to you, you’ll want to check out these basic tips below.
Instead of using our regular credit card that would have earned us a tiny 1% “rewards” back, we opened these new cards and saved $4,000 on our Disney vacation.
Not bad, right? And the best part is that YOU can do this too and it is surprisingly easy!
Step 1: Booking a Disney Hotel with Points
Nothing beats a free room, and we’re going to show you exactly how to get free lodging with points. Recent changes to hotel programs and credit card bonuses have made this tougher, but we have found ways to work around it. Let’s dig in!
First, you’ll choose between two main hotel options: The Disney Swan/Dolphin or the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista Resort. The Disney Swan and Disney Dolphin cost more points (50,000 per night*), but they are luxury hotels right on-site and within a short walking distance (or nice free boat ride right out back!) of both EPCOT and Hollywood Studios. The Sheraton Lake Buena Vista Resort costs fewer points (25,000 per night*). It’s just a few blocks away from WDW, and it has free shuttle service and lots of other perks and amenities.
*Note: Marriott is introducing new peak and off-peak pricing. So for Swan/Dolphin the rates will be as follows: Standard = 50K; Peak = 60K; Off-peak = 40K. For Lake Buena Vista it will be: Standard = 25K; Peak = 30K; Off-peak = 20K.
We’ll show you how to plan for either property. In some ways you get more bang for you buck (or bang for your points?) at the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista Resort. But the conveniences offered by the Swan and Dolphin are also quite nice, and many of our readers have chosen to book there instead! What you do might be based on the current credit card offers when you apply. Previously, we have seen the Marriott card’s bonus fluctuate between 75,000 and 125,000 points. When it’s 100,000 (as an example), booking the Swan/Dolphin becomes much more attainable than at 75K. It’s still doable with a 75K bonus, but it just makes it far more likely that you will need to transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards to supplement your Marriott points. However, a recent change in Marriott card offers may change the approach here (keep reading!).
Side note: many of our Disney Challenge members want to earn five free nights or more for their trip. Marriott has an awesome perk called the “5th night free” promotion (aka “Stay for 5, pay for 4”). When you book four consecutive nights with points, the 5th night will be free. Using the standard rates, you would need 200,000 points for five nights at the Swan/Dolphin, and 100,000 points for five nights at the Sheraton. Remember if you book at peak or off-peak times the pricing will be different.
Again, the strategy here may change based on current credit card offers.
Marriott Bonvoy Boundless® Credit Card
Important Note: The information for the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless® card has been collected independently by Richmond Savers. The product details on this page have not been reviewed or provided by the bank advertiser.
You and your significant other could each open a Marriott Bonvoy Boundless® Card. Earn 3 Free Night Awards (each night valued up to 50,000 points) after spending $3,000 on purchases in your first 3 months from account opening. Annual fee of $95 applies.
The other option is to supplement Marriott points/nights with your Chase Ultimate Rewards. We talk more about the Chase Sapphire Preferred® below, and it’s quite frankly the best travel card on the market, in our opinion. With the points from that card, you can transfer some of them to your Marriott account and book additional nights that way.
Total Savings for at least Five Free nights at a Disney hotel: ~$1,500 (assuming $300 per night cash value for 5 nights)
Step 2: Booking Flights to Disney World with Points
Important Note: The information for the Chase Sapphire Preferred® card has been collected independently by Richmond Savers. The product details on this page have not been reviewed or provided by the bank advertiser.
Chase Sapphire Preferred® card, which earns Ultimate Rewards (UR). These points are incredibly valuable since you can either use them to book travel directly through the online portal or you can transfer them to one of their rewards partners such as United, Southwest or British Airways where they become true frequent flyer miles in those programs.
The current sign-up bonus is 100,000 points after reaching the minimum spending requirement of $5,000 (of your regular spending) in the first 3 months the account is open. There is a $95 annual fee.
You’ll each earn the 100,000 point bonus plus at least 5,000 points for your $5,000 worth of spending, so after meeting all the requirements you’ll each have at minimum 105,000 points each.
If you each open this card and fulfill all the requirements as stated above you will now have at least 210,000 points and you have two main redemption options for your flights to Orlando:
- The easiest and most flexible option allows you to purchase your flights through your online rewards portal. This is as simple as searching on any of your favorite online travel sites, so nothing difficult here at all! You will get 1.25 cents per point in value this way, which equates to $2,625 in free flights from your 210,000 points. That will give you a lot of flexibility to book on the airline of your choice and $2,625 should cover the vast majority of the flight expense for a family heading to Orlando.
- The second option is to transfer these points to one of the partner airlines to book award tickets at that airline. You will want both spouses to send their points to one frequent flyer account and consolidate them there. Southwest Airlines is your best option by far since those miles are easy to use, and you likely will get significantly more value out of booking this way.
Southwest has no blackout dates and the award tickets are based on how much the flights cost, so this was the choice we made. We know many people who booked through the portal for simplicity and convenience, as it couldn’t be easier to book that way.
You also might find some great redemption options with JetBlue or American; it really comes down to your outbound airport.
For the ease of redemption and great value this is simply our top card for flights to Disney World.
Total Savings for flights to Disney World: $2,625 (or more!)
Step 3: Booking Walt Disney World Tickets with Rewards Points
There are no specific credit cards dedicated to earning Disney World park tickets, but after a lot of research and phone calls we found a way to earn credit card bonuses to cover the vast majority of the expense of the Disney park tickets.
The Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card is the best option currently.
This card is the perfect solution because it allows for flexible travel redemptions; you just pay for the “travel” purchase with your credit card like you normally would. Here’s the lowdown:
The current offer is 75,000 bonus miles when you spend $4,000 on purchases in the first 3 months after you open the account. There is a $95 annual fee. (Plus, get $250 to use on Capital One Travel in your first cardholder year. So it can really be worth $1,000 in travel) The bonus miles are worth $1000 of free, flexible travel.
This card is so easy. Once you meet the bonus, you essentially just reimburse yourself for travel expenses. So nobody knows or cares that you have “miles” — you just simply pay for your travel expense with that card and after the fact you log into your online account to redeem your miles for a travel statement credit which reduces your credit card bill.
Learn more about the and find out how to apply
One other great things about this card is that you can retroactively apply the reimbursement to expenses you made before earning the early spending bonus. So if your first purchases on the card are your Disney tickets (following the “Undercover Tourist” method we outline below), you can still use points to pay yourself back later, after you meet the minimum spending requirement.
This card is very specific about what counts as “travel” to be reimbursed as a statement credit when redeeming their miles. Buying Disney World park tickets directly from Disney will not work to get the statement credit, however, we found a way you can do this!
Using Undercover Tourist
Our top choice to purchase Disney World park tickets with your Capital One Venture is an official authorized seller, UndercoverTourist.com and buying through their site will work as a “travel” expense to redeem your Venture miles as they are coded as a “travel agency!” We were so impressed with Undercover Tourist, as their Director of Marketing personally emailed with us and confirmed their coding for credit card purposes before we made our purchase. How’s that for customer service??
We have already purchased Disney World tickets through them, so we know this works and you can be confident as well.
If you and your significant other each open one of these accounts your family will have at least $1,500 in total travel statement credits available for Disney tickets through Undercover Tourist. You would then want to each purchase some of your family’s Disney tickets on each card, so you can redeem the bonus points for statement credits on each credit card account.
Undercover Tourist is highly recommended by MouseSavers.com and the famous Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World, so you know they are reputable.
They also do not charge a shipping cost, so you are able to split your ticket purchase over multiple credit cards and it won’t cost you any additional money.
Total Savings on WDW Park Tickets: $1,500 (if you both open the cards)
10 Rules for Succeeding with your Nearly Free Trip to Disney World Using Credit Card Rewards Points:
- Please make sure you are responsible with your credit cards. Responsible means paying them off on time and in full every single month and not spending more on the credit card than you normally would with cash/check/debit. No amount of “free travel” is worth getting into debt or paying interest on your credit card!
- In my opinion, it’s easiest to stagger the credit cards you open with your spouse so you’re only working on one card at a time. For instance, I would open the first account and then Laura and I would both use it. We would both put our normal spending on the card until we hit the cumulative spending requirement (paying it off in full each month!). Once done with that account, Laura would then open the next one and we’d keep doing that until we earned all the points for our trip. In the past, adding each other as authorized users could make this slightly more convenient, but given some of the rule changes from a few banks, I recommend that you DON’T add each other as AUs. It will make it more difficult to get approved for more cards later.
- As we alluded to in #2, each adult can open each of these accounts in their name and social security number, so for a couple it allows them to really double up on every single one of these bonus offers.
- We think it will take most families approximately 12 months to reach the bonuses on all the cards detailed in this plan, and you generally want to book a few months in advance. That means you’ll want to start at least 12-15 months before your anticipated trip if you intend to complete the entire plan. Every family has different spending levels, so if you spend over let’s say $2,500 per month on your cards you can likely cut 3-6 months off the timeline.
- Following this plan is not complex at all, but it does require some basic organization to keep track of your credit card accounts and rewards points.ke
- Flexibility is a huge key to succeed with travel rewards points, and while we’ve tried to make this plan as simple as possible (no flexibility needed for the park tickets or airfare!), you will need a small bit of flexibility with booking the hotel rooms at the Dolphin. This is a huge hotel with hundreds of rooms per night that are available to be booked with Marriott points, but it does fill up during the holidays and occasionally on random days throughout the year. If you can be flexible even plus or minus a few days that will almost guarantee that you’ll be able to use your Marriott points.
- As mentioned in #5, the hotel is the one minor constraint in this system (VERY minor in our opinion), we suggest most people get started on the plan with the Chase Marriott Card
- For your WDW park tickets you have a ton of flexibility to open up the credit cards right up until nearly the last minute. As long as you give Undercover Tourist enough time to ship you the tickets in the mail, you can open this last credit card in the month or so prior to your trip, purchase your tickets and then continue using the card on your trip and beyond. Capital One gives you up to 90 days after the travel expense to log into your account and redeem your miles, so you can continue earning to save even more!
- Our family spent $159.80 out of pocket for two expenses that you can also avoid with the right planning! There is an $11.20 government fee on all frequent flyer mile flights in the US ($44.80 for our family of four) and the Swan/Dolphin charged us a $23 per day resort fee even on the award nights ($115 for the 5 nights). However, if we had planned ahead even more, we could have opened an additional “fixed value” card to use to pay for these “travel” expenses to really make the trip entirely free.
- Getting to/from Orlando International Airport is one aspect of the trip that is not free, but you can use Uber promo codes to save a lot of money. What we suggest is have one of you sign up using their promo code and then refer your significant other. This referral will get each of you a $20 free ride. So that’s three highly subsidized Uber rides you’ll have for this trip. We personally used Happy Limo but many people use the Mears Shuttle to get to/from the airport.
Take Action!
So there you have it, nearly a free family vacation to Walt Disney World for up to five nights at the luxury Dolphin hotel (or many more at the nearby Lake Buena Vista Resort), airfare and park tickets. Just by following the instructions in this article you can save $4,000+ on your family vacation!
Our family had such a great time at Disney World that we want to ‘pay it forward’ and help other families do this as well!
Thanks,
Brad and Laura Barrett
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