How I saved for my last Disney Cruise

Our first cruise with Disney was in February of 2019 and we actually booked this cruise when the cruise dates opened in October of 2018! Doing your research ahead of time and booking when the cruise dates open is a good way to get the best price for your cruise date, as prices only go up with Disney after opening day. Also there can be a huge difference in price if you cruise when kids are out of school verses when schools are in session. If you need help with this, using a Authorized Disney Vacation Planner is a good bet, after all, this is at no extra cost to you. For this reason, we chose to cruise in February. Plus we live in Ohio, who doesn’t want to go to the Caribbean in the winter?

Since booking this cruise, I have learned much more about various strategies for saving on travel, but life is a journey and I will discuss what I did for this trip.

I booked this trip using my Disney Premier credit card and used this credit card for my payment method for most of this trip. I had previously obtained this card when planning a trip to Walt Disney World. This card does have a fee of $49 per year, but at the time I got the card, the first years fee was waived and also had a promotion of a $200 statement credit after spending $500 in the first 3 months. I chose to go with the premier card, even though there was a fee, because of the promotional bonuses and the fact it had higher rewards in the spending categories and the ability to get a statement credit on airline tickets. Using this credit card, I automatically received 2% back on any spending with Disney. This card marked the being of my credit card travel journey, but I actually highly recommend looking into the premier travel credit cards now. I had always been leary of those cards in the past because of the higher fees and not really being sure that traveling as infrequently as I did, it was worth it. There is also a no fee Disney Visa card available that I think is worth having in your wallet instead of the Disney Premier card if you are a Disney fan like I am.

My goal was to pay for any on-board spending with money saved from cash back on credit cards and money saving shopping apps. Obviously, cash back credit cards will not get you anywhere if you do not pay them off in full each month. I did no extra spending and for saving for this trip, I used my Disney Premier Credit card and my Chase Freedom credit card with 5% categories and my husband’s Wells Fargo Cash Wise credit card.

Whenever I did any shopping, I first checked out Cashback Monitor to decide the best credit card and shopping portal to use. I also used Ibotta, Shopkick, Receipt Hog, Coupons.com, Saving Star and Disney Movie Insiders. I wish I had saved my list of my earnings, but that was before I decided to blog about my travel budget journey. Admittedly, the shopping apps were a small portion of the money saved toward this trip, but it does add up.

Another way I was able to stretch our dollars was to purchase Disney gift cards at BJs. I paid some of my cruise balance this way. This results in a 4% savings. I also used money earned in the shopping apps to purchase Disney gift cards at BJs to further stretch the savings. (There are many people who also purchase gift cards at Target for a 5% discount with a Target Redcard.)

When it was time to buy plane tickets, I was doing so well with my savings, that I was able to also pay for our plane tickets almost entirely. I paid just shy of $40 out of pocket. I did this by utilizing the statement credit on my Disney Premier Credit card for airline tickets and transferring cash back from my Chase Freedom to my checking account to pay the balance due. At the time I was very excited to achieve this, but now I realize that I would have got a much better redemption if I had a travel rewards credit card.

In the end, I was able to save up about $1200 for spending money on-board. We did spend a little more on board than that , but it was nice not having a huge credit card bill come in after our vacation. In addition to spending a little more on board the ship, we also purchased a placeholder for our next cruise. This placeholder allows us to book our next Disney cruise at 10% off! The placeholder cost $250 that then gets applied toward your balance on your next cruise. You have 24 months to go on your cruise. If for some reason, you do not use your placeholder, the $250 is refunded back to you.

One last way I would like to mention that I saved some money for this trip was by booking our hotel though a booking portal available to me though work. I had a particular hotel I decided to stay at the night before our cruise, and shopped around for the best rate. Don’t overlook shopping portals that may be available to you at work.

In all, I was happy with my efforts to do our vacation the most budget conscious way possible. It was a good first effort for a more pricey family vacation. We used our placeholder to book a cruise for January of 2021 and I look forward to sharing how that trip goes in the future.