Let’s go to Disney World for free! (Okay, maybe not ‘free’, but pretty close to it – and cheaper than you ever imagined!).
Check out this information below, provided by Brad Barrett.
Brad and family. Source: http://www.richmondsavers.com/
With two young daughters it is incredibly difficult to travel anywhere due to the sheer cost; this is especially true when talking about the holy grail of travel for young kids: Walt Disney World.
As CPAs and owners of the website RichmondSavers.com, my wife and I are always on the lookout for ways to save money. We figured there were savings to be had on this Disney trip, and amazingly we found a way to make it almost entirely free!
We heard previously of the concept known as ‘travel hacking’ (less crudely I call it maximizing travel rewards), which is essentially opening targeted credit cards that offer massive signup bonuses of airline and hotel miles/points. With the proper information and planning, you’re able to parlay those bonuses into a free trip nearly anywhere in the world.
As accountants we’re naturally cautious when it comes to any ‘too good to be true’ offer, but after studying this concept, we decided it was the real deal and now we’re going to Disney for free! Here’s how we did it:
Hotel:
The Walt Disney Swan and Dolphin hotels are right on-site at Disney, immediately adjacent to EPCOT, and they include all the perks of a Disney hotel such as free intra-Disney transportation and extra Magic Hours where the park is open only to Disney hotel guests. What most people don’t know is that this is a Starwood brand hotel (Westin, W, Sheraton, etc.) so you can book these hotels for free using Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) Starpoints!
These are luxury hotels and they often run over $300 per night, but they are a ‘sweet spot’ in the SPG reward chart Category 4 at only 10,000 points per night. Even better, SPG has a 5th Night Free promotion on Category 4 hotels so you only need 40,000 Starpoints to stay five nights in the Swan or Dolphin for free!
As we detail on our step-by-step instructions, you just need to open two Starwood Preferred Guest AMEX cards that each come with a 25,000 point bonus to earn enough points for up to seven free nights at the Swan or Dolphin! Each card requires you put $5,000 of your normal spending on it in order to earn the full bonus, so this will earn you an additional 10,000 Starpoints for 60,000 total points including the bonus.
Since you’ll be paying the balance off in full (or it is not worth it to do this!) this will cost you nothing. Five to seven nights are easily worth $1,500 – $2,100 in free hotels right there. There are no blackout dates, so if they have a room for cash, you can book with points, which is amazing.
Airline Tickets:
Southwest Airlines just opened a route from Richmond to Orlando and they have a great rewards program with no blackout dates. These tickets are currently running $200 round-trip, so about $800 for our family of four.
Southwest’s rewards program is essentially on a basis of: 60 points for every $1 of airfare. So to book $800 worth of free airfare, you’d need 48,000 Rapid Rewards points (800 x 60 =48,000).
We were able to open a Southwest Visa credit card that offered a 50,000 point bonus for just spending $2,000 on the card in the first three months the account was open. So just like that we opened the card, spent our $2,000 and now our flights are free!
Disney Amusement Park Tickets:
The first strategy we’re using to get free Disney tickets is to go right before our youngest daughter turns three years old, as anyone under three can enter the park for free. We’re literally going the week before her 3rd birthday, so now we only need tickets for the remaining three family members.
There aren’t any specific rewards programs to get free Disney tickets, but we found a simple way to earn ‘travel statement credits’ through the Barclaycard Arrival World MasterCard to get $800 worth of free Disney tickets. This will be enough to cover nearly the entire cost of our remaining Disney tickets!
Laura and I each opened an Arrival card and they offer 40,000 bonus points (worth $400) each for a $1,000 minimum spend on each card. In order to redeem these points for $400 of statement credits, you must use your Arrival card to purchase qualifying travel (such as airfare, hotels, car rentals, and most importantly for our purpose “tour agencies and travel operators”).
We determined that UndercoverTourist.com, the reputable authorized seller of official Disney tickets, fits Barclays code of ‘tour agencies and travel operators’, so buying tickets through them, which we were going to do anyway, worked for our travel statement credit redemption.
Summary:
If this is your first time ever hearing about this concept, it probably sounds hard to believe, but we can vouch for it firsthand that it works and it’s really easy! We’re already planning our next free trip to either Paris or Hawaii for 2015 and that trip will be completely free too.
We offer a completely free travel rewards coaching service where we’ll help you plan your dream trip, determine which cards to open and guide you through actually booking the trip with rewards points. Please email me at brad@richmondsavers.com or sign up for the coaching service here.
Brad Barrett is a graduate of the University of Richmond, a Virginia CPA and the owner of RichmondSavers.com which offers ‘financial advice for the rest of us’ and free financial and travel rewards coaching. He lives in Short Pump with his wife and two daughters.
