Advice for buying Disney vacation in December

[virgo7598]

Hello everyone! This is my first post and I'm excited to hear what advice you guys have about my Disney World trip.

My friend and I are planning a vacation to Disney World in the beginning of Dec 2017. We know we'd like to go for 7 days/6 nights, sometime after Dec 3rd and before Christmas week. We'd like to stay at a Moderate hotel (we stayed at the Hilton last time we went to Disney in 2014, but we'd like to really have the Disney experience at stay on property this time). We booked our previous vacation through Expedia and we'd like to do the same this time around too. Since my friend and I live in different states, I'm going to buy the my flight with our hotel together and my friend is buying her own plane ticket separately.

Playing around with dates in our time period, we've found prices running $1600-1700 for hotels like Caribbean and both Port Orlean's. So my question is, should we wait to book until prices go down? I was reading that room discounts for this time period come out beginning of the summer/6 months out. And I know Free Dining just came out for this time period too, and we're not utilizing that, but will that cause prices to skyrocket? Is the construction going on at some of the Moderate's going to cause prices to go up or down?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[amandareid12410]

I am in the same boat you are. We are staying Dec. 2-5 at French Quarter. Free Dining is blacked out at all hotels till December 8, French Quarter and Riverside aren't participating. Room only discounts should be coming out "any time" according to Cast Members I spoke to. They did say if you booked your hotel now, if any applicable discounts came available, that they would move your reservations as long as their is space. Hope that helps your dilemma.

 

[Tuvalu]

They did say if you booked your hotel now, if any applicable discounts came available, that they would move your reservations as long as their is space. Hope that helps your dilemma.

*IMPORTANT*
Disney will not automatically apply a discount to an existing reservation. If a discount is released, the GUEST is responsible for either calling Disney to ask if the discount can be applied, or clicking "Change Reservation" online to see if the current reservation can be changed to a discounted room.

Also, the more rooms people book at rack rate (hoping to apply a future discount), the less incentive Disney has to offer a discount, since those rooms are already "taken" and out of inventory. (Disney only offers discounts to fill available rooms, not to be nice. )

 

[JillC LI]

I'd book now if you are sure you want to go then. If you book yourself, then monitor mousesavers.com for discounts. If you use a Disney travel agent, they will probably monitor newly released discounts for you. If one comes out, you can call (or have your travel agent call) to see if it can be applied to your reservation. You may need to switch resorts in order to have it apply, if at all.