Help needed! Trying to book september trip on shoe string budget!

[Belle92]

Hi all!

Im a fairly new member to this forum and received great help when my Fiancé and I were planning our first trip last year. Were hoping to return this september to celebrate our 1 year engagement after the wonderful moment happened back in WDW last september. At this point we'd pretty much consider stowing away in a suitcase just to get back there this year were missing it so much. We have also made the decision to get married in WDW in 2016 and are already saving hard for that, another reason we want to visit this year to check out the venue etc and attend the wedding showcase on the 27th of september . I won't bore you with the details but I've had an hours cut at work and my other half has only just managed to get a job after being made redundant so needless to our available money is considerably less than last year and we have a relatively short amount of time to save for this holiday.

Reluctantly we've decided on staying at all star movies from 16th-27th of september , with tickets and obviously flights to pay for , ideally we'd like to opt dining plan but theres no way to afford that currently.

so heres the dilema!
i can book the hotel through hotels.com for around £619 with tickets separately for £585 or
Disney direct for £673 with tickets costing £544
flights through thomas cook cheapest currently possible 1098

if i was to book through hotels.com does that mean upon arrival at disney we won't be able to use magic bands with our tickets etc linked and if we did decide to go for ddp would we not be able to add that on as we haven't gone through disney themselves?

Im basically thinking should we just try and pay the extra to go through disney direct to save hastle?

Any advice on how to make this trip the best possible would be greatly appreciated + if anyone can advise me of any cheaper ways to do this that would be amazing!

Thanks in advance

Chloe and Craig

 

[SAV]

You can save money by booking on off-site room. Did you look in to the rooms and rates of the hotels located on Hotel Plaza Boulevard? They have very good transportation to and from the parks. You would have to look into transportation from the Airport to the hotel, though.

 

[Bocko57]

I agree with SAV. If you want to save money, stay off-site. If you want to stay on-site, your best choices are the All Star Resorts or Pop Century (I recommend Pop over All Star). You mentioned the Dining Plan. Do you have to have the dining plan? I find that when I have had the dining plan in the past I end up eating a lot of food more than I would normally eat. Also towards the end of September and beginning of October, Disney has been offerering free dining of some sort. With whom to book, I can suggest AAA (not sure if you have something similar) and Kingdom Konsultant. Good Luck on your search.

 

[lilclerk]

I am pretty sure hotels.com just offers the resort, they won't be able to add a dining plan. You may want to double check with them, though.
If you stay on site, you'll still get an MB no matter who you booked through.

 

[CheshireCat12]

My advice would be to book the cheapest room (Value- All-Star Sports or Music usually), find the cheapest flight you can, and avoid the dining plan like the plague. If you eat snacks or light choices for breakfast or lunch you can save money. Tickets- can't help you there, they are all expensive. Look carefully at how often you want to go into the parks. Maybe you can save by getting less days on your ticket but taking the water park option which if you want to go to Typhoon or Blizzard is actually a good deal. For example, on a 3 day water park option ticket, you could stay 6 days if you made three days out of DHS, MK, AK, Epcot; and then 3 of your days a water park visit/resort/DTD etc.

 

[Belle92]

Thanks guys i think our decision up to now will be to book disney direct and probably give dining plan a miss , but stay at all stars possibly art of animation if we have any extra cash tickets will probably be the 14 nights for the price of 7 deal sadly the uk is a bit rubbish and we don't have anything like kingdom konsultants its really either booking this individually or high street travel agents which are usually more expensive.

so thats possibly the plan for now unless any other offers etc come along like free dining plan or a percentage off the hotel price

Thanks for all the help everyone definitely aided my decision

 

[HouCuseChickie]

I'm not sure about Hotels.com, but I've heard that Orbitz is able to get you your confirm info so you can set up everything on MDE, get magic bands, DME, etc. Still, if budget is a big issue...exploring offsite alternatives would be wise.

 

[SteveW]

I just did a compare for Pop Century with Disney direct vs Hotels.com and the difference was only $3. You can probably save more when Disney comes out with the fall specials. As far as saving money on food, you might think about getting some groceries for your stay.

My sister used one of the big name web sites like hotel.com for a trip last month and it was a nightmare.