Isn’t she lovely?

When I was in first grade, I “published” a book about going to Disney World. Even though we had never been, I wrote and illustrated a vivid tale about our family’s trip, which may have involved winning the lottery in order to be able to go. Even as a first grader, I had a hunch that a trip like this might require some extra, unexpected cash flow. We did eventually get to go as a family, and I even remember the 3am wake-up to face a full day of motion sickness along I-95 as absolutely magical. Going to Disney may not be your thing, but if you do think you want to pass along the magical nostalgia to your own kids, points and miles can definitely help. That way, you won’t have to count on lottery winnings to defray the cost.

My mom sent me a pic of the masterpiece

Flights
One of the simplest ways to cut down on the cost of Disney (and incidentally the starting point of my own travel-hacking rabbit-hole) is trying to cover the flights with points and miles. Of course, every city is going to have best airline carriers to work with, but in Pittsburgh, Southwest is the way to go. Out of PIT, the only non-stop flights to Orlando are serviced by Southwest, Frontier, and Spirit. While Frontier and Spirit are both budget-friendly, Southwest has the simplest, most straight forward options for earning and transferring reward points for travel.

We opened the Southwest Rapid Rewards Plus card, which at the time had a bonus of 40,000 rapid rewards. This was our first reward card, and initially I thought we’d maybe cover half the cost of airfare. Tom, though, learned about the good ole’ Chase Sapphire Preferred card, which transfers 1:1 to Southwest, and we opened that for an additional 80,000 points. Those points can be transferred instantly to your Southwest account, and that is how we booked five flights. Once you get more into travel hacking, you may find that Chase Ultimate Rewards can be used for a lot of other things of higher value to you, so another strategy could be to have your spouse or partner also open a Southwest card, or to consider one of the Southwest Business cards. Those cards come with sign-up bonuses around 80,000 points, and surprisingly, even the smallest side-hustle like selling things on eBay can qualify you for business cards. We continue to feel comfortable transferring our Ultimate Rewards to Southwest because it is valuable to us. For folks flying from other locations to Orlando, other co-branded credit cards may work better for you (think, American Airlines, United, etc. – just look at the direct flights on your home airport’s website).

Hotels
Ok, you’ve got your flights down, now, where are you going to stay? The no-brainer in the points and miles world, is the Disney Swan and Dolphin/Swan Reserve. These hotels are on Disney property in a location that really can’t be beat with walking paths to both Epcot and Hollywood Studios. Guests who stay there also enjoy all of the bougie benefits of staying on site – Disney transportation, early theme park entry, and extra magic hours at night – but the property is run by Marriott and bookable with Bonvoy points. There are several avenues to Bonvoy points via credit card bonuses. The Chase Bonvoy Boundless card just had a promotion for five 50k certificates – this hotel often has availability for 42k per night, a perfect use! Amex also has several co-branded Bonvoy cards that will earn anywhere from 75-125,000 points depending on the card and promotion. Marriott is picky about how many of these cards you can receive sign-up bonuses for in a given amount of time, so be aware. You can get a bonus for one personal Amex and the business Amex at or around the same time, but you can’t get a Chase Bonvoy bonus and an Amex Bonvoy bonus within 24 months of each other. Just piling on to the never-ending points and miles rules to learn – this article is helpful.

Our family stayed at the Swan last year when Tom and I each opened Amex Bonvoy Business card when the bonus was up to 125,000 points. One thing to note about this resort is that there is a $40/night resort fee that you can’t get around. We happened to be staying there when there was an Amex offer on those cards to get 20% off anything spent at a Marriott hotel, so our fee ended up being slightly less.

The Swan (it was built in 1990 – could you tell??)

Tickets
So now you’ve saved a ton of money on your hotel and transportation. If you are going for net zero at Disney World, it’s going to be tough. Tickets to the parks for a family of five for a four day trip will be in the $2500-$3000 price range. Can you hack it? You can, but you won’t be getting the best value out of your travel points. If you really wanted to, you could open the Chase Sapphire Reserve, The Capital One Venture, and the Citi Premier Card, all which will give you the equivalent of about $800 cash-back if you convert the points to cash. Those three cards alone would about cover the cost of tickets if you cashed out your points with Citi and Chase and used the travel erase feature of the Capital One card (you would have to do this through a third-party site like Under Cover Tourist, so the purchase will code as travel. Plane-old tickets purchased directly through Disney code as entertainment and cannot be erased). If you are planning your bucket-list Disney trip and really want to get as close to free as possible, this might be what you want to do. We considered this, but in the end decided that we wanted to hang onto our points for something else for a better value. For example, un upcoming roundtrip flight I booked to Montreal cost me 35,000 points, but the cash price was over $700. That’s double the value than if we had just cashed out points at a penny per point. Ultimately, only you can decide what you want to use your travel rewards on – and don’t let anyone make you feel like you shouldn’t do what you want!

This brings me to one more hack that Tom has taken on: the bank account bonus. He has opened several bank accounts over the years, read the fine print carefully, followed the rules, and received the cash bonus – sometimes as high as $500 a pop. Typically, the terms include things like make a certain amount of direct deposits, or keep X amount of money in the account for X amount of time. I will be honest – this is not something I have participated in first hand, this has been all Tom and has taken time and organization on his part. I actually think I’d end up being really bad at something like this, easily losing track of important details. Obviously, you can use extra money for anything, but this can go a very long way to stretch a Disney budget. We have considered Tom’s bank account hobby as an extension of our travel budget. It’s quite effective – one year he almost hit $5000! If you want to get some ideas of how to do this, Doctor of Credit has a whole section about this.

So, those are the big three – flights, hotels, tickets. If you choose even two of these things to focus on, you could really take what could be a $10,000 endeavor (gulp) and get it down much, much lower. If you do end up paying cash for parts of the trip, just make sure you are working on a sign-up bonus and swiping that card!