Category — Disney Specials, Deals and Discounts

DISNEY’S ARMED FORCES SALUTE IN 2016

Miltiary families and their friends will be delighted to know that my friend Steve Bell has broken the news at Military Disney Tips that today Disney’s Armed Forces Salute has been extended into late December 2016.

There’s two parts to the Armed Forces salute

• A steep discount on Disney World park tickets, and
• Discounts on eligible Disney World resort hotel rooms.

Eligible military families can select one or both, but can’t combine them with any other deal. You can also use the Military Salute tickets and stay at Shades of Green.

My friend Kelly B can book the room-rate part of this deal for you. Contact her at 980-429-4499 or kellyb@destinationsinflorida.com.

(The image, by the way, is of General Colin Powell, USA (Ret.) saluting Captain America at Disney’s Contemporary Resort!)

EVEN BETTER NEWS: WALT DISNEY WORLD FOR MILITARY FAMILIES

Eligibility for these and other Disney military deals has always been complicated, and the process for getting and using some of them even more so.

Steve’s Military Disney Tips has always been the go-to site for military families looking to make the most out of their Disney World vacations.

But like every other website (especially mine), finding exactly what you need to know, in the right order, sometimes isn’t as easy as you’d like it to be.

So the great news is that Steve has just published a Disney World guidebook for military families.

With entire chapters devoted to the 2016 salute, to Shades of Green, and to other deals and perks available to military families, I can’t recommend it enough!!

It’s available as a PDF–probably the most convenient format–here, and on Amazon.com here.

This book will be a great help to military families contemplating a Disney World visit in 2016!!

BOOKING THE DISNEY MILITARY SALUTE

As noted above, Kelly B can book the room-rate part of this deal for you–but not the discounted tickets.

Contact her at 980-429-4499 or kellyb@destinationsinflorida.com.

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In recent years, Disney World has offered deals most parts of the year.

The most common deal is discounts on its hotel rooms, but now and then it also offers package deals, such as the dining plan for free to those who book a hotel room and tickets at full price.

In 2015, however, several major deals in a row have been hard to book, especially for the least expensive “standard” rooms: the fall free dining deal (now closed), and room rate deals for early and later fall (both still open).

Why are these deals hard to book?  Because Disney is making many fewer rooms out of its inventory available for the deals.  And why is it doing that?

Because it can get really good occupancy and rates even without the deals.

A week and a half ago Disney reported its Q3 earnings and (in its earnings call) hotel trends for the current quarter.  In its 10Qs it also includes available room nights, occupancy, and per-room guest spending.

For Q3 2015 (basically April to June) it reported 2.6 million available room nights at 87% occupancy with an average spend of $310 per night.

Multiply them together, and that’s more than $700 million in domestic hotel revenue, Disney’s highest results ever, and nearing twice the worst quarter of the recession, Q2 2009 when hotel revenue was just a bit over $400 million.

Seasonality can muddle Disney’s trends, but using a four quarter moving average clears out seasonality.

The chart above shows the results of this analysis.

It combines the effects of available rooms, which vary from both new construction and rooms taken out of inventory for refurb…

…occupancy…

…which then results in booked rooms (multiplying available rooms by occupancy)…

…and is multiplied by guest spend per room to yield actual room revenues per quarter.

Disney is a public company–which means it has the job of increasing earnings. How do you increase earnings when your hotels are booked almost to capacity?

Well, one way to increase earnings when you don’t have a whole lot more rooms to sell is to cut back on the number of discounted rooms you offer…

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DISNEY WORLD ROOM RATE DEAL

A new Disney World room rate deal covering most arrival dates from October 4 through December 23 2015 was released today. (November 25-27 is excluded.)

This deal has

• Value resorts (except Art of Animation Little Mermaid rooms, which are excluded) at 10-15% off depending on the date
• Moderates at 15-20% off depending on the date (no moderates are excluded)
• Deluxes at a complex variety of discounts ranging from 10 to 25% off, depending on the hotel, the room type, and the date
• DVC resorts at 20-30% off, excluding Bay Lake Tower, the Villas at the Grand Floridian, and the Polynesian Villas and Bungalows

To book these discounts, contact Kelly at 980-429-4499 or kellyb@destinationsinflorida.com.

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Steve Bell is breaking the news that the Armed Forces Salute has been extended “to 20 December 2015 for Disney Armed Forces Salute Tickets and 23 December 2015 for Room Discounts.”

See Steve’s material here for important details!

Friend of the site Kelly B can book Armed Forces Salute room discounts. Contact her  at 980-429-4499 or kellyb@destinationsinflorida.com.

Kelly not only will book your trip, but also help you (for free) with

• Itinerary planning, including advising on and booking your FastPass+
• Dining suggestions and reservation planning
• Future discount searches – Ongoing searching for future discounts to apply to your vacation
• Free “Mouse Perks” – tips, updates, and fun freebies

And, for qualifying trips Kelly and her agency, Destinations in Florida, will get you a free copy of The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit, the best-reviewed Disney World guidebook in history, after it comes out later this year!

Kelly cannot book Armed Forces Salute tickets–just the room deals.

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Disney in Your Day is running a giveaway of The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit–the best-reviewed Disney World guidebook ever.

The giveaway is on this page, at the end of the review.

Good luck!!

Disney’s late summer and fall Free Dining and late summer room discount deals came out about two weeks ago.

The universal experience, so far as I can tell, is that even though more rooms opened for booking into the deal May 9, many fewer standard rooms were available for these offers—especially free dining at the moderates–than we’ve seen in the recent past.

Moreover, 2015’s free dining deal saw a new requirement: families had to add Park Hopper or Water Park and More add-ons to their (always previously required) base tickets to even get free dining.

For those who had not planned to buy these add-ons, that’ll cost a family of four more than $270 extra, and will, for those ten or older, blow a night of savings on the free regular dining plan or almost two nights on the free quick-service plan. Results are even worse for kids 3 to 9.

So what’s up? Well, what’s up is that Disney doesn’t need to discount so much anymore. See the chart:

Hotel revenues the last four quarters were more than $2.5 billion, including the first-ever two straight $650 million+ quarters. And despite major net capacity adds since the recession (Kidani Village, Bay Lake Tower, Grand Floridian Villas, Art of Animation), occupancy is running at levels not seen for years.

You will see some people who have not done the math—or don’t know what Sarbanes-Oxley means—saying that Disney is fudging this occupancy. But every quarter’s SEC filings include this at the end:

…and they also include something like this data:

You can understand almost everything about trends in the competitive position of Disney’s hotels from this data, with a little work.

The only thing that’s tricky is that not all quarters are the same length (most, but not all, are 91 days) so to get fair trend comparisons you should convert into “per night” figures instead of “per quarter” stuff (you also have do some arithmetic to tease Q4 out of the FY’s 10-K).

It’s then a pretty straightforward analytic task to turn this into relevant trend data, using where needed four quarter trailing moving averages to accommodate the major seasonality in prices and occupancy that Disney faces.

So here’s the results. (All are for Disney’s total domestic resorts—you can’t separate California and Florida. But there’s so few rooms in the three California hotels that it doesn’t much matter.)

Available rooms. Disney reports available rooms per quarter in thousands (again, subject to the penalties of Sarbanes-Oxley, so no fudging). Converted to available rooms per night, here’s the facts over the past years:

You see the kick up from the phased opening at Art of Animation in the second half of 2012, and then a slight trend down from various refurbs/conversions—especially at the Polynesian and Caribbean Beach.

But the down-trend is just not that big a deal. Available rooms peaked in Q3 2013 (roughly, April-June) at 29,154 per night, and in the last reported quarter (Q2 for fiscal 2015, roughly January-March) stood at 28,527.

That’s a difference of just 627 rooms per night, or about 2% compared to peak availability.

Rooms booked per night. Of more interest is rooms booked per night, which dropped to less than 21,000 rooms per night in Q2 2010 but in both the last two quarters exceeded 25,000 per night.

(Renting another 4,000 rooms per night is worth more than a million dollars of revenue a day to Disney.)

The upward trend is apparent, but so is the seasonality of these results. Showing a four-quarter trailing moving average cleans out seasonality to show pure trend:

Dividing rooms booked per quarter by rooms available per quarter is where the “occupancy” figures come from. And multiplying rooms booked per quarter by average per-room guest spend gives you revenues.

Per room guest spend.

Above is the per room guest spend by quarter…

…and as a moving average, so you can see the trend without seasonality. (This particular moving average is not an arithmetic average of the 4 reported numbers, but rather weights them by the number of rooms booked each quarter.)

The overall per room guest spend is going up as a combination of increased prices, reduced total discounts, better revenue management (Disney has focused a lot on this lately) and increased guest willingness to spend on extras.

Total room revenue. Multiplying per room spend by rooms booked gives you hotel revenue.

Here’s the results–note it bottoming towards $400 million in the depths of the recession, and heading for $700 million the last two quarters…

…and as a four quarter moving average:

So the reason the Free Dining is so hard to get, and is more expensive than it used to be, is the same as why some hotels are rarely offered as part of the deal anyway, or why there are still no coffee-makers in value resort standard rooms (I really needed one at my stay in All-Star Movies last week): Disney does not need to offer them to get the kind of results it is looking for.

And the future of Free Dining? Well, as long as results are this strong, I don’t see anything more in the future than it being as hard, or even harder, to get as it was this time.

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