Category — Disney Specials, Deals and Discounts

Disney World has a new free dining deal that covers many dates from October 2011 through March 2012.

The deal needs to be booked by October 29, 2011. Update: for 2012 dates, the book-by window has been extended to December 17. See this for more.

According to this post on the Disney Food Blog, available arrival dates are as follows (updated 8/26–those who have already booked the old dates will still get the free dining; new bookings must use the new dates)

2011 FREE DINING AT WALT DISNEY WORLD ARRIVAL DATES

• October 1-6
• October 22-November 3
• November 12-17
• November 26-December 1
• December 10-December 15
• October 2-8
• October 23-November 5
• November 13-19
• November 27-December 3
• December 11-17

2012 FREE DINING AT WALT DISNEY WORLD ARRIVAL DATES

• January 8-12
• January 21-February 2
• February 11-16
• March 3-8
• March 24-29
• January 8-14
• January 22-February 4
• February 12-18
• March 4-10
• March 25-31

Disney announced a while ago that it was extending into 2012 and adding tickets to its 2011 Military Discount.

Details have been…ummm…evolving, and only this week has the military ticket discount deal begun to show up on Disney World’s special offers web page.

As Steve at MilitaryDisneyTips.com notes here, some related Disney sites aren’t updated yet.

I’ll post more on this 2012 military deal later, but in the meantime MilitaryDisneyTips.com as usual has the hot scoop, here.

LINKS FOR MILITARY FAMILIES AT WALT DISNEY WORLD

• Military Families at Walt Disney World
• Deals and Discounts
  • Military Discounts and Deals
  • Other Walt Disney World Discounts and Deals
• Shades of Green
  • Review of Shades of Green
  • Splitting Your Stay Between Shades of Green and Another Resort
  • Overflow Rates at Shades of Green
  • Shades of Green website
• Other Resources for Military Families
  • DisneyMilitarySales.com
  • Disneyworld.com/military
  • MilitaryDisneyTips.com

Lots of important news over the last few days…

DISNEY WEBSITE OPEN FOR BOOKING 2012

You can now book most 2012 dates on Disney’s website.

This is a couple of months earlier than Disney has made this possible in past years.

You still can’t book Disney World more than 500 days ahead, so the website only lets you book (as of today) through late October 2012.

This means that most 2012 Disney World prices are out as well–I’ll update this site over the next few weeks based on these prices. You can see the new Disney World 2011/2012 ticket prices here.

YOU CAN BOOK THE ART OF ANIMATION RESORT

Disney’s Art of Animation Resort is open for booking, for arrival dates beginning May 31, 2012.

See this on MousePlanet.com for more details.

DISNEY MILITARY SALUTE TICKETS: UNLIMITED USE?

Update 7/7: only a total of 12 tickets can be used over the 2011-2012 period, wth no more than 6 activated at a time.

Steve at MilitaryDisneyTips.com is reporting here, based on new instructions to Disney ticket window staff that he has seen, that the discounted Military Disney ticket offer can be used multiple times–“unlimited” times–so long as no more than 6 tickets are purchased each time.

The details of the extension of this deal to 2012 are still not on Disney’s website; MilitaryDisneyTips.com has a lot of the specifics of them here.

WALT DISNEY WORLD NEW DEAL ANNOUNCED

Walt Disney World has released a new special offer for visits from August 14 to October 1 2011.  The deal must be booked by August 13, 2011.

The offer is expressed in terms of room rates for certain resorts “most” Sundays through Thursdays.  Weekend rates apparently will remain unchanged, and it’s unclear if resorts other than those listed have a discount.

DETAILS OF DISNEY WORLD SAVINGS

Resorts listed as eligible are below.  The per night Sunday-Thursday deal price is first, and second is the standard rate for the period (all pre-tax)

• Value resorts: $69/$85–about a 19% savings
• Moderate resorts: $129/$159–about a 19% savings
• Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge Lodge and Wilderness Lodge: $189/$260 (AKL) or $250 (WL)–a 25%+ savings
• Disney’s Old Key West and Saratoga Springs: $209/$305–about a 32% savings

More details can be found on this page on Disney’s website.

A couple of major Disney World deals have been recently announced—an extension of the Disney Armed Forces Salute into the fall of 2012, and the return of free dining for late summer 2011.

DISNEY’S MILITARY SALUTE FOR 2012

Update May 24: key details for this Disney military deal are now out!! Click here for more.

The military salute extension was announced on ABC-TV about a month ago, as part of a White House initiative to show support for the troops and their families.

However, Disney’s web page for military families still reads “Details regarding the September 2012 pricing extension of this offer will be available soon. “

The missing details, while frustrating, don’t mean the deal is not happening. Rather, it’s that the details are still being worked out. Getting the details right means a couple of things—first, coordinating with the U.S. Military about its role in the eligibility setting and purchasing process, and second, getting the right blackout dates for 2012.

My suspicion—based on how the Disney military deals have unfolded in the past—is that coordinating and collaborating with the military is not as quick and simple as it perhaps should be—this will surprise no one with experience of DOD. All could be solved in one day by an empowered E-7…but Oprah has not yet tasked one.

The other issue likely is the blackout dates. These are not relevant to the military alone—blackout dates are about Disney World’s entire 2012 calendar, and I’m guessing that fixing that in stone now is outside of the typical management process, and is also creating some delays.

My belief is that Disney collaborated as a good corporate citizen with the White House to announce this extension as part of the initiative to support the troops, and the operational complexities of actually delivering on the specifics at this time of year weren’t high on anyone’s radar scope at the time the program was agreed to.

E-7s will also recognize this situation…

THE FREE DISNEY DINING PLAN AT DISNEY WORLD IN 2011

The recently announced free dining deal, in contrast, was built to the usual calendar, is in Disney’s full control, and is up and running.

Free dining at Walt Disney World follows the basic structure of the deals of recent years, but with a twist.

Those reserving a moderate or a deluxe resort, and meeting other criteria (dates, length of stay, at least two days per tickets) get the regular dining plan for free. Those staying at a value resort get the “Quick Service” dining plan—still a savings, but not as much of a deal as the regular dining plan.

The twist is that all reservations taking advantage of the free dining option must also buy a ~$100 photopass package—a new development in 2011.

This package reduces the value of the savings by the equivalent amount—at least for those who would not otherwise have bought this pass. Depending on family size and ages, this requirement may in effect wipe out the value of the first day or so of free dining.

This is in effect a surcharge over normal resort pricesduring this period. You could re-state the deal as “get free dining for $100.” This doesn’t make it a bad deal—juts not as good a deal as offered in the past.

This “surcharge” is consistent with Disney World’s current strategy of reducing the scope of the discounting it is offering as the economy continues to slowly rebound.

As noted elsewhere, I’m not yet convinced that this overall strategy will work as well in the short term as Disney hopes it will…but I also expect that enough families will find “$100 for free dining” a compelling enough deal that the best-loved Disney World restaurants—and many others—will book up quickly for the relevant August and September 2011 dates.

On today’s Disney Q2 earnings call, Bob Iger and Jay Rasulo noted that while Q3 resort hotel bookings so far are 2.5% lower than last year, realized prices are more than 10% greater.

A CONTINUING REDUCTION IN THE DEPTH OF DISNEY WORLD DISCOUNTS?

They noted that this was consistent with Disney’s general strategy to limit the discounts it offers as the economy improves.

Iger said that increasingly “discounting is something of the past.”

However, there may be some price surprises coming for Disney in Q3 that may lead to further discounting.

Iger and Rasulo did not clearly distinguish the impact of an extra week of Easter in Q3 this year than last year on Q3 effective price increases. (They did comment on the impact of the extra Q3 week for Q2, and for Q3 volumes–just not for Q3 prices.)

Specifically, they did not address the point that the longer 2011 Easter season means that there were 20 more days of peak and Easter pricing in April 2011 than there were in April 2010.

This factor alone could drive realized prices for the whole quarter up by 3-4%, based on my back of the envelope analysis which suggests Q3 April 2011 average daily rates were 11% higher than those in  Q3 April 2010.*

OR MAYBE NOT??

In other words a big part of the Q3 realized resort price increase compared to last year could be coming not from fewer discounts, but from an Easter timing-driven higher set of April prices compared to 2010.

If so, then this, combined with bookings in Q3 running 2.5% below last year, suggests that more Disney World discounts may in fact be needed.

(You can find April 2011 pricing here, and April 2010 pricing here.)

*Including only April days in Q3, which began April 4 in 2010 and April 3 in 2011.