Category — e. What to Budget for Walt Disney World

2013 FREE DISNEY WORLD DINING DATES?

A “bounce back offer” is a deal offered to Disney World hotel guests that they can only take advantage of if they book it during their current stay.

As I write this, I’m in Disney World’s All-Star Music Family Suites (review here!) and the offer in my room is for free dining beginning 8/18/2013.

However, there’s a wrinkle: the end dates of the free dining offer vary depending on what resort type you reserve. [Read more →]

NEW DISNEY WORLD ROOM RATE DISCOUNT

Disney World has announced a new room rate deal that covers arrivals most nights from September 30, 2012 to November 16, 2012 and November 24, 2012 to December 22, 2012.

Savings under this deal are convoluted—some resorts are excluded, and the discount varies by night. See the calendar on the right side of this page for the gory details.

In general, though, here’s what Disney World has on offer:

• Value resorts: save 15-20%; Art of Animation Little Mermaid and All-Star Movies excluded; Art of Animation Family Suites excluded some dates, available others
• Moderate resorts: Save 20-25%; Port Orleans French Quarter excluded
• Deluxe resorts: save 15-30%; Savanna view rooms at AKL excluded
• Disney Vacation Club resorts: save 25-30%; Beach Club Villas, Wilderness Lodge Villas, Bay Lake Tower, and savanna views at Jambo and Kidani excluded

This deal must be booked September 29, 2012 for October travel, and by October 31 for November and December deals.

See Disney’s page here for more details and which nights which discounts are available.

DISNEY WORLD CROWDS AND FREE DINING

Pretty much every time Disney World announces a free dining deal (like this one), I get a  bunch of comments like this:

“Dave–with free dining now announced for my week, should I move my dates to avoid the crowds it draws?”–Perplexed

My short answer is always something like “No, don’t change.  It’s mathematically impossible for free dining to much change park crowds.”

For the longer answer–and why the short answer is true–keep reading!

FREE DINING CAN PACK THE DISNEY WORLD HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS, BUT NOT THE PARKS

Here’s the basics:

• The vast majority of people in the parks are NOT staying in a Walt Disney World hotel
• Free dining only affects the number of people staying in Disney World hotels
• Some people who take advantage of free dining arrival dates would have been in Walt Disney World hotels then anyway, so don’t incrementally add to park crowds
• Some people are simply pulled into Disney World hotels from off-site hotels by free dining, so have no incremental impact on park crowds
• Some people would not have gone during one of the eligible arrival dates at all except for free dining

Only this last group has an incremental impact on park crowds, and it is so small that it can’t affect park crowding much.

Here’s why:  including all the Art of Animation rooms, there’s about 27,200 Walt Disney World hotel rooms (excluding the Campsites at Fort Wilderness, which are never eligible for free dining).

The last bucket–people who would not have come but for free dining–is going to book at most 20% of these rooms, or about 5500 rooms.

At 3 people per room, that’s about 16,000 incremental people.

Divided across 4 theme parks, two water parks, off-days, Universal and SeaWorld, etc., the incremental effect on any given park is de minimis.

For example, on a slow day (and basically free dining is only offered during the slow periods–that’s why they offer it…), the Magic Kingdom will have 20,000-25,000 people in it; adding another 5,000 or even 10,000 people will have only a trivial impact on park crowding, as this will still put the crowd level well below the point where the park lines start going crazy.

Free dining does make the park crowds higher than they would be on the same exact dates without free dining, but not enough to change the nature of the parks or their lines.

It does crowd the hotels–that’s the point–and crowd the restaurants–that’s the tool.

But in general, you should view the presence of free dining during your week as an indicator that it’s a pretty low crowd week to attend!

Walt Disney World has a deal saving 15-30% on hotel rooms for arrival dates from August 15 through September 29, 2012.

It needs to be booked by August 14, so if you want this deal, you need to act soon!

See this for more on the discount.

DISNEY WORLD MILITARY SALUTE TICKETS AND ROOM RATE DEAL FOR 10/1/2012-9/28/2013

Update July 2013: This deal has been offered for FY 14–October 2013 into September 2014–as well! See this.

Steve at MilitaryDisneyTips.com broke the news earlier today that there’s a new Disney World offer for US active and retired forces for FY 13–specifically, October 1 2012 through September 28 2013.

There’s two separate deals: on tickets, and on hotels.  I’m seeing some inconsistencies, and am missing a fact or two which I’ll fix later, but based on Steve’s scoop and the draft press release which Disney sent him, and he forwarded to me, here’s the details:

NEW 2012/2013 DISNEY WORLD TICKET DEAL FOR THE ARMED FORCES [Read more →]

See this.