![]() These points are incredibly valuable since you can either use them to book travel directly through the online portal or you can transfer them to one of their rewards partners such as United, Southwest or British Airways where they become true frequent flyer miles in those programs. Step 2: Booking Flights to Disney World with PointsĬhase Sapphire Preferred® card, which earns Ultimate Rewards (UR). Total Savings for at least Five Free nights at a Disney hotel: ~$1,500 (assuming $300 per night cash value for 5 nights) With the points from that card, you can transfer some of them to your Marriott account and book additional nights that way. We talk more about the Chase Sapphire Preferred below, and it’s quite frankly the best travel card on the market, in our opinion. ![]() The other option is to supplement Marriott points/nights with your Chase Ultimate Rewards. Limited Time Offer! Earn 100,000 Bonus Points after spending $3,000 on purchases in your first 3 months from account opening. You and your significant other could each open a Marriott Bonvoy Boundless Card. ![]() ![]() Remember if you book at peak or off-peak times the pricing will be different.Īgain, the strategy here may change based on current credit card offers. Using the standard rates, you would need 200,000 points for five nights at the Swan/Dolphin, and 100,000 points for five nights at the Sheraton. When you book four consecutive nights with points, the 5th night will be free. Marriott has an awesome perk called the “5th night free” promotion (aka “Stay for 5, pay for 4”). Side note: many of our Disney Challenge members want to earn five free nights or more for their trip. However, a recent change in Marriott card offers may change the approach here (keep reading!). It’s still doable with a 75K bonus, but it just makes it far more likely that you will need to transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards to supplement your Marriott points. When it’s 100,000 (as an example), booking the Swan/Dolphin becomes much more attainable than at 75K. Previously, we have seen the Marriott card’s bonus fluctuate between 75,000 and 125,000 points. But the conveniences offered by the Swan and Dolphin are also quite nice, and many of our readers have chosen to book there instead! What you do might be based on the current credit card offers when you apply. In some ways you get more bang for you buck (or bang for your points?) at the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista Resort. We’ll show you how to plan for either property. For Lake Buena Vista it will be: Standard = 25K Peak = 30K Off-peak = 20K. So for Swan/Dolphin the rates will be as follows: Standard = 50K Peak = 60K Off-peak = 40K. *Note: Marriott is introducing new peak and off-peak pricing. It’s just a few blocks away from WDW, and it has free shuttle service and lots of other perks and amenities. The Sheraton Lake Buena Vista Resort costs fewer points (25,000 per night*). The Disney Swan and Disney Dolphin cost more points (50,000 per night*), but they are luxury hotels right on-site and within a short walking distance (or nice free boat ride right out back!) of both EPCOT and Hollywood Studios. Let’s dig in!įirst, you’ll choose between two main hotel options: The Disney Swan/Dolphin or the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista Resort. Recent changes to hotel programs and credit card bonuses have made this tougher, but we have found ways to work around it. Nothing beats a free room, and we’re going to show you exactly how to get free lodging with points. Step 1: Booking a Disney Hotel with Points Not bad, right? And the best part is that YOU can do this too and it is surprisingly easy! Instead of using our regular credit card that would have earned us a tiny 1% “rewards” back, we opened these new cards and saved $4,000 on our Disney vacation. If this is a new concept to you, you’ll want to check out these basic tips below. We are both CPAs, so being financially responsible is essential to us and we thoroughly researched this before getting started. Since we pay these cards off on time and in full every month, this didn’t cost us anything at all. To make this trip happen Laura and I opened a few new credit cards and used them for our regular spending in order to earn the significant signup bonuses that were offered with those cards.
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