Budgeting the vacation is a necessary evil. For me, it starts with getting a ballpark idea of what I'm comfortable in spending. But it can be difficult to translate that into real dollars - or what you get for the money - until Disney makes their annual rates available. And they finally did earlier this week.
Let me take a quick bird walk here. You don't have to pay the rates that Disney posts on their Web site. These are what are known as rack rates and they are the most you will pay for your trip. There are a gazillion different types of discounts out there that you can take advantage of and you're a fool not to. All you have to do is a little homework and you can save a lot of money. One of my favorite places to visit is mousesavers.com (see the quick link on the right) which is a great clearing house of current discounts. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The important thing to know is Disney rack rates are important because you can model a fairly realistic budget. Yes, it's on the high side but that is much better than being on the low side.
Back to the budget. So Disney came out with their rates and I started playing with things. As I mentioned in another post, we're looking at 8 nights/9 days. I have a general idea of when we would like to visit - which is basically as soon as school lets out. I know that I want the basic dining plan (and I'll have to dedicate a whole post to the dining plan at another time) and I think I'll probably do the park hopper. As for hotels, I have one moderate, Port Orleans French Quarter and a few deluxe that are on my short list. I know I don't want to rent a car and I'll use Disney's Magical Express to and from the airport. And last, I know I don't have to build airfare into the budget. We have points we can use and airfare will be free!
So here's what I did. I visited the official Disney Web site and I did a Room Only search for the approximate dates of our trip. What popped up was the cost per night for the room. Since Disney instituted the variable cost per night along with their seasons, the costs can get a lot higher on the weekends. My rates varied from $195-$210 a night for moderate; to $310-$445 for the deluxe. When I looked at each night I was shocked at the cost so I backed up my dates a couple weeks and found rates that were on average $25 a night cheaper! As a result, we’ll be going sooner. If I didn’t do the room only search I would have never known this.
To be honest, overall, the rates were running much higher than expected even with my anticipated increases over the 2009 number. Do they not know we’re in a recession and have 10+ percent unemployment? I was initially bummed looking at the numbers. However, now I have realistic numbers that tell me something about cost and I know in my gut my threshold for what I’m willing to pay for the room.
The other elements I needed to factor in were the park tickets and dining plan. For the two adults and child I know I can expect to pay about $890 for the 8 day park hoppers when tax is lumped in. And I'm looking at about $730 for the basic dining plan. So I took $1620 and added that to the room only costs of the hotel. I like to get ala cart pricing because I also look at renting points. I’ll explain what that is in another post. Once I had the prices broken down I also ran my dates and vacation wants I also modeled my vacation using the Vacation Package tab on the Disney Web site.
This is getting a little long so I'm going to come back and break it down in parts in later posts. Who knew this would be such a big job?
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