I was just reading about historical resort room discounts. It appears that people with Disney Visa cards can get 35% off rooms as opposed to 25% off for deluxe resorts. This kind of blows my mind, as it is an extra 10% discount! Is this right??
I am not the type that opens up extra credit cards… but am certainly considering it.
I understand that there are only a limited number of rooms available that can have the discount applied. Do you think it would be worth it for me to get the card?
We’ll be staying in a standard 2 queen room at Wilderness Lodge for 7 nights in January.
Has anyone here used the Disney Visa discounts on their room?
I haven’t, but I have the card, and get notices of upcoming discounts all the time. There’s often a cardholder advance booking period before public discounts are available. My sister and I use the card as a joint credit card, and put everything we can on it for the rewards. We have nearly $750 built up so far that will just go towards our rooms in December. I’m hoping a discount becomes available soon that I can apply to our already booked rooms.
Yes, and yes. I got the Disney Visa for our first trip in 2016, and it was purely to get the extra room discount. I don’t think it was quite that high, but it was slightly better (and could book earlier) than the regular package discount. It’s worth having the card at the parks, because you do get extra discounts on dining, shopping, and extra meet & greets. However, I’d caution you that it’s a TERRIBLE card for everyday use, because the interest rate is ridiculously high, and they won’t/can’t lower it. But it was worth getting, for me, for that extra room discount and to use while in the parks for the various discounts.
Interest rate on a credit card shouldn’t, ultimately, ever matter because you should always pay it off each month. If you aren’t, then the rewards it offers are pointless. (It would be like paying $10 to get a $5 discount!) Just sayin’.
I have never used a Visa discount since every time I have booked a trip there was an equal offer available to the general public. Often the Visa offer is the same other offers but is available one or two weeks earlier than the one to the general public. Right now the only Visa offer is for trips in August. We already had a trip booked in September prior to that offer coming out.
I have had the Disney Visa since May 2015 when I booked a vacation staying at the Wilderness Lodge. I signed up during the booking process and got a $200 credit, also paid a $49 annual fee, so it netted out to $151 credit to my trip. In addition we got 2% in Rewards, the total cost was around $3K so we got another $60 to use while in the parks.
Since then we switched to the lower reward level card, 1% instead of 2%, but no annual fee.
I have been accumulating Rewards on this card because you can use the rewards earned to pay for your tickets, room, meal plan, etc
This is extremely hard for people to understand. I have a cashback card that we pay off because of a stupidly high interest rate, and if we have a large emergency, we put it on my husbands card that has no rewards and a teeny tiny interest rate.
I have had the Disney Visa since 2005. I have the no fee version and use it primarily for Disney purchases. I have never booked the Visa room discount. I think I have booked other discounts early and I have taken advantage of the 6 months of no interest a few times.
Well in theory, yes, it should be paid off every month. But when making big purchases (furniture, home improvements, airline tickets, etc.) sometimes that’s not practical. So I do carry a balance on another card sometimes, but just would never carry one on the Disney Visa because like you say, the rewards aren’t worth the associated penalties.
Barring an absolute emergency, I don’t see that furniture, home improvements, nor airline tickets would be just reason to not pay off the balance. If you don’t already have the money to pay for the items, it shouldn’t be charged to begin with.
Now, I realize that isn’t necessarily how people often work…but it is how it SHOULD work. When you have the money, you THEN pay for the items…using a credit card with rewards to make the purchase provides an umbrella of protection against fraud, as well as rewards. But then, you have the money sitting there ready to pay off the credit card.
Full disclosure…I lived with credit card debt a great many years, and often would do as you say: buy before I had the money to pay off. But I also always lived with a low-level sense of stress about it. Then, after going through Financial Peace by Dave Ramsey, it kind of changed my life. No more credit card debt, emergency fund, etc. Vacations suddenly became so much more enjoyable because I knew, going into them, that every bit of it was already paid for. We knew how much we could spend, and we stuck to it, often with money to spare. My wife actually felt the entire tone of our vacations change because I no longer saw each Mickey Mouse ice cream sandwich as contributing (or edging closer) to further debt, but instead, I could just see a food stand and go, “Hey. We’ve got money. You all want ice cream?”
That is my plan. To use the card to hopefully get a higher room discount, and then just pay it off. I will be going for the $0 annual fee version too, I don’t own any card with fees. But yeah, I pay off my cards every month, and already have the cash for the trip, so it almost seems like a no-brainer. I think i’ll probably go for it. Thank you for the input!
I generally don’t want a card with fees. But at $49/year, at two years, that’s about $100. I’ve had my Visa Rewards card for less than a year and already earned in rewards more than $200. Had I gotten the $49/year fee one, I would have doubled that to $400, minus the $100, and I still would have been ahead by $300.
So, in hindsight, it probably would have been better for me to get the one with the annual fee…but it just depends on how much you pay for using your card throughout the year. We’ve had quite a few planned big-ticket purchases (new carpet, etc) that had I thought about it, I would have changed to the annual fee card.
I think if I was going every year, I would do the Premium card for the $49/year. But, I can’t really justify it when I don’t know when our next trip will be after this upcoming one. Someday… I hope we can afford Disney every year! That would be my dream
So I have been thinking about this. Is my math right:
To break even for the annual fee you have to earn double points for $2450 in expenses. At that point the no fee will have $24.50 in points. At $4900 they will be even? As a secondary card I think I would need to use it more to justify the fee. I only have two cards and don’t want to play the cancel game so a one time bonus does not tempt me that much.
Yes. It doesn’t make sense if you aren’t spending a lot using the card. But if you spend more than that $4900 a year, the annual fee card makes more sense. I think the one-time bonus is also higher, but keeping that out of the equation makes the math simpler.
That’s a good point. In my case, it would be so. But, regardless, I didn’t opt for the annual fee card, so the discussion is moot for me! I’m still happy with the rewards I’m earning. I expect to, all told, including the one-time bonus, that I’ll have earned myself about $500 in rewards by the time we get to our trip.
One thing, however, that I’m bummed about is that you can’t Mobile order using Gift/Reward cards. So, we’ll probably not end up getting to mobile order as much as I would have liked since I already have $450 in Disney Gift cards intended for buying food and souveniers.
