About two weeks into watching the price of my Universal hotel, park tickets, and limited express pass package. I did throw in a seasonal AP pass even though I’m already getting park to park multi day tickets for all, when I tell you Universal math can be wacky — you should always run your package through AP rate and throw in a season AP if it makes the hotel discounted enough to make sense. Anyway — park ticket price has stayed the same, limited express pass has increased, and the hotel AP rate has dropped for late May saving be about $280 over the week’s stay. But I did notice not all AP rates at the various hotels dropped as drastically as our hotel (Surfside) — in summary: book and get your deposit paid to lock in prices and modify if or when those hotel prices drop. I would not expect park tickets or express pass prices to drop, and you will see express pass actually increase in cost.
I’ve been watching for an upcoming trip. Was stupid not to book Express for Epic earlier as that jumped by $30 pp, so booked that. But hotels, I’m constantly booking and cancelling when they get cheaper. Booked Portofino via Amex Fine Hotels and in the last month the price has dropped by $100, then booked Helios & Stella Nova via Universal with FL Resident ID, and both of them have dropped by $50 and $30 during that time. So I just rebook then cancel.
This is exactly what I have been doing the past couple of weeks. The prices for Terra Luna and Stella Nova have dropped significantly. I was going to go with Stella Nova for the walking path, but I think I’m going to stay at Terra Luna now that the total cost is $130 less. The price dropped again today for Terra Luna. 
And…I just checked again and the total Terra Luna cost for four nights went down another $50 since this morning!
Thanks again for the post! I too checked this morning and I just saved $63 on my 3 night stay at Stella Nova. I am really happy with this price.
Funny, I have one night at HR CL and it is almost $300 more tonight.
Thanks to all of you, I am also regularly reminded to check prices for my June/July dates, and saw another big drop today!
Prices dropped so much that Saphire Falls was now the exact same price as Cabana Bay for our dates ($190 per night for FL residents rate), so while I loved the Cabana Bay theming I switched us to Saphire Falls because I know we’ll love the ease of of access of moving around by water taxi. The price for a night at RPR (which I am getting primarily for the 2-day UXP for four people) also dropped another $30 (down to $436 per night, which translates into $61 per person per day for UXP). Very pleased with that!
I love Sapphire Falls! Plan some pool time!
Hard Rock Club level dropped today. I just saved about $40 for one night. This rate was more than $350 lower than it was a few days ago, and lower than the regular RPR rate for that night.
Signing off of TP to check my days now …
It took a little while for all of the groups to agree on the details for the trip. I had been watching the price and it had gone down a little but wasn’t as low as when I first started looking in Dec. Then I got busy with another project and didn’t actually make the booking until this past weekend. I was pleasantly surprised to find the price had dropped down to what I saw in Dec!
I booked as quickly as possible to lock that in, but will still keep an eye on it in case it drops more or if they offer the meal vouchers for the dates we’re going!
Follow up note, does the same idea of rebooking if prices drop work for tickets and express passes as well? I was going to book each of those separately to spread out the expense and figured that would make it easier to alter them if the price dropped later. But I noticed that unlike the hotels, it looks like you pay for those in full. Does that change the ability to rebook if there’s a better deal?
Nope - all sales are final. If you buy through a reseller like Undercover Tourist, you can sometimes get a 95% refund or something like that, but probably not worth it for a better offer.
Usually ticket prices increase though, so it’s generally advantageous to get tickets early (using a discounted site if possible - compare all options).
That said, at WDW they have “vacation packages” with tickets included that are refundable until 30 days before. I’m not sure if UOR has an equivalent policy.
When checking the prices on the hotel at one point, it offered me a popup to make a package that included tickets and express pass. It added a tag line to my cart that it was saving $150. But when I looked at the line item costs for the tickets and express passes, they were more expensive than the prices currently being shown if I bought them individually. It’s possible I was missing taxes or something on the individual prices, but I couldn’t actually see that the $150 bundle discount would actually save money.
That is probably true. I always price things out myself cause you can’t trust what the websites say themselves. They compare themselves vs. full price, so not apples to apples.
I’m semi-seriously trying to price out options for a UOR visit this year. Despite being the simple place for planning (vs Disney) I’m kind of overwhelmed with trying to compare options since there are so may potential configurations (multi park, express, express via hotel stay, stay near epic, epic express, and so forth). Does anyone have a site or template they recommend as a starting point for building comparisons? I started a spreadsheet but figured I’d check before reinventing the wheel!
RPR (which I’ve got booked for one night to benefit from 2 days of UXP for a family of four) is now down to $414 per night for my date, so I rebooked again!
I don’t know if there is a pattern/predictability to this, but in case useful for others holding upcoming bookings: so far I’ve observed that prices for my dates remained pretty steady between 4-7 months ahead of check in, and have started coming down progressively around 4 months out. If they keep dropping I’ll be delighted!
Though of course at some point that’ll just tempt me to reconsider an actual split stay between RPR and one of the Epic hotels
The thing that seems to make the AP rate no come out on top for my shorter stays is the need to buy the seperate EPIC ticket. This also made it so complicated to compare prices that I just stopped trying.
If we decide we want delux I’ll come back to it, because that’s where the huge savings is.
That said, the buy 12 months get a 15 month AP is very tempting because it lets me use thay AP across two HHN seasons.
We debated the deluxe hotels but we’re specifically planning days where we won’t be going to the parks during our trip. If you’re not going to be in a park the whole thing about the free express pass from the deluxe hotel doesn’t actually save you as much money and it wasn’t worth the price difference.
That said we compared the price of a 4 day 4 park ticket to the price of the Preferred level annual pass. To make it fair I added the cost of one day tickets to EU and VB to the Preferred pass since we’d have to factor those in. The price difference was ~$280. When I booked our Cabanna Bay rooms, the annual pass rate saved us $200. The Preferred annual pass gets a 10% discount on food and merch in the parks and most of the resort locations. 4 people staying for 7 days is easily going to spend more than $800 on food and merch so that more than makes up the remaining price difference.
So getting an annual pass for just 1 person in your party and then regular tickets for everyone else will still save you money even if you’re at the cheaper hotels. That may change if you’re only there for one or two days, but for us it’s definitely going to help out.
I currently have Terra Luna booked for the upcoming choir trip at about $129 per night. The kids and official chaperones are staying at Cabana Bay, and today CB is showing $158 per night. When the planning for this trip started back in October, CB was over $300 per night!! Would you rather stay at Terra Luna for a smaller hotel or stay at Cabana Bay? I have never stayed at either resort.