How We Scored Free Disneyland Tickets
- Feb 26, 2016
- 5 min read
It sounds too good to be true, right? But it's not!
Now that I've figured out how to get hotels and flights for free, my next experiment was to see if I could score any Disneyland tickets using points. I scoured the internet for tips--Pinterest, blogs, flyer forums, travel websites--none of them were any help. I could find ways to save on literally every other aspect of a Disney trip, but I didn't need to know about how to pack fifteen meals inside a carry-on bag. I wanted free tickets!
Hitting a dead end, I started looking at various sites that boasted discounts on tickets, deciding that I could at least save a little bit, and I'd call it good. I remembered seeing billboards for GetAway Today when we lived in Utah and thought I'd check them out.
That's when I struck gold.
The beautiful thing about GetAway Today is that they offer package deals on hotels, flights, and Disneyland park tickets. You're able to save a few bucks by booking through them as opposed to booking through the Disney site directly. Essentially, they're a travel agent. The wonderful thing about this is that purchases made on this site are coded as travel spending! {Hear the heavenly choirs singing!}
Because you've read all about "travel category erasers," you know that you can use points earned on these types of cards at any retailer that codes itself as travel. {Remember, some companies may not have listed themselves in a travel-spending category and different cards may have various restrictions about which travel-spending categories you can redeem. Be careful.} I wasn't sure at the time if this would work, but figured I was out of options anyway, so I might as well go for it. Here's how I did it.
First of all, getting 3-day tickets for our family was going to be $694.00 directly from the Disney website.
We also knew that we wanted to do a premium character dining experience at Ariel's Grotto, which would add another $129. So if we booked directly with Disney, we would pay $823 for everything.
In booking through GetAway Today, our total for all of that was $799. That $24 in savings will buy our family a breakfast of man-catchin' beignets, a dish of spaghetti and meatballs at Pizza Port, and an Olaf cake pop. We like our Disney-themed food.
Additionally, GetAway Today offers a price match guarantee. So when I found a random site (aResTravel) that had everything I wanted for cheaper, all I had to do was call GAT and send them a screenshot of the deal I found and they matched it. That brought our total down to $786, and now I had $10 to spend on a Mickey pretzel and a Dole Whip.
I was a little hesitant to buy tickets from a non-Disney retailer, but working with GAT was seriously so simple and painless. Everything went smoothly, the tickets arrived in time, they worked fine at the gate, and they looked oh-so-cute with my manicure.
P.S. I feel like I should mention here that GAT offers me no compensation whatsoever for singing their praises. They have no idea who I am, they don't care that fifteen people will read this. I'm just being real with y'all. (Although if they did ever offer me free tickets for my family, I'd totally sell out and say whatever they wanted me to.) But seriously, they were great.
Now, the good stuff.
I used my Barclaycard Arrival Plus MasterCard to book our tickets. Because we've been using the card for other trips, we were only able to erase about $250 of the cost, but that still paid for a kid's park ticket and our character dining ticket. Plus it means I had some extra spending cash to enjoy a Minnie Mouse caramel apple, some peanut butter fudge, and a cheese-covered bacon hot dog. (I don't have a problem, I swear.)
If you signed up for the Barclaycard with the sole purpose of getting to Disneyland, you would have at least $400 to put toward your tickets after meeting the minimum spend. If your spouse opened one as well, you'd have at least $800 worth of points to redeem!
A few things to keep in mind:
You will need to be able to make a minimum spend on this card to get the bonus miles. It's currently at $3000 in 3 months. There are lots of ways you can achieve this and people have written extensively on how to do it creatively. The card carries a $89 yearly fee, which is waived the first year. As a reminder, you can open the card, make the minimum spend, buy your tickets, and close it out before your year mark come around and you have to pay the annual fee. Remember, make sure you are aware of your credit and how you use it! You do need great credit to be able to qualify for this card.
If you and your spouse are each planning on getting a card, make sure you can meet the minimum spending on both cards at the same time (which would be $6000 in 3 months) or plan enough time before your trip to do them back to back over a period of six months ($3000 in the first three months followed by $3000 in the next three months).
Additionally, Barclaycard recently announced a change in the minimum number of miles you can put toward a travel redemption. It used to be 2,500 points ($25), but now the minimum is 10,000 ($100). So while I was able to redeem at $250, if I tried this again now, I would only be able to redeem for $200 toward my purchase or wait until I had enough points to redeem at $300.
I am very curious to try this process with other other card types and travel agency websites. My guess is that it would work very similarly, but as I have not tried them personally, I cannot say for sure. We are doing Disney World next year, and I'm hoping to open a Capital One Venture because it has no minimum threshold for redeeming points (we once redeemed miles for a purchase of only $4) and see if I can knock a big chunk out of the price of our park tickets.
It takes some time, a lot of organization, and careful planning, but in the end it's worth it if you don't have fork out $800 for park tickets.
Think of all the corndogs and turkey legs you could eat with savings like that.
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