How We Save Thousands on Disney & Universal Trips Using Points

In today's episode, we're chatting about

• How to save money on theme park trips to Disney and Universal using points and credit card perks
• Strategies for finding the best award flights to Orlando
• When to check airline alliance partners for cheaper award pricing
• Why hotel points and free night certificates can make theme park stays much more affordable
• How to stay on Disney property using points or travel portal bookings
• The strategy for booking Universal hotels that include Express Passes
• Ways to reduce the cost of park tickets using credit card miles
• When a Universal annual pass might actually be cheaper than regular tickets

📋 SHOW NOTES

Step-by-step - Using Venture Miles for theme park tickets

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👋 Hi! I'm Michele!

A points and miles expert, using points for family vacations to Japan, Hawaii, Thailand, Greece, Italy, Spain, theme parks and so much more. 

I don't believe in spending more to earn more points. The key is knowing how to earn the best points and getting massive value from them. 

With a teenager in competitive sports & public school, traveling during the busiest of times is our family's norm. I'll show you my best tips & strategies to use points for making incredible family travel happen. 

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Opinions expressed here are the author’s alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.

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Information was correct to the best of my knowledge at time of recording. Always double check/verify information about cards and or bookings. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Theme park trips are getting insanely expensive, but these fun family vaces don't have to break the bank. Today we're chatting about exactly how I use points, free night certificates, and card credits to make Disney and Universal way more affordable. Welcome to the Points and Miles Travel Chats Podcast. I'm Michelle from Fancy Travel Pointers, and I believe your everyday spend is a secret to extraordinary travel. If you've ever worried that points are too complicated or wondered if a busy family with public school attendance and competitive sports could really travel with points, I'm here to show you it's absolutely possible. Here's what I know for sure: it's not about spending more. And keeping my credit score sky high, that is always front and center. I'll give you actionable steps, teach real repeatable strategies that transform the way you earn points and the value you get from them. Thanks for being here and let's get to it. Welcome back to Points and Miles Travel Chats Podcast. I'm Michelle from Fancy Travel Pointers, and today we are chatting theme parks. Yes, basically Disney and Universal. It is spring break time, and if you are like me, you're seeing lots and lots of people on your Instagram feed, going to Disney and Universal, and they're two of my favorite places. I would not call us a Disney family, but it wouldn't not call us a Disney family. I would definitely call us a theme park family. We go to Disney and Universal probably two to three times a year, like total combined. And because we visit so much, it's really important for me to use my points, my credits that I get with different cards to offset those trips the best that I can because I don't want to stop going to them. If you've been wanting to go and the price seems outrageous, because the price absolutely is outrageous, and you're wondering where could I save money? That's what we're gonna chat about today. We're gonna chat about flights, we're gonna chat about hotels, and we're gonna chat about tickets. Let's talk first about the flights. Truly, in general, this is for everything really, but flights are gonna depend on your home airport. So look which airlines fly the most on the routes to the theme parks. For us, we're in Denver, and so Southwest has tons and tons of flights. 99% of the time, we're gonna fly Southwest. If you listen to my last podcast episode, we talked about the Southwest Companion Pass and how when you have a companion pass to Southwest, your companion flies for just taxes. Whether that is a cash flight or a points flight, they're flying for just taxes. So Southwest is our go-to because we've had a companion pass for a really long time and so we continue to fly them. I know there's been a lot of changes with the fees now for check bags and picking up seats. And so for us, it's really important to have a credit card that gives us the benefits we want. And we want to be able to choose our seat at the time of booking. I'm gonna go ahead and in the show notes put an article all about that for Southwest. I do not like leaving my seats up to being assigned the day of or anything like that. So it's really important that I have a card that's gonna give me those benefits. I think if there is an airline you fly all the time, you should have that airline's card. Do I think you should spend tons of money on it and put all of your groceries and bills and all those stuff on it? Absolutely not. No, I do not. But I think it can be really, really worthwhile for the benefits. And so for us, we fly Southwest a lot. We have made the decision that it's important to hold a card that allows us to choose our seats at time of booking. We do not check our bags, but if we did, we would have that option as well. Here's the thing with Southwest: here is what I do to make sure that I'm always getting the best awards deal or cash deal. But I would say most of our flights with Southwest are uh points. And so what I do is I use their low fare calendar. If I can be flexible at all on my dates, I will use that calendar because sometimes, even if I'm like, well, this is the only weekend we can go because this is the weekend that school is out. But sometimes it might make sense to fly out on a Thursday night and come back on a Sunday night. Or sometimes it makes sense to fly out on a Friday night and come back on a Monday night. And so having that award calendar to be able to check a couple different weekends or a couple different days has been really, really helpful in me to getting the best deals on those Southwest flights. United is our other major carrier. We have flown them a couple times. My best advice to you if you're flying one of the major carriers like United, American Airlines, or Delta, is to become aware of their alliance partners that make sense to check for award tickets. So if I am looking at a United ticket, I will go over to Air Canada and I will log in and I will search Aeroplan, which is the frequent flyer program for Air Canada, and I will see do they have this United flight? And if they do, how many points is it? Here's the thing, it's really important to know. Air Canada doesn't have all of United's award flights. It really depends, what does United release to Air Canada Airplan? Sometimes it's nothing, sometimes it's zero flights a day, sometimes it's only the earliest flight of the day or the latest flight of the day. It's worth checking because those points can be lower than United, even if the points are the same. Like what if, you know, Air Canada is saying it's 12,000 points and United is saying it's 12,000 miles? Most of them I'm still gonna book with Air Canada because I'll have a big stash of transferable points. Like maybe I'll have a big stash of transferable Capital One miles. I can transfer those over to Air Canada and book that flight easily that way. So here's the deal. Here's the alliance partners I want you to check depending on your hub. Like I said, if you're in a United hub, I think you should check Air Canada Aeroplan. If you're in a Delta hub, I think you should check Virgin Atlantic and Air France. If you are in an AA hub, I think you should check British Airways. And if you have Alaska Miles, you should absolutely check Alaska because man, you can get some fantastic deals flying American Airlines booked via Alaska. Now, Alaska uses Atmost Rewards, that's what they're calling their Alaska Miles now. And so we have found it really important to build up our stash of Atmost Rewards by having credit cards that earn those points. I will put a link in the show notes for you with those as well because I think that they have to be part of your strategy. I think that Alaska is such a big player in offering amazing deals on domestic and international flights that you should make sure you have some at most rewards. Also via built points. And how do we earn built points? Yes, you can do it with a credit card or also on top of that, either or it doesn't have to be one or the other, it could be both. Um, you can earn it with Rackuton. You can shop via Rackuton, elect to earn built points, and then transfer those built points over to Alaska. Again, definitely a strategy we are using. And I will put that information in the show notes about earning built points with Rackuton. That's definitely should be part of your strategy if it's not already. So knowing the airlines that fly to the theme parks, and then what are the alliance partners you should check is really important. The alliance partners are important, not just because they might have better prices, but yeah, they might, which is crazy, but also because they let you use different types of points. Maybe you want to use your capital one miles and you don't want to use a different type of points, then maybe you have that option. On top of that, there are these things called transfer bonuses. Like right now, there's a transfer bonus that goes through the end of March 2026, 20% to British Airways. So what that means is let's say the flight you can find on British Airways is 22,000 Avios. And real quick, Avios is just British Airways form of miles. So points, miles, obvious, it's all the same thing. Avios is what British Airways uses to call theirs. Let's say you find a flight for 22,000 miles, but there's a transfer bonus. Now you only need to transfer 19,000 points. So that could be an even better deal than booking with the airline directly. So alliance partners, super important. The thing for us is we always fly Southwest and they have no Alliance partners. And so it's pretty straightforward. I go to Southwest, I check, I use a low fare calendar. The other thing I do, and again, this is unique to Southwest, and I have talked about this before, so I won't talk about it too much, is that I will set a Google flight price tracker for any Southwest flight I book. Why? Because for Southwest award flights, their points and the cash are correlated. That is not the case with most award flights on other airlines. A lot of times they have no correlation whatsoever and they don't make any sense. But for Southwest they do. So I can go set a Google flight alert to know if the price goes down. Then I can cancel my Southwest flight and rebook it. Yes, if I had my companion attached, I need to cancel his too and rebook his, but sometimes it can be worth it because it can be a lot of miles. So flights. Know who flies from your airline to the theme park. Know the Alliance partners. Make sure you know what the transfer bonuses are. I'll put that in the show notes too. I have a page you can bookmark which has the updated transfer bonuses. That all is gonna create a good flight strategy for you for getting the best deal on your award flights to the theme parks. Now let's chat about hotels. I actually think hotels are by far the easiest way to save on your theme park vacation. Let's chat about Disney first. Disney, a lot of people want to be on site, and I am with you. I want to be on site too. I totally agree. There's a lot of benefits from being on site, and I love the convenience. We do not rent cars when we go to the theme parks. We will take an Uber or a Lyft from the airport to our hotel. And yes, we do have Uber and Lyft credits with our credit cards. So that's really nice. We're able to use those when we are traveling because we don't really want to rent a car. I don't want to deal with parking fees, and I don't want to deal with parking or alliance for parking. Oh my gosh. Anyway, so being on-site can be really important, but there's a couple different ways that you can book those on-site hotels and still save lots of money when you hold certain cards or you have certain types of points or free night certificates. Let's chat first about booking in a credit cards travel portal. Yes, you've heard me say before, like, oh, don't book in the travel portal. You can use your points better somewhere else. I don't mean that for Disney though. I mean that for other things. Like I mean that for Hyatt stays usually or certain airlines. But if you want to stay at an on-site property at Disney, I think booking through your bank's travel portal can be an excellent way to use your points. What is a bank's travel portal? You log in, you go to travel, you do a search for your travel. It looks almost identical to like a travelosity or an XPDS. Super easy to use. It spits back out the results for you, right? But it's gonna give you the cash prices for the hotel, but also what would it cost in points? And how easy is that? You just book it with points. The only thing I'll say is make sure you're paying attention to the is this refundable? Can I cancel this at some point? Always be aware of that. But that's just like expedient or travelosity, right? So it's the same tip I would say for that. That is a really easy way to book Disney and Universal hotels. They are in the bank's travel portals most of the time. Sometimes a hotel or two is sold out, but lots of times you can find lots of great options. So booking in the travel portal using your points, fantastic. Booking in the travel portal and using a credit that comes with a card, also fantastic. Here's a really smart thing that I saw people doing in December. So in December, a lot of people, including myself, got the City Strata Elite card. The City Strata Elite Card comes with a$300 travel portal credit for a two-night hotel stay. And it's calendar based. So when I got that credit in December, I could book a July Disney hotel for two nights and get$300 off. I just had to prepay it. And then January 1st, it's a calendar-based credit, so it dropped again. I could then book the next two nights of that Disney stay and get$300 off of that. So I used my credit for the year before and I used my credit for this year for a back-to-back total four-night stay and got$600 credit. Super valuable, and you're staying where you want to stay. Being strategic with these credits and when they renew can be super, super helpful. The other way I personally love to book Disney on-site hotels is I book the Swan or Dolphin. The Swan or Dolphin are on property at Disney. Like literally, you can walk to the back entrance of Epcot or walk over to Hollywood Studios or take their friendship boats. Um, but they're on property and they're Marriott hotels. So we will often use our 50K free night certificates we get from Marriott, or even we have used 35K free night certificates for Marriott. Remember, with every single Marriott certificate, whether that's 35K, 50K, uh 85K, you can top them off with up to 15,000 points if you have them. So essentially, if you have a 50K Marriott Free Night certificate, you can book it at a hotel that costs up to 65,000 points a night. Here's what we did recently. We used both of these strategies. I went and found the weekend that we wanted to go. First, I go to Southwest, I play with the dates, I use their free night calendar, I see what is the cheapest night to go and the cheapest night to come back, and that's how I decide on our dates. Then I go over to Marriott and I play with those dates and I say, which of these dates could I possibly use free night certificates for? It turned out it was the first three nights that I could use the free night certificates for. So I use those for the first three nights of our Disney stay over at the Dolphin, the Marriott Dolphin. I still had the two nights. So we had our City Strata Elite credit and we booked two nights at a Disney on-site property and got the$300 off. Those two nights. We got the credit basically. That is how you can use a bunch of these techniques to mix and match. For this one, of course, we do have to move hotels. I guess we could have actually just booked two more nights at the Dolphin with our City Strata Elite credit, but I didn't want to. I wanted to be at a different hotel. So we're doing going to different parks, and I thought it'd be convenient, and we're gonna check out a hotel we've never been to before. There's a lot of mix and match strategies you can use, but in general, the hotels are just really, really easy to book. I always recommend signing up for hotel cards when they have elevated offers. And the elevated offers usually have free night certificates. There's amazing properties near Disney, whether they're Hyatt's, Hilton's, IHG's, or Marriott's. If you're okay with being off property, you're gonna have a lot of options and you'll be able to use your free night certificates you've got with your welcome offers, or your points, or using credits from different credit cards. There's so many different ways to use these different elements to make your perfect stay. Speaking of perfect stays, now we're gonna switch over to Universal. There is one thing that is really, really important to me to make sure that we have a really good time at Universal, and that is booking a hotel that comes with the Universal Unlimited Express Passes. And the Express Passes are front of the line. You don't have to time them, you don't have to register for them, there's just a separate line that you go in that is for Express Pass, and usually it's at least half the wait time of the regular line, and sometimes much, much shorter. So to me, creating a good universal vacation means I have to stay at one of the hotels that have those express passes. And there are three Lowe's properties that have them. The only one I usually care about is the Lowe's Portofino Bay Resort. The reason that is my go-to, it's not because I love that hotel, but the reason I love staying there is because I can book that hotel through the Fine Hotel Resort program. And with my very expensive, very bougie credit card, I get a$300 Fine Hotel Resort credit from January to June, and then another one July to December. But again, I don't have to stay during those dates. I just have to make the booking during those dates. Like I have to physically book the hotel and pay for it during those dates. We have done this many, many times where we will book two nights back to back using, I'll use like one of my credits and one of my husband's credits the next nights. These hotels are expensive. There is no way around that. The Portofino Bay Resort, I have seen it for over$900 a night. Now we typically try to go when it's not as bananas crowded. And so we just booked a stay for later this year, and the nights were around$600,$700 a night. With the$300 off, you're looking at$300 to$400 a night, which for a hotel with the unlimited express passes for everyone in your room. So a lot of these rooms fit five people. And you get the pass for the night you check into the hotel and the day you check out. So we've even done it where, okay, we're just gonna check in this hotel for one night and we'll have two days of express passes. I mean, my gosh, these passes are just they're so worth it, in my opinion. They just make the day a lot easier. And because I have these$300 Fine Hotel Resort credits, makes a hundred percent sense for me to use them there. But Find Hotel Resort, also just to throw this in, when you book through that program, you get the free breakfast for two, you get the$100 um resort credit, you get the upgrade one available, and you get the 4 p.m. checkout. One thing I will say about the express passes is that they are not valid at Universal's newest park, Epic. If you want express passes at Epic, unfortunately, those are a completely separate fee. And so when we've gone to Epic and we've gone twice, we have not stayed at Portofino for that. We actually, what we've done is usually we'll go to Epic the first day and we will use our$300 travel portal credit that we get with the Capital One Venture X card. So we'll book Helios Grand, which is their like bougie bougie hotel that literally dumps you out into Epic. Okay, if you don't know this, this is crazy. This hotel is in the park. You go to the back door, you do your bag check at the back door, you show them your tickets at the back door, you walk through the back door, and you're in Epic, Epic Universal. And we have used our$300 Capital One Venture X card portal credits to stay there twice now. And we have it booked again, actually this year, later this year. My husband and I both have cards, so that's why we've been able to use it more than once. Between the points, the free night certificates, the credits, you just have a lot of theme park choices. You can mix and match. Like I said, when we go to Universal, we mix and match. We will do the Portofino Bay Resort through Fine Hotel Resort credits. Um, when we're going to Allenza Adventure and Universal Studios. If we're going to Epic, we're gonna use our$300 Capital One Venture X credit that we get for their travel portal to stay in Helios Grand. When we're going to Disney, we almost always stay at Dolphin or Swan using free nights certificates or points, and then we'll use credits from different cards for the rest. That's a lot. There's so many choices. It's kind of bananas. There's not as many choices for tickets, so let's chat tickets. Tickets, I will say, we just pay for our tickets. We're like, hey, we got the flights, we got most of the hotels or all of the hotels, we are gonna pay for our tickets. Last year and this year, we have done the Disney Plus subscriber deal where you get a three-park ticket at a much lower cost. So be aware of what the deals are when you're going there. They can be a big, big, big money saver. If they're not having one of the deals when you're going there, or if it just doesn't work for you or whatever, here's my advice. The Capital One Venture Rewards card is a great option. Most of the time, the welcome offer on that card is 75,000 points. So if you have 75,000 Capital One miles, you can cover$750 worth of those tickets. The way you would do that though, is that you want to use that card to book your Disney tickets, but you don't want to book them through Disney if you're going to do whatever that's tell you. So if you book your Disney tickets through Disney, they are gonna code as entertainment. But if you book them through um, like Theme Park Frog, otherwise known as Undercover Tourist, then they're gonna code as travel. So you take your card, you book the tickets through one of those third parties where the tickets will code as travel. Then once you see that charge in your Capital One account, it will let you cover that charge with your miles. I think that's a really, really good option. And I think it can be great if, let's say you, player one and your player two, are both gonna get that card, you're gonna be able to cover a good chunk of those tickets. And remember, with Capital One, you can share your miles with anyone. So if I got the card and my husband got the card, I could then have him transfer his miles over to me and I can book the tickets on my card, and I'll have both of our miles combined to cover those tickets. It's a really good way to use those miles when you're looking to go to a theme park. The key here is just making sure you book in a way. That codes as travel because it has to code as travel for you to be able to use those miles to cover that cost. Universal, I want to tell you something real, real quick about Universal is basically the same thing. So same thing. You want to book the tickets that way if you want to cover them with miles. But with Universal, their annual passes can be a really good deal. Disney, not so much. Their annual passes are so expensive. But last year, when we visited Universal, I saw that doing the annual pass to Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios. So again, not Epic Universe, but just the other two parks, it was only like$50 or$60 more to do the annual pass than to do the tickets we needed for last year's trip. So I did that. And then this year, of course, we're gonna go again. We're just gonna go a bit earlier in the year so that we can use those passes. And now we've basically saved a ton of money by not having to buy those park tickets for this year. So Universal for sure, check out what the annual pass is versus your tickets. But not only that, when you have the annual pass at Universal, you're gonna get discounts for your epic tickets as well. And so we are gonna add an epic day on, and our tickets are slightly cheaper. It's not that much cheaper, but it is a little and every little bit helps. Whether you're using points for your entire trip, the flights, the hotels, and the tickets, or you're doing a mix and match like we do, it's always nice to know what your options are. It's always nice to know there's lots and lots of different ways you can save money. We have found that when we have these shorter school breaks, theme parks really kind of fit a really good need for us to go and have family time and have fun. They have something for everyone in our family. Thanks for chatting with me today about theme parks. I've had so much fun, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the Points and Miles Travel Chats podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review, give it a like, and share it with a friend that loves to travel. In the show notes, you'll find all the links and resources we talked about today. And if you're ready to take those next steps, don't miss my free PDF guide. It's been downloaded over 17,000 times. I also launched an online, self paced, free course a few months ago. You can join the over 1,800 students who are loving this resource. Of course, be sure to sign up for the weekly newsletter, and you'll never miss the latest strategies, stories, and offers. Until next time, here's to seeing the world on points.