Ben and Libby’s Fabulously Frugal Festive Vacay - Christmas 2015 | *Trippie has been started!

[oh_darling]

Ben and Libby’s Fabulously Frugal Festive Vacay – Christmas 2015



Hello and welcome to our 2015 holiday pre-trippie! I’m so excited to be writing this; I can’t believe we’re going back! And then going again next year too! IT’S ALL SO EXCITING! I need to calm down.

So, as you’ve probably gathered if you’ve seen a little thread called “Ben and Libby’s Happily Ever After,” there is one reason for this trip, and one reason only.

In October 2016, we are getting married in Walt Disney World.

Yay!

I feel I can actually start writing this now as I’ve been offered a new job and am generally feeling happier and more secure about the future If this hadn’t happened, this trip would have been done on even more of a budget! Like, no budget at all! Thankfully, and fingers crossed, we won’t be in that position and it will just be a normal budget trip, as planned.

So I’ll get into all the details later but for now, here’s the cast!



The Cast

Now I’ll be honest, the line-up hasn’t changed much since our last trip. Or the one before that. Or in fact, the very first Disney trip we went on together, back in 2007. How time flies when you spend all your money on Disney holidays!

First of all we have, well…me! Libby, author of said pre-trippie, main planner of trips (but the boy is catching me up here) eater of all the food, drinker of all the wine. I love all things Disney, holidays, food, Harry Potter and cats…and now weddings!



Next we have Benj! Co-star, partner in crime, and all round good guy. He is really getting into his trip planning these days and it’s normally him who suggests most Sundays we sack off all plans and spend the day watching Disney holiday videos on YouTube. I know, I’m lucky! Obviously I always agree. He also loves Disney, basketball, music, food, and rum. Maybe in that order, I’m not sure.



Honorary Cast Member and latest addition to our small but perfectly formed family unit, is Saffie. Full name Princess Sapphire, she’s a 20 month old Birman. (I’m not sure why I said 20 month old like she’s a baby...) Saffie enjoys sleeping, knocking over full glasses of water, being put on the top of the wardrobe, meowing to be let out of rooms, and meowing to be let back in to rooms. She’s a gorgeously affectionate, good-natured kitty and we love her very much



Bonus picture cause she’s beautiful <3



Unfortunately Saffie isn’t coming on the holiday, although I’m sure she’d enjoy it. We need to sort out some kind of vacation arrangement for her; possibly at a cattery she’s been to before. I feel awful leaving her over Christmas though Horrible parents!

So that’s the cast! Onto how this holiday came about!



Introduction

As I said earlier, we are getting married in October 2016. We’ll be having something called a Wishes wedding, one of the options Disney offers for weddings. It basically means we think we’ll be having more than 18 guests, and we’ll be able to design an ‘a la carte’ wedding, rather than choosing options from various packages. I know, it all sounds very exciting and magical but it is also unfortunately the most expensive option hahah! It’s what we want though, so we’re going for it. There are some upsides though! As we’re planning a Wishes wedding, we get a Planning Session Although this sounds almost painfully dull, it actually is super exciting. Once we’ve paid our deposit, we’re invited to go to Disney, meet our planner and pretty much plan our whole wedding. We’ll have a menu tasting and get to pick our food choices, choose all our floral options, have our cake tasting, and just plan out how the whole day will run. We’ll also have a site visit so we’ll go with our wedding co-ordinator to visit a few of the places you can get married (ceremony sites, reception sites etc) and make our choices. See, exciting!

So back when we were agonizing over whether or not to get married in Disney (hard to believe, but it happened! If you'd like to kill a few hours you can read the full story of the painful 8 month ish saga on my wedding planning thread ) one of the things most important to us was our PS. Now, you can do it over the phone. And plenty of brides do, and it all goes swimmingly and I’ve never heard anything bad about it. But we’re only going to get married once. For us, travelling out for the PS is a really important part of planning our wedding, and we decided to factor the cost of the trip into the wedding budget as a whole. So for us it isn’t really an extra trip, it’s part of the wedding! If that makes sense.

NOW. All that being said. Obviously, we aren’t millionaires. Not even close. We work very hard for our money and we save very hard to be able to afford nice holidays.



We also don’t have them every year, as we can’t afford them! So this Planning Trip needed to be on a budget. Like, the smallest budget it’s possible to have a Florida holiday. Think about the cheapest you’ve ever heard of people going to Florida on. Subtract about 90%, and you have our budget Every penny spent on this trip is money coming out of our wedding fund and although we’ve made that decision ourselves, it’s important we spend the absolute minimum!

Hence, Fabulously Frugal Festive Vacay! (also, I like alliteration.)

Let the challenge commence!



Why?

As I said before, flying out for our Planning Session was really, really important to us. It also made sense as when you book a Disney wedding you get free Annual Passes for the bride and groom.



So, no expensive theme park tickets to shell out for, and we could use them for our wedding trip too and get maximum value. We’re planning a West Coast 1st anniversary trip in 2017 so wouldn’t use the WDW tickets then anyway

Something that was also really important to Ben was that if we don’t fly out for our PS, we wouldn’t actually get to see the places we’re getting married at until, well, we get married! Which is kinda mad when you think about it. We have been to the Wedding Pavilion and lurked around outside like two creepy wedding obsessives, but we haven’t been inside. And we’ve never seen the place we’d like to have our reception, or the place we’d like to have our dessert party. Obviously we’ve looked at a million photos online, but it will be so good to see them in person

Saying that, I think we all know that the main reason for going is, of course, CAKE TASTING!




Time of Year

So Disney recommend you do the Planning Session approximately 6 months before the wedding.

6 months!? Two trips to Florida within 6 months!? Eeek! Ka-CHING! Don’t panic though, because I asked my faithful UK Disney Brides on the FB group I’m on, and they assured me it could be done up to a year out, we’d just have to be speedy with getting the contract back, and the prices wouldn’t be finalised for 6 months (which is why Disney recommend you do it 6 months out or less.) Phew! Crisis averted.

You may remember that Ben’s job means he can only have school holidays off (I say only, he gets loads of holiday!) This greatly limited our opportunities to fly out for the planning session. We had 3 options:

1. Fly out October half term 2015 for 1 week.

Pros: F&W, weather, crowds, Halloween etc.

Cons: Probably wouldn’t be able to sign the contract and get it back in time for us to sort out the logistics of the PS, get annual passes etc. Trip would only be 1 week. Still a year til the wedding.

2. Fly out for Christmas 2015 for 10 days or 2 weeks.

Pros: TWO WEEKS. Christmas. New Years! Both off work already for 2 weeks (although this has now changed haha but it was valid at the time!)

Cons: It’s the busiest time at WDW. Chilly. Expensive for hotels and flights.

3. Fly out for February half term 2016 for 1 week.

Pros: Close to wedding. Low crowds.

Cons: Scarily close to wedding! Only 1 week. All my annual leave would be gone (3 weeks for wedding/honeymoon, 1 week for this trip, so no days off left for hen do etc if needed)

We ruled out October pretty quickly, so it was between Feb and Christmas. It was actually Ben who suggested Christmas, I hadn’t even considered it for some reason! At the time, we both got two weeks off so we wouldn’t have to take any extra annual leave. Obviously we’d prefer to go for 10 days or 2 weeks rather than 6 or 7 nights, but this would also make it more expensive. The annual leave thing was an issue too; we were planning a 3 week extravaganza for the wedding/honeymoon trip, so a week in Feb would leave me with 0 spare days. Not a total disaster, but not ideal.

After lots of umming and ahhing, we decided Christmas made the most sense, all things considered. I was really nervous about telling my parents as I’m a real creature of habit and I LOVE Christmas at my parents’ house. They were totally cool with it though and my brother and his GF also said they may go away so I think it may be all change for this year! Crazy! As we’d already decided before this Christmas that we’d be away for the next, I made sure to soak up every second of Christmas 2014 and just really appreciate it. And do you know what? It was absolutely amazing, but Christmas in Florida will be even more amazing



To be continued...

[oh_darling]

Table of Contents!

Introduction, The Cast and The Why

Accommodation

The 2015 Flight Saga

Night Before Hotel

General Plans!

Special Christmas Things!

159 days - ADR's!

93 days - To-do lists and off-site eats!

[pcnine28]

I'm jumping in quick here as I'm rushing off to work but I am soooooo excited to see this pop up before I run out the door :-)
We have all been waiting for it haha.
Looking forward to following along with all your wonderful planning - the parks are so beautiful in the holidays.
Hugs xxxxx

[Redrach1903]

Love that Libby! How exciting It will be SO much better to meet your wedding planner and see everything properly! That was exactly our reason for going last year and we were so glad we did

Eeeek exciting! Your cat is just too cute btw xx

[collybird]

I think Christmas in Florida (even on a budget!) is something really magical. You are going to have an amazing time.

[gartland87]

Wow! I really really excited to be reading this, the wedding planning sounds amazing, can't wait to read more

[oh_darling]

Accommodation

As you know, our two previous trips have been split stays; half I-Drive, half on-site. This has worked well for us in the past, but after less than ideal experiences with I-Drive in 2013, I think we’d lean towards staying on-site for future trips (Disney and Universal.) However, we all know that staying on-site comes at a cost. I realised pretty early on that this cost was a LOT more than off-site, and thus not in our budget for this trip. Sob!



For our dates, even All-Star resorts (which we would totally stay at, and probably love!) were £100ish a night. Hotels on I-Drive were like £40. Crazy prize difference!

We also know how much it costs to eat at Disney. With no DDP this time we’ll be buying a Tables in Wonderland card with our AP’s – a fab deal which gets us 20% off at lots of Disney restaurants and bars. However, it’s still like $15 each for a CS meal. So even if Disney were affordable, we knew the spending money we’d need for food would still massively bump up the price.

So, we began searching off-site hotels. One night, I stumbled upon a little gem called Lake Buena Vista…which I’d never heard of before! I know right, where had I been!? It was actually reading Tracey’s (mickeysgirls) 2013 trippie where I first came across this hidden mecca of hotels. They stayed at the Wyndham LBV and they could WALK to Downtown Disney! WALK TO DTD! ? I didn’t even know this was a thing! I threw myself into researching and after a few hours, I had a complete list and per-night breakdown of the entire Crossroads/LBV area. I was so excited, it really seemed like it could be the perfect option for us! I-Drive is sooooo far away from Disney and we don’t want to drive on our holidays (hello, day-drinking) so to be able to stay in an affordable hotel close to DTD and be able to walk there and get Disney busses…it was like a dream come true <3

…I’m exaggerating, but it really was exciting. We then spent a few happy Sunday afternoons watching YouTube videos of all the hotels in our price range. I tried to ignore how much more expensive hotels were over the Christmas period and instead focused on finding the cheapest hotel that wasn’t totally vomit-inducing to stay in.

And, ladies and gentlemen, I found it in…..THE CLARION INN LAKE BUENA VISTA!







This little beauty was showing an astonishingly affordable £42 a night for our dates. It was walkable to DTD (20-25 minutes according to various trusted sources) had a super regular free shuttle service (no-one likes a hotel shuttle service that rocks up to the parks at 11am) good reviews, in-room fridge, close proximity to a Lynx bus stop…the list went on. We considered looking at hotels that were slightly more expensive but they were either further away which defeated the point, or they didn’t have as good reviews. Clarion seems to be a good, solid all-rounder. And it’s £42 a night! Crazy money! It’s also SURROUNDED by options for eating, drinking, shopping…all the stuff you need. We were sold!

We booked a couple of months ago with Low Cost Holidays via Trivago as they were the cheapest, for a grand total of £601 for 14 nights. What a barg!

We’re both weirdly excited to stay here We’re fully prepared for it to be not great, but it does have really good reviews and I figure if our expectations are low, we’ll be impressed! We know it isn’t going to be like staying at Disney but this is a budget trip, and this is a budget hotel. We keep walking around the area via Google Streetview and I get little excitement spasms when I see all the spiky Floridian grass and the big signs advertising all you can eat buffets and 7-11’s and the like I know, I need to get out more. There are SO MANY restaurants you can walk to though, and we literally have to walk past Millers Ale House to get to DTD. If that’s not fate, I don’t know what is! I think we all know how much myself and Benj love Millers! Anyway, food choices is a MAJOR part of this holiday so there’ll be a lotttt of posts about it coming up as we get closer to the trip!

Next up…The 2015 Flight Saga! (why is it always a saga with us!?)

[Redrach1903]

Woohooo what a great deal on your hotel!

You are not the only one that clicks around google street view all the time! Haha!

[lovedisney89]

SUBSCRIBED! Eeeeeek, so excited for this (along with your Wedding pre-trippy)

Sounds like a great deal on the hotel and fab location.

It will be such a fun planning trip for you both! xx

[abiknox]

Great start Lib, can't wait to read about the flight saga! Ha