Price Paid? Can I improve upon the total cost of holiday compared to our last visit?

[Grimdogg]

Hi there all

I enjoyed planning our Orlando Holiday for 2018 so much so that we have decided to take the plunge and do it once more.

My question herein lies with the total cost of the trip - accommodation, flights, food and tickets etc.

Last year we paid £3800 for a Flydrive with Virgin Atlantic, £1100 for a share of a 7 bed Villa with wider family, about £3000 on tickets to visit Disney and other theme parks etc. We then had about £1000 for spending money which paid for parking, food, tips and misc etc.

In total I think as a family of 4 we spent about £9000 - was this a good price to pay? We are planning to go again in 2021 - our kids will be 11 & 8. We will likely be travelling with parents and sister in law so will be looking at Villas again. Also we are restricted to fly during school holidays.

I have read the DIBB guide book over and over and trawled through various threads and know there are ways to reduce the total cost of holiday - please if you can offer any first hand experience/advice I would be most grateful!

Thank you

Mark

[BigSkip]

Mark. You can always reduce costs, and the feeling of being wiped out at the end of the holiday, by not doing all the parks. Maybe just stick to disney, saves on universal, seawork, Busch garden tickets. Or any combination of parks.

Flying indirect can be a good cost saving, but adds to travel time, and possible stress with little ones.

Unless you have to, book car hire and flights individually, be as flexible as you can on day of flying, it can be cheaper to do Friday to Saturday, so 15 nights, rather than 14, for flights that is, obviously, you need to factor more car hire and villa costs.

Somethings for you to think about.

HTH

Andy

[Rik666]

My kids are 8 and 11, for 9 days over Halloween holidays, staying in point hotel and suites,(£700) flying Dublin-newark-orlando,(2000) plus universal (1600)and discovery cove (including SeaWorld and aquatica) (400).
Don't do Disney tho, so that's a huge saving for a start.

[Procrastinator]

Only 2 large potential savings in there are to either drop some parks, or lok for indirect flights.

[LLamb]

We have been quite a bit and now just do Disney or universal. Don’t do sea world or Busch anyway.
The two things you can do (as said above) is less parks and try and gets your flights as cheap as possible.
I have booked a flydrive for next May school hols as it is actually cheaper than flight only with ba.
So I’ve paid £1592 inc std suv doing 15 nights. Lgw-Mco. So direct can be cheaper. I wouldn’t do a virgin flydrive as the insurance isn’t included but it is with Ba.
Park tickets, you may get a bit of discount but you can’t influence them.
Can eat fairly cheap out
Accommodation, well already sharing a villa.
Our total cost for this year was £3850 2a2c (1 under 3 so only three tickets) split stay of hotels/cabana bay/rpr/apartment at Windsor hills.
Then we spent another £1200 on food etc
I got cash back on rpr, paid with avios on one hotel and used Tesco vouchers on another. All adds into the savings.
We upgraded our passes this year so only one ticket to buy next year

[Grimdogg]

So is booking a Fly Drive or package holiday cheaper? I think we will discuss the park options - we have done all before - in laws havn’t - it’ll knock some of the cost off if we skip universal parks... also where can you use tesco vouchers?

[mrs rcch]

We use Tesco club are points for airport parking , we stay the night before, so also use them for the hotel, last but not least, our evening meal.

[sarah82]

I bought our Seaworld tickets in the Black Friday sales so it’s always worth looking out for good deals
I also did car hire via Andy at Discount Florida Car Hire. He reduced my final cost twice before I needed to pay which gave us an extra little bit of spending money !

[Sitron]

Originally Posted by Grimdogg

... also where can you use tesco vouchers?

See more...

You can use them through hotels.com or for airport parking via the Clubcard site.

We have used our vouchers to pay for a hotel at the airport the night before. You can part pay too and only swap up to the value of the hotel before tax (this you have to pay by card).

You can also book Universal and some Disney hotels through them too but limited availability.

Another option if you may be using a taxi in the UKto the airport is uber vouchers (can't use these for bookings in the states). Also, they do rail cards if you plan on travelling by train.

Hope this helps

[Shooby doo]

If your V Flydrive price is just for you 4 then there are ways to make a saving straight away, we fly BA thru Gatwick from Glasgow & anything under £500 is a good price, it's no hassle as our cases leave us in Glasgow & we don't see them again until MCO & only land an hour after the Virgin flight. The next biggest expense is passes, Disney, if the increases keep coming then you could easily exceed 2k just for 4 passes to Disney then probably another £1200 -£1500 for Universal. If the £ strengthens then you might see some prices dropping but at the minute even food isn't the bargain it once was.
Villa is probably your cheapest option but you could also consider somewhere like Staybridge suites- Free breakfast & less driving
SD