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Planning your theme park vacation, on a budgetLooking for amusement and theme park deals? Wondering how to make a family vacation fit in your family's budget? Theme Park Insider editor Robert Niles in the articles below answers readers' questions about vacation planning, and offers tips on how to find and enjoy the best possible theme park vacation. If you would like tips on getting the most of your time at top theme parks, including Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando, Sea World and Disneyland, please also visit our Four-Hour Tour Plans page here on Theme Park Insider. And for our latest round-up of discounts and promo codes, visit our deals and discounts page. Planning your theme park vacation: Step 1 - save, don't borrow, the money This week, and every Thursday until next spring, we'll be talking on ThemeParkInsider.com about how to plan for your family's 2009 vacation. My goal with this series is to help you find the best possible vacation for your family at the lowest possible price. Many folks equate "theme park vacation" with "week in Orlando." While we certainly will find ways for many of you to get that great, affordable vacation to Central Florida, I'll also show you other options from around the country (and, in a few cases, the world). A family weekend at Legoland and the beach in Carlsbad, Calif. The couple days at Dollywood while camping in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A mid-year history trip to Williamsburg, Virginia, with a day at Busch Gardens, too. But before we get to any potential itineraries, we have an important issue to address first: money. Like I said, the goal here is to plan a vacation for the lowest possible price. To do that, you need to start right now. Today. Keep reading...
Planning your theme park vacation: Step 2 - where do you want to go?Last week, we talked about money in taking our first step toward planning next year's theme park vacation. Today, we're going to forget about money for a few moments, and instead just daydream a bit about what we want from a theme park visit. Where do you want to go? Let's think about the possibilities. Keep reading...
Planning your theme park vacation: Step 3 - keep track of your expensesIn our first two installments, we talked about the importance of saving for a vacation, then daydreamed a bit about where you might want to go. The next step is to start putting numbers on paper. But before we start looking into the cost of visiting specific parks, let's take a moment to think about how we will manage the information we find. Theme Park Insider reader Don Neal e-mailed me about a wonderful system that he uses to budget for his family's theme park vacations. With his permission, I'm passing along his system, along with the spreadsheet he uses. Keep reading...
Planning your theme park vacation: Step 4 - Bookmark reservation websites[Editor's note: The "Tuesday Park Visit" that would normally appear on the Blog Flume today will run on Thursday this week, since I am visiting the media preview for Universal Studios Hollywood's Grinchmas holiday celebration that morning. Instead, we're running our "Vacation Planning" feature (which normally runs on Thursdays) today.] Before you start clicking around the Web to price your dream family vacation, you will want to put together a well-organized list of sites to help you price and book your trip. This week, I've put together that list for you, with links to websites where you can check airfares, hotel rates and theme park ticket prices. These include all major U.S. airlines, hotel and theme park chains, as well as direct links to airlines (such as Southwest) and hotels (such as Disney World's) that don't show up on the big industry-wide search sites. Keep reading...
Planning your theme park vacation: Step 5 - Consider on-site hotel benefitsA hotel room reservation can give you much more than use of a couple of beds and a bathroom for a night. When you book a room at many U.S. theme parks, you might also get special admission to the park itself, which can help you bypass long waits for some popular attractions. Almost every theme park has introduced a system that allows some of its visitors to bypass lines. Many of you might be familiar with Disney's FastPass. FastPass is a ride reservation system that assigns you a return time later in the day to an attraction. Show up at your assigned time, and you can enter without having to wait in the regular, stand-by line. In addition to ride reservation systems, there are two other types of systems that theme parks use to allow certain guests to bypass the regular queues: Priority boarding: These systems allows you to skip the line (or, at least, most of it) whenever you want to board. There's no need to wait until an assigned return time. Exclusive admission: This allows designated guests entrance to a restricted ride, show or section of the park, either before it opens or after it closes to the rest of the guests. Hotels at many major theme park reports offer one of these three line-bypass options to their overnight guests. If you are thinking about a family vacation visit to one of these parks, you should consider the value of these perks when deciding whether to stay in a participating hotel before automatically deciding on a cheaper hotel nearby. Keep reading...
Planning your theme park vacation: The best deals so farI started our series on planning a theme park vacation on the cheap late last year, knowing that 2009 would be a tough one for many theme park fans. With sound planning and a bit of useful advice, many people could find a way to afford a fun family vacation this year, I hoped. Well, the big theme park companies have recognized how tough times are for many families, too, and theme park resorts are responding with aggressive discounts. Yes, you'll still need to plan and set money aside, but many more deals are available now for families that want to get away for a winter or spring theme park vacation. I'll summarize many of those deals today. Keep reading...
Planning your theme park vacation: Step 6 - Saving money inside the parkOkay, we've started setting money aside, decided where to go, set up a system to track our expenses, checked prices online, weighed the benefits of staying on-site or off, and looked up the latest deals at the top parks. How else can we save money on a theme park vacation? Easily. By watching what we spend while inside the park. Think about the ways that your diligently saved cash can evaporate inside a theme park. Forget the sunscreen? That's $20. Headache? Another $10 for a handful of pain pills. Drinks can cost $3 a serving. Scrape a knee? You can get a free bandage at first aid, but only after you waste an hour of your day waiting around and filling out accident forms. And heaven forbid you parents run out of diapers. Notice that I haven't begun to talk about food or souvenirs yet? So, yeah, you have plenty of opportunities to save while inside a theme park. Here's my Golden Rule for in-park vacation savings: Never buy anything inside a theme park that you can buy outside the park. Keep reading...
Planning your theme park vacation: Save on airline baggage feesYeah, call me a cheapstake. But I'm just not going to pay $15-$50 a bag to check my luggage on an airline flight. Especially given the (lack of) care that airlines typically have shown my bags in the past. I believe in Peter Greenberg's theory of airline luggage - that there are two kinds: carry-on and lost. So when I fly somewhere, I'm packing everything into one carry-on, darn it. And I think that you should, too. When I flew to Hawaii for the first time ever this month, my wife and I carried on our bags and didn't have to leave any essentials behind. Since flying to Hawaii requires a similar wardrobe to an Orlando or Southern California theme park trip, today I offer my tips on packing carry-on bags, so you can avoid the airlines' checked luggage fees. Plus, you'll save about half an hour at your destination, since you'll get to skip baggage claim. Time is money, too! Keep reading...
Planning your theme park vacation: Teach your kids the power of budgetingWe've talked before about the importance of saving money in advance for your vacation, and tracking your vacation expenses. People who charge vacation expenses to their credit cards, without giving those charges much though soon find their vacation memories tarred by the months and months of bills that follow. Today, I want build on that point by talking this week to the parents on the website. Downtime's great, and vacations are wonderful by themselves. But why miss a great opportunity to teach your kids a lesson or two? Vacation planning's a great time to teach your children the importance of creating and sticking to a budget. Your kids don't have to grow up to be careless with money, and forever in debt. But they need to learn that lesson from you, if they are to avoid what could be the catastrophic expense of learning it on their own. Keep reading...
Planning your theme park vacation: Readers' top money-saving tipsI've offered several money saving tips for theme park vacations in this series over the past three months, and many Theme Park Insider readers have their own advice to offer, as well. Several of the items submitted to our Tips for visiting theme parks page offer advice on how to save money and time (which is money, in my book) on your vacation. Here are 10 of the more popular tips from that section. Keep reading...
Planning your theme park vacation: How much are you planning to spend?Back in November, we started a series to help readers budget their money for a theme park vacation in 2009. We've written about how to set aside money before a vacation, pick the right park, look for deals online and to weigh the relative value of deals at various parks. During this time, the U.S. and world ecocomy's gotten even worse, with many businesses sliding into bankruptcy, and millions of people either losing their jobs or fearing that they will. Of course, a theme park vacation can get your mind off this mess. And I think that the advice we've provided not only still applies, it's more appropriate than ever. Today, I'd like to get a sense of what you are planning for this year, and ask you to put some specific numbers on that. Keep reading...
Planning your theme park vacation: More useful Web links for saving moneyMy former LA Times colleague Liz Pulliam Weston, who now writes for MSN Money, has published a great list of The 100 most useful Web sites, upon which she's included Theme Park Insider. Many of the other 99 are well worth checking out, too. I've been writing about what you can do to save money on your theme park vacation and many of the sites that Liz lists can help with that, as well as getting everything else in your household's budget in order. Keep reading...
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