Saving Money Using Disney Giftcards on Your Next Disney Trip
Disney giftcards are a great way to pay for your Disney Vacation! They are super easy to use and can even save you some money if you do it right.
I have a few tips on how to get the most out of your giftcards as well as warn you of some things to be cautious of.
1. Use the Target Redcard Hack!!!
You may have heard this trick before, but for those of you that this is new to you, let me explain.
If you have a Target Redcard (we recommend the debit kind, not the credit kind) you can use it to get 5% off on all your purchases. This includes giftcards!
This may not sound like a lot, but if you think about it in terms of paying for your trip, that’s 5% of potentially thousands of dollars that you would be spending.
Let’s do a little math, shall we?
Let’s say you just want to use giftcards to pay for your resort hotel. Let’s say you are staying at Pop Century in a standard view room for 4 nights and the total cost (without any discounts) is around $850.
If you used the hack and purchased $850 in giftcards with your Redcard, you would get $42.50 off! That’s easily a nice quick service meal or a fun souvenir!
Or you can use that money for other life and non Disney things (even though that isn’t as fun).
Now let’s say you are staying at a more expensive hotel for the same amount of nights and you also are buying park tickets.
4 nights at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort in a Standard View Room and a 4 day Park Ticket can run around $2,200.
If you use the same method, that’s $110! That’s a lot of money!
You can also do this same or similar method with places like Costco, Sam’s, or any other places that sell discounted giftcards!
ALWAYS use caution when purchasing giftcards online as some websites may be counterfeit.
It’s definitely saved us quite a bit in the past and can be a really great option to save you some too!
2. Combine Your Giftcards Using the Disneygiftcard.com
If your using that giftcard hack, you probably have a million giftcards in smaller amounts. That can be super annoying to have to manage, so Disney has a really great tool to help make it easier.
You can combine up to $1000 on a giftcard. All you have to do is log on to the website, create your account, and start combining!
I do have a few tips when it comes to doing this:
Give your giftcard a name and write it with sharpie on the physical giftcard.
Once a giftcard balance has been transferred and is empty, you don’t need those anymore, but it’s important to clearly label your giftcards that do have money so that you don’t get them mixed up!
We always do something easy like October 1, October 2, etc. (if we have a trip in October haha)
This brings me to a VERY important tip:
3. DON’T PUT MORE THAN $1000 ON ONE CARD!
We learned this lesson the hard way…
When we first started paying with giftcards, we would pay with one, empty it to nearly zero and then load it up again and pay again.
Then 2020 happened and we ended up having to cancel our trip.
Since refunds have to go on the original form of payment (and each giftcard can have a max balance of $1000). It made it VERY complicated to get our money back.
They had to physically mail us and digitally email us the rest of the giftcards and it took weeks to get back.
Eventually we did get it all back, but it was very nerve racking to wait on hundreds of dollars of giftcards to arrive.
Here is what you SHOULD do:
Keep a spreadsheet, something to keep track of which card you use for each payment.
Once a giftcard is zero’d out, write “done” and KEEP THE GIFT CARD. Then don’t load any more money on it and set it aside, that way of you do for some reason need a refund, you know exactly which card it was and you get your money back within hours or days… not weeks…
(We’ve also made the mistake of throwing away giftcards when we were done with them… which was a whole other mess)
Of course once you are home and happy from your trip, you can throw those giftcards away and start fresh!
Hopefully these tips are helpful and save you a bit of cash on your next vacation!
Make sure you follow us so that you don’t miss our next post where I give you some tips on how to use giftcards to help you budget while on vacation.
