Best Disney World Money-Saving Tips - Articles - Travel + Leisure

How we use your personal information

American Express Publishing ("AEP") may use your information to send you account updates and offers that may interest you, and may share such information with select business partners for you to receive offers from those partners. To learn more about the ways we may use and share your information and about your privacy choices, read the AEP Privacy Statement

Mary Waring had just quit her marketing job in San Diego in 2001, so saving money on her upcoming trip to Disney World in Orlando , FL , was a high priority. She found lots of resources online and posted links to coupons on a website. Her brother, a Microsoft employee, told his colleagues about her savings tips—and within six weeks, her little online scratch pad had amassed 23,000 page views. That’s when Waring realized the country’s insatiable appetite for Disney savings gossip.

“I often say Americans think it’s their God-given right to take the kids to Disney World,” she says. “For a lot of people it’s part of childhood.”

Waring’s site has evolved into MouseSavers.com , a clearinghouse for scrimping Mouseheads, and it’s her full-time job. Without assistance from Disney, she finds and posts more than 300 pages’ worth of coupon codes and money-saving ideas, and her site typically attracts at least 60,000 page views a day (more than four times as many as SixFlags.com ).

The attention shouldn’t be a surprise. An estimated 17 million people visited Disney’s flagship Florida property, the Magic Kingdom , in 2008, and even in the depths of this recession, Disney Parks has unfailingly turned a tidy profit. Whereas Disneyland , in southern California , is often visited casually by people who live within driving distance, Walt Disney World in Orlando —47 square miles containing four theme parks, two waterslide parks, and nearly two dozen company-owned hotels—is a destination unto itself. Trips can require planning akin to military invasions.

Read more...