There are over a half-dozen discounts on resort rooms, tickets, and dining available at Walt Disney World for now through October 2025. We’ve analyzed each of these special offers to give you an idea of which is most likely to be the best and is the worst, primarily offering the illusion of a good deal. But we’ve also stressed the importance of doing the math, as there’s no one size fits all answer.
We’ve already spilled a lot of digital ink assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the new special offers, and what we’ve seen from reader comments is that it’s all overwhelming. So for this scenario, we’re going to demonstrate the differences by planning a Walt Disney World trip for the Costanza family from New York, who have booked a variety of fake vacations in past blog posts on this site. The Costanzas are once again a family of 4, having adopted the twin 8 year old girls who starred in The Shining. This means their party is 2 adults and 2 kids.
The Costanzas are going to visit August 3-9, 2025, which is one of the Best Weeks to Visit Walt Disney World in Summer 2025. (They enjoy heat, hate Christmas and are intrigued by the idea of celebrating Halloween over two months early, so it’s the perfect time of year.) They’ve decided to stay at All Star Sports, which is one of the hotels highlighted in Easy Tip for Cheaper Resorts at Walt Disney World.
Let’s start pricing out packages, beginning with the Free Dining Deal for Summer through Christmas 2025 that’s now available for the general public.
As we’ve reiterated repeatedly, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. At minimum, Free Dining requires that guests purchase a non-discounted 4-night, 4-day Walt Disney Travel Company package that includes a rack rate room and a theme park ticket with a Park Hopper option. This means you can opt for a longer length of stay or more ticket add-ons, but you’re required to book at least 4 nights and 4-day tickets with Park Hoppers, both at full price.
The Costanzas opt for 4-day tickets as opposed to a longer duration, which is mostly for the sake of comparison. They also elect against upgrading to the standard Disney Dining Plan, as they view that as too much food. And again, they’re staying at All Star Sports, as is the case with all of these examples.
Their total package price with Free Dining is $3,870.30.
Now let’s price out the ‘Stay Longer & Save More’ Room Discount in Summer & Fall 2025 for the Costanza family’s same travel dates as Free Dining. This offers up to 30% off stays of 5 nights or longer, and up to 25% off shorter stays.
Doing a longer stay necessarily means including weekend nights with higher rack rates, so the actual nightly cost isn’t that much different when doing a shorter weeknight-only stay versus a longer one. You still come out ahead with the longer stay, but not necessarily by much.
The Costanzas can get a standard room at All Star Sports for $123/night via this general public discount, and qualify for the extra savings since it’s a longer trip. During the booking process, they’re given the option to add-on full price tickets, which they elect against doing.
Their weeklong hotel cost is $838.52 after tax.
As for tickets, they opt to take advantage of the 50% Off Kids Ticket Offer for the twins and the 3-Day, 3-Park Magic Ticket Deal for the parents.
To book these special offers on admission, they go directly to the ticketing package of Disneyworld.com. Creating a package doesn’t offer both discounted tickets and rooms for some odd reason, even though these discounts are stackable–unlike Free Dining.
They opt to purchase standard 4-day tickets with admission to 1-park per day with a start date of August 5, 2025. Note that these tickets are not Park Hoppers. Meaning this isn’t going to be an apples to apples comparison with Free Dining, which requires the purchase of Park Hoppers. The total ticket cost for both of the twins is $566.80.
The Costanza adults opt to take advantage of the 3-Day, 3-Park Magic Ticket, once again as a separate transaction because Walt Disney World’s online system cannot book different discounts as a single order flow. (Perhaps it got distracted by tinsel.) The parents select tickets starting on August 4, 2025 and their total for both is $645.40.
They aren’t done, though! You’ll notice that the parents only have 3-day tickets, whereas the kids have 4-day tickets. No, the twins aren’t going to Magic Kingdom unaccompanied by adults, offering a two-girl preview of Villains Land and leaving terrified guests in their wake. Rather, the parents are buying separate, full-priced single day tickets to Magic Kingdom.
August 7 is one of the cheapest days to do Magic Kingdom during their trip. It’s also a Thursday, which is one of the Best Days of the Week to Visit Magic Kingdom. The total cost for the two parents to do this single day in Magic Kingdom is $349.32. Oof.
As opposed to doing that full day in MK, the Costanzas debated just sticking with the 3-day tickets (ditto their daughters) and buying 2025 Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party tickets when those are released.
Those hard tickets will almost certainly be cheaper for adults for day tickets, but more expensive for the twins, as the incremental cost of adding another day to 3-day tickets that are half off is lower than separate MNSSHP tickets.
In the end, it should be about a wash. We elected against this since 2025 Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party tickets are not yet available, so it’s impossible to do the math. Also, the Costanza family is fictional (thankfully), making this the more straightforward illustrative example. If this example were with the Bricker family, we’d opt for MNSSHP over a full day in MK during the hottest time of the year.
Adding up all these totals, the Costanza family would spend a total of $2,400.04 on this a la carte Walt Disney World package by separately booking the ‘Stay Longer & Save More’ room-only discount and both ticket special offers. Booking this trio of deals separately is $1,470.26 less expensive than Free Dining.
However, it’s important to reiterate that this is not an apples to apples comparison. As mentioned above, Free Dining includes Park Hopper tickets. It also offers more freedom, as you’re not “forced” to spend a full day in Animal Kingdom, etc. So you’ve gotta determine what, if anything, that’s worth to you.
More obviously, there’s the value of the Quick Service Disney Dining Plan. This one is easier, as we can simply take the actual cost of the QSDDP for this family, which is $1,006.20, in order to bridge the gap. Even then, though, you have to determine whether the Quick Service Disney Dining Plan is something you want, or if you’d prefer to pay a la carte. Mr. Costanza is a big time travel hacker and churner who is addicted to buying discount Disney gift cards, so he’d prefer to go that route if at all possible. (Smart fella, that Georgie.)
Obviously, this is a specific example and both of these options require compromises you may or may not be willing to make. The numbers will also change based on how many kids are in your party (if any), as the 50% Off Kids Ticket Offer is the best discount of the bunch. “Best” is subjective, but barely.
That’s the kind of discount seldom seen at Walt Disney World, and it’s really good–to the point that families with kids who qualify will be hard-pressed to pass it up. Also worth mentioning is that top demographic that usually comes out ahead with Free Dining is families with multiple kids. Not so this year–it’s parties with more “Disney Adults.”
It’s also fair to say that not everyone is going to want to book the cheapest Value Resort. The good news there is that the savings of the a la carte approach will increase with pricier Value and Moderate Resorts. This is because the ‘Stay Longer & Save More’ offers scaling savings at more expensive resorts, whereas you’re paying full price for the resort with Free Dining. So really, the comparison we just did is the more favorable for Free Dining. At least, until moving up to Deluxe/Deluxe Villa Resorts that offer the regular Disney Dining Plan.
Even when moving up in resort tiers, the higher percentage savings on the room-only rate and higher rack rates is going to make the stackable combo of room-only and ticket deals almost insurmountable. There’s a version of this post with the Costanzas staying at a Moderate Resort where they save over $1,000 even after adding dining costs.
If you have kids eligible for the 50% off ticket deal and yourself are willing to do the 3-Park Magic Ticket, it doesn’t really matter which resort or tier you choose. The bottom line is that guests eligible (and interested in) both ticket deals should opt for the a la carte special offers–being able to double-dip on discounts will always win. Older parties of 3+ or those who are inflexible on ticket type could still come out ahead with Free Dining; you’ll need to crunch the numbers yourself if you fall outside the ‘young families’ target demo.
The goal of this post wasn’t to analyze every possible permutation of the current Walt Disney World. It was to concisely convey the math on Free Dining versus the a la carte deals. And we managed to do that in under 1,500 words (to this point), a rarity for this blog!
If you’re still struggling to wrap your head around all of this (it’s a lot!) and want someone else to do the math, consider reaching out to a travel agent. Any travel agent! As always, we’d recommend requesting a FREE no obligation quote from Be Our Guest Vacations, an Authorized Disney Vacation Planner and having them book for you.
One item of interest about “Cool Kid Summer” and the new young families initiative is how all of these discounts compare to Walt Disney World’s own pricing benchmarks. As we’ve been saying, a lot of what has transpired in the last few weeks feels like an indirect response to last month’s bombshell Wall Street Journal report, which we covered at length in Walt Disney World is Worried About Its High Prices and its progeny of posts.
Walt Disney World pushed back against WSJ’s estimated costs of a typical four-day visit, saying they were exaggerated and didn’t take into account the range of value options available. According to Walt Disney World, “a four-day trip for a family of four in the fall could cost as little as $3,026 before food and transportation costs…and guests don’t need Lighting Lane passes to have a great time.”
We already separately did the math on this in Is Walt Disney World Too Expensive for Middle Class Americans? In a nutshell, we found that cost ballooned to $4,114 after including transportation, and $4,814 once including food. That put Walt Disney World above the average annual vacation budget (based on U.S. government consumer spending data) for all but the top 20% of households.
Free Dining is still above Walt Disney World’s price estimate, which is telling since the baseline “before food” should be pretty close to the Free Dining total since the Quick-Service Disney Dining Plan is, ya know, “free” in that case. But the added cost of Park Hopper tickets, opportunity cost of forgoing an alternative discount, and differing duration of the trip probably explain the difference.
However, the $2,400 total price for the room and ticket deals when booked on an a la carte basis are significantly below even Walt Disney World’s own minimum. That’s a $600 difference, which feels significant! Not only that, but this is a longer hotel stay and it’s with adding single-day Magic Kingdom tickets for the adults, which contribute an outsized amount to the total package price. Were we to remove those and take a day off the kids tickets, the grand total would’ve been below $2,000.
Honestly, I’m surprised Walt Disney World isn’t trumpeting this from the rooftops. I’m likewise still a bit perplexed that they didn’t just release a 4-Day, 4-Park Magic Ticket that includes Magic Kingdom, even if it ended up being roughly the same cost as the 3-Day version plus a single day Magic Kingdom ticket. Plenty of people aren’t going to even think of doing that in the first place.
Perhaps that’s the point? That Walt Disney World wants to push people towards Free Dining to the greatest extent possible, so they’re not offering an option to bundle the a la carte discounts and making it more difficult to see just how much money you can save with the separate room-only and ticket deals.
On the one hand, Free Dining increases per guest spending (a critical metric for the company). On the other hand, prospective guests may not dig deeper into individual component pricing–they may have sticker shock and opt against visiting Walt Disney World entirely after pricing out the bundle. Just ask Universal Orlando how well that’s worked out for them.
Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!
Your Thoughts
Does the math on Free Dining work for you, or do the stackable a la carte deals make booking a room-only rate and tickets separately too attractive to pass up? Which discounts will you be taking advantage of? Any twists on this for your own unique circumstances? Do you agree or disagree with our analysis? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
