How I travel hacked Disneyland for my family of 5!

We planned to go to Disneyland and Disneyland California Adventures for 2 days with park hopper passes, and one day at Universal Studios Hollywood. I had checked the cost ahead of time, arranged to get my husband a new credit card prior to spending this ticket money so we could put that larger expense on a new card, hit the minimum spend and get the sign up bonus!

My husband had just gotten the Chase Ink Business Cash, which gets 5x points at office supply stores, so we killed 3 birds one stone - we had set the money aside to pay for the tickets in general, and were working towards his 6k minimum spend for the 90k bonus points.  Sent him to the Office Depot 2x (ours you can only purchase 1k in gift card per visit and they check your ID so it’s not like I could run in after him), bought the Disney gift cards for $1500, and earned 7500 Chase Ultimate Rewards points. Woot!

We had also purchased two $250 Disney gift cards from Costco for $450, so saved $50 there and also, again, purchasing what we would anyway and using that new Ink Cash to meet that spend and get 450 closer to hitting that 90k bonus.

Please note - You can’t pay for Disney tickets with more than 1 gift card so you have to use the Disney parks app to download and manage your gift cards and consolidate them.  It took me more than a minute to be honest, but I figured it out. Worst case, I think you can call them and they can help you purchase tix over the phone. 

We booked 2 award nites at the Holiday Inn (part of the IHG family) near the park with ½ of my IHG Premier personal card sign up bonus - they only had award availability for 2 of our 4 nites.  Initially Hyatt House on Harbor didn’t have any award availability  for our dates, but I searched again and eventually found 1 nite that was 9k points plus the cash price of like 175$.  We were going to pay for the extra IHG nites anyway, and it still dinged our cost down to 2 nites which was awesome. 

Checked Hyatt AGAIN days later cuz I was worried about having to change hotels after one nite and how much of a struggle that would be with our kids, and lo and behold, they had availability for the nite we would’ve paid for the IHG so that was another 9k points plus $175 so instead of paying $1366 for our original hotel room cash - I was able to cancel that reservation now - our total came to $346 plus parking of $28/nite. Both IHG nites were freeeeeee. NOT BAD. 

Also, Hyatt House and Hyatt Places are awesome becuz they have free breakfasts! Most of the time.  So we can feed our family of 5 there at the hotel on points instead of paying our usual $40-$50 to put food in all our biscuit holes. Total win!

And buying the Disney cards at Office Depot got us nearly a nites stay at the Hyatt also.  So it was super hacked.  

The Universal Studios tickets I paid for with my card that we were working on meeting the minimum spend, so we started racking up Am Ex points as well for our next adventure to Europe! 

Side note - My AmEx biz Gold card has a $20 allotment you can spend at office supply stores each month where they will credit that amount right back, so I had February and March to run in to Office Depot and get a $20 Disney gift card for free basically, so we used those for things for the kids in the park and felt no pain there. :) 

Once inside the park, we used the next cards we had going to meet those minimum spend and continue earning points toward our next trips. Yes, Disney is a buttload but I’m super happy we at least knocked our hotel insanely down, as well as earned a bunch of points for the future. 

There are lots of other and additional ways to hack taking your family to Disneyland, but that is just mine and how I did it, and I’m still thrilled about it and figured I would jot it down to give someone else ideas about their Disney trip. :)

Happy hacking!