Hi everyone, it's Jacqueline for Pixie Dust PhD. Today I will be showing you my
experience buying Walt Disney World tickets from a third party website, making park reservations,
as well as making a rental car reservation. Normally I wouldn't cover car rental--that's
pretty straightforward in my mind-- but like many things recently, it's just not quite the
same as it used to be. The rental car market is kind of wild right now, so I ended up actually
bundling that with my ticket purchase. This is also my very first time making park reservations
since that was not required in trips past. Things are really starting to come together
from my planned fall 2021 trip to Walt Disney World, and I hope you stay tuned as we progress!
When buying tickets to Walt Disney World you absolutely can do that directly through Disney,
but you don't have to. I use a third-party website called Undercover Tourist. I know
often you can also purchase Walt Disney World tickets at your local AAA office if you are a
AAA member. Similarly, membership to a wholesale warehouse like Sam’s Club may also get you access
to discounted Walt Disney World tickets. When you choose to purchase your Disney tickets through
anyone but Disney please do be sure to take your time and do your research to ensure you aren't
being scammed. There are plenty of fraudulent ticket sellers out there. Note that Disney is
actually very good at spotting fraudulent tickets when they're trying to be used to enter a theme
park, so it's really not worth your time or money to bother purchasing those. Fraudulent
tickets can be very tempting, as they are often quite cheap, but in the long run if you do plan
to enter a theme park it will probably cost you more. For example, if you spent $100 purchasing
a fraudulent ticket that would normally cost you $400 it feels like you're saving $300. But
when you go to use that fraudulent ticket at the theme park and they find out what you're doing,
you will have spent that $100 already on that ticket you can't use and if you do want to enter
the theme parks now you're gonna have to spend that $400 you would have originally spent. In
this way you end up actually spending more money by purchasing those fraudulent tickets in the
first place. Overall, if the price seems too good to be true it probably is. Please buy legitimate
tickets. As I just mentioned, I personally use a website called Undercover Tourist. I’ve used them
multiple times before across different theme parks and there has never once been an issue. They are
a verified seller. I really can't vouch for any other third-party ticket sellers, but I can give
you my scout's honor that Undercover Tourist is a good place to go. Beginning on their website you
will have to do a few clicks to navigate your way to actually buying tickets for Walt Disney World.
Disney does have a date-based ticketing system so you will want to select a date of roughly
around when you'd want to start going to the theme parks. You do potentially have some wiggle room as
multi-day tickets come with a window of use that is longer than the amount of ticketed days. For
example, this ticket has five days of admittance but you have an eight day window to use them.
I am looking to purchase 10-day park hopper tickets, so I’m gonna go ahead and scroll down
to the park hopper section. And I know I really don't need to compare to other lengths of tickets,
so I’m just going to go ahead and proceed to the page that shows me details for only this 10-day
parkhopper ticket. Here you'll find all the fine print. You can see details on redemption here,
including terms for things like expiration and length of that valid window. They also list
the refund policy. Even tickets bought directly through Disney are not really refundable, so I’m
not too fussed about this. And for unused tickets Disney is actually extremely accommodating. For
example, if I end up moving my trip and we're not going down in the fall but say we want to go in
February instead I’m very confident that with my unused ticket Disney could easily help me adjust
the start date. All in all, the refund policy here at Undercover Tourist may read a little bit harsh,
but it's actually very normal for theme park tickets. All right, great, so I’ve read the fine
print and I’m feeling good. I’m going to add two of these tickets to my cart. This blue bar allows
you to double check your theme park ticket dates easily, and then we just move on in the process.
Here my interest is piqued, as it says I can save up to 50% on a car rental when I bundle
with my ticket purchase. Personally, I do prefer to have a rental car when I’m down
in Disney so I have that freedom to come and go as I please. Usually I mentally budget for about $200
a week for a rental car. This is a two-week trip so I was expecting to pay about $400.
Of course, I was hoping to find some sort of deal and pay instead around $350 total,
but I was ready for $400. However, since mostly folks weren't traveling during the pandemic,
rental car companies sold off a lot of their fleet and now the demand is much higher than the supply.
I was finding rates for my two-week trip on services like Hotwire and Kayak for anywhere
between $850 to $1,300. I also am a USAA member, which tends to give me the best prices on things
like car rentals. But even through USAA this two-week car rental was going to cost me $700.
Therefore, I decided to look into this bundle. I have never bundled a rental car with anything
before--not flights, or hotels, or theme park tickets. So this was a brand new experience
for me. Just like with any rental car, you set the dates that you want to pick up and drop off
as well as the locations you'd like to pick up and drop off. Then you run a search. Undercover
Tourist does not automatically sort from price low to high, they sort from what is most popular.
Naturally, I sorted by price. And then we can see that Budget has prices from $415
for the full trip. When you read the fine print from Undercover Tourists it becomes
obvious that this price is inclusive of all the standard fees and taxes, so it really is $415.
Also the rental is fully cancelable. The catch here is that you do have to pay up front--your
credit card is charged this full amount when you go ahead and process your purchase of the tickets
and the rental car. Whereas most other rental car bookings you are actually booking the car and then
you would pay at the rental car counter when you pick the car up. But ultimately my partner and I
decided that these savings were worth paying up front. Paying upfront also does help spread the
cost of the trip out over several months instead of having many things come right during that month
of the trip. And rather go for the bottom of the barrel option, we decided to go one class up.
We selected the compact car over the economy car for an up charge of about $40. And importantly,
especially in Florida, I always check that cars come with air conditioning. And this one does. It
also has automatic transmission, which I prefer. So great, this passes all my checks. Now we just
double check everything: this is the rental car I want and it has all the appropriate details;
similarly, these are the tickets I would like to purchase and the details are correct.
If you'd like you can have your theme park tickets physically mailed to you and these actually have a
more generous refund policy, but I know I will be using these theme park tickets and to some
extent I’m a little bit impatient so I will just have them emailed to me. Undercover Tourist does
ask that you allow for 24 hours for tickets to be delivered to your email. Upon checking
out with a rental car, now is when you input the driver's name. Luckily for me my partner
agrees to do the driving when we go on vacations. And then for tickets you will enter your name. It
notes here that the name of the person you enter needs to be present when the tickets are used,
and you may need to present a valid ID. I’m guessing this is more of an issue for
things like Florida state resident tickets where something needs to be verified. Every time I’ve
done this in the past--with standard base tickets or park hopper tickets as an out of state person
not getting any real special discount--I’ve never had to make sure that my name matched anything or
present an ID when I’m trying to use the tickets in the parks. I do make sure the name my input
here matches my name in my My Disney Experience account. Although, honestly, I think that's
overkill and probably not necessary. Alright, so you enter your name and then you fill out the
standard billing address and payment options. They do take most major credit cards. We're going to
skip most of this since it's private information I don't want on YouTube. But essentially you fill it
out like you normally would for online shopping, and then you submit your order. After that you'll
automatically be presented with some other offers from Undercover Tourist. I did not pursue any of
those at this time. But worth noting if you are a Rakuten member, which is a way to get cash back
on your online purchases, you can actually get one percent cash back at Undercover Tourist--at least
right now--for non-ticket purchases. So this won't count for theme park tickets, but it will
count for my rental car purchase. Less than five minutes later my tickets were in my email inbox.
You simply click the view your e-ticket button in that email that you're sent. They list your
reservation number on the top, and this is also the same as the numbers listed under the barcodes
at the top and the side. I’ve blanked mine out for security purposes, but trust me there is text
here. It's a combination of letters and numbers, and that is the code you're going to need to move
forward with the process. Now head over to your My Disney Experience account, navigate to your plans,
and you can see that right now I don't have tickets attached to my account. Next I will
link my tickets that we just purchased. And here is where we paste that code in from our tickets.
My order was for two tickets, so you can now see that two tickets have populated. I assign those to
the correct folks in my friends and family list. I believe people do need to be in your friends
and family list to do this, so ensure that your friends and family list is up to date. And then
you'll get a system confirmation of the tickets linked to the relevant people in your friends
and family list. On this same page you can scroll down into the what's next section, and then click
a link in order to make your park reservations. Here you'll begin with everybody in your friends
and family list. Select the relevant folks, then you select a date. It will default to begin in
the month that you're currently in, so you can see that I purchased my tickets in May. Scroll
through the calendar until you get to the month that you're looking for--for me that's September.
Then pick the date that you'd like to make a park reservation for. Parks with availability
for that date are populated below. Since I’m doing this relatively far in advance and I’m
also an on-site hotel guest you can see that there is park availability everywhere. Select the park,
and then on the next page you will just confirm everything and then agree to terms and conditions;
great! At the bottom of this confirmation page you can continue your process by selecting
make another reservation. The same party members will automatically be selected now, which is a
nice time saving feature. However, it doesn't have a smart date feature; I again started in May when
I needed to be in September. Scroll through to the date you want, pick your park, agree to the terms,
and then it's confirmed. Rinse and repeat. I made 10 park reservations for all 10 days of my ticket,
and the whole process took maybe 3 minutes. When you're done making park reservations you can then
hit view my plans at the bottom of this page instead of make another park pass. This takes
you back into your plans section of My Disney Experience. And, hooray! You can now see that both
my park tickets as well as park reservations icons are lit up blue indicating I do have these in my
account. Scrolling down you should see your full plans. I noticed that my first hotel listed was
Bay Lake Tower, and that's incorrect because I’ll actually be at the Beach Club before I’ll ever hit
Bay Lake Tower. Clearly some of the reservations I made in my Disney Vacation Club account didn't
migrate over to My Disney Experience. It's a little strange that some did and some didn't,
but it's really not a big deal. If you notice reservations are not showing up in your My Disney
Experience go ahead and manually link those. Just like we manually linked our tickets, we can do the
same for our hotel reservations. Go to the hotel icon and then click link reservations. Then copy
and paste your reservation number as well as the last name associated here. Then I’ll associate the
guests in my reservation to my friends and family list in My Disney Experience. Do this for all of
your missing reservations. I had four missing hotel reservations, and the total process took
around two minutes. Amazing. So now we have all of our hotel reservations, we've got park tickets
and we've made park pass reservations, now the my plans section should be looking pretty complete.
Every day has a hotel reservation and a park reservation, and every day lists the relevant
people in my friends and family--in this case it's just me and my partner. Under the tickets and
memory maker tab you can see what valid purchases you have there. Our tickets show up here. We have
not yet bought memory maker. We haven't actually yet decided if we're going to buy memory maker--we
probably will, but that's a decision for another time. But if you had it, it would show up here.
And scrolling through the list under my plans I’m just double checking everything to make sure we
are good to go… and yes indeed every day does have a hotel reservation, a park reservation, and then
both of us listed. Overall, this is a pretty easy and straightforward experience. I’m very thankful
for how much functionality the online version of My Disney Experience has so I don't have
to sit on hold with a Cast Member simply to link reservations. Also I am a big proponent of buying
discounted tickets through Undercover Tourist instead of directly through Disney. If you are
getting a fantastic deal package directly through Disney that requires you buy tickets through them,
then by all means do that. But for a standard trip, especially if you're buying pieces a la
cart--meaning you're not doing a vacation package, well save a little bit of money by buying tickets
through Undercover Tourist. The amount of work you have to do is really minimal, it's really
just linking your tickets to your account. To me that's absolutely worth the savings. For 10 day
park hopper tickets we saved about 62 dollars per ticket, so around 120 total. Now that's not much,
but it is a bunch of quick service meals. And hey, I’ll take any savings I can get. This has
been my first experience using Undercover Tourist to rent a car. The process of securing the rental
car at the same time as buying tickets was easy enough. It is also fully cancelable in case I find
a better rate before we head off for vacation. We will see how everything goes once we actually are
on vacation and pick up the car, but I’m hopeful it will be just as smooth as the renting process
itself. I’ll be sure to report back later. I hope you found this helpful! If you did please
hit that thumbs up button to like the video and consider subscribing to the channel--you can ring
the bell icon to receive notifications whenever I post new videos. And please do let me know in the
comments down below, or you can hit me up on other social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram,
where you buy your Walt Disney World tickets. Do you have any hacks for small savings that you
can share? Same goes for car rentals. I would love to get a peek into your planning process!
I hope the rest of your day is truly magical, and we'll see you real soon at Pixie Dust PhD.