Benefits of Booking a Disney Land/Sea Vacation Separately

We are geared up for our grand summer 2011 vacation that includes a 5 night cruise on Disney’s newest ship, the Disney Dream, and a week long stay at the Walt Disney World Resort. We can book or reserve or Port Adventures, also known as shore excursions next week, as long as our cruise is paid in full.




The cruise portion of our trip, is paid in full, which brings me to the subject of this post. The benefit of booking land and sea Disney vacations separately.

At one time, Disney sold land/sea packages, which offered guests convenience, but not very much choice. The land portion HAD to be before the sea and the only options were 4 days of land, 3 days of sea or 3 days of land, 4 days of sea. Guests received, and paid for, a 7 day park hopper ticket, even though they were using only 3 or 4 days—as the price of this was well disguised. Also, guests could not add on dining plans to their tickets or stay at Walt Disney World. Thankfully, the days of this are long gone and recently Disney has added more flexibility for guests.



We purchased our land and sea vacations separately, which gives us the maximum flexibility AND the convenience of using Disney transfers, transportation, etc.



Since we are silver Disney Cruise Line Castaway Club members, we can reserve our shore excursions 90 days from the beginning of our cruise as long as the cruise is paid in full. (Click here to read more about the Castaway Club member benefits.) And, since we want to take advantage of booking early—new guests can book at 75 days out—we have paid in full the cruise portion of our trip.

But, the land portion is required to be paid in full 45 days prior to the start of our trip, so we have another month and a half before the rest of the trip needs to be paid in full. Good for us and good for our budget.



We also had the flexibility to purchase the type of park ticket we wanted/needed and added on the dining plan. We even got the Quick Service plan for free and just paid the minimal difference to upgrade to the Basic Dining Plan—saving us quite a bit of money!



The convenient part is that we will still use Disney transfers from the airport to the port and from the port to the resort and from the resort to the airport at the end of our trip. One out of three of those transfers is free. Disney will handle our luggage for us the whole way.

Convenience and flexibility—with our time, money, and choices for our vacation—are the benefits of separately booking a Disney land and sea vacation.