Hotwire Deals: Sundays in the Park with Pop
Welcome back to another edition of Schroedinger’s HotRates!
Thanks to a tip from reader Stephanie on our previous post, we’ve found that there are finally some Hotwire deals out there for some very (very) very specific days in August.
If you recall in our previous post, No Deal or No Deal, several weeks ago all of the Disney resorts dropped from Hotwire’s search results. Among other things. In that post we went into some tips to squeeze some Coronado deals that were still out there.
Coronado continued to come and go in the weeks that followed – but I personally was able to find and book my own 5 night deal for $159 per night. *insert self-congratulatory woohoo! here.*
Well, now we have a new Disney resort to spot: in August you can find some deals for Pop Century for $78 to $85 per night. Those are pretty awesome rates – they can save up to $70 or more per night over even Disney’s current 25% discount.
But there’s a catch with these Pop deals: they are out there… until they aren’t.
If Schroedinger was a Disney fan, even he’d be scratching his head.
So, you may need to keep checking obsessively (like some people typing this blog post do). Sometimes deals disappear for a few hours, then return. Sometimes they only appear on the app, sometimes they’ll appear on my iPad app but not my Android phone app. Sometimes you need to use the old Draw technique, as we outlined again in that last post.
Oh Yeah, Some Disappointing News
I’ll return to the very (very) very thing I mentioned earlier: when I first checked for these Pop deals you could only find them in the first 4 weeks of August on each successive Sunday. That’s it – Sunday.
However, you could string together 3 days of $78 deals from August 29th to September 1st.
This morning a re-check of the deals turned up one for the entire week starting Sunday, August 15th and ending on the 22nd. Then, a re-re-check this afternoon and they were all gone again.
*shakes fist at Schroedinger*
One last tip before our deal examples: If you find your Hotwire app is not seeing any of these deals, try clearing the app cache, or on iOS, deleting and reinstalling the app. I had to do that to get both of my apps to see any of them.
If you are lucky enough for the Hotwire gods to look down upon you with favor, here is how Pop Century will look in a hidden deal.
There are only three 3-star, 4.4-guest resorts in Bonnet Creek – the other two resorts are Art of Animation and Homewood Suites. In the example above you can see I used the Draw function in the app to place a circle around Pop and verify this was indeed a deal for that resort.
Another method to identify resorts is to compare the sub-amenities and review counts listed on the deal. In this case, Pop is the only one of the three resorts to have a review count over 1,000. Also, if you check the Hotwire page for the resort, the sub-amenities match the ones shown below.
Just be aware that the Hotwire ratings system is hosted by Expedia and sometimes the values shown on the deals are not entirely in sync with the values shown on the resort page. (In fact, until recently the resort page for Pop had a 4.5 for Room cleanliness while the deals had the 4.6 shown.)
The World Famous Calendar of Deals
Kudos to you for reading this far – you can use the calendar below for a visual on the terrific Pop deals we found. You may see more, you may see less at any given time – but if you keep at it and use the tactics we’ve blogged about you’ll have a very good chance of grabbing one for yourself.
Hopefully Hotwire’s randomness will go away soon and we’ll be able to find more deals in the near future.
If you’ve booked any of these or other deals – let us know in the comments!
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I just booked Pop for August 1 for $109 for 3 adults. I also saved an extra 8% using code hwescape. I was not able to add a day before after booking, which is what we were expecting to happen since it was not included in the days available. Thank you so much for your help.
Hi Barb,
Thanks for the update! Sorry that you couldn’t add the additional days.
For others reading: Barb and I were planning tactics for her booking over on Touring Plans Lines chat. She was trying to book a pair of inexpensive days at a Disney resort and we could only get a single one of those $88 Pop Century days to show up on Hotwire. Barb decided to book the single Hotwire day and then try to use the add technique – and it didn’t work.
She was comfortable giving it a shot because she also noticed that she could book Pop for the other day using the 25% off discount, which she ended up doing.
Kudos to Barb for trying it out and letting us know!
John, I noticed that you haven’t posted any PL express deals posts in quite a while — are they no longer offered?
Hi Susanne,
Priceline is an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, and deep fried like a churro.
Since the start of this year any deals over there have been few and far between – to the point that Disney resorts even were missing from regular non-hidden deals until just this last week.
The only Disney “deal” that has consistently appeared over there has been a 3.5-star, 9-guest rated resort in Bonnet Creek: Fort Wilderness Cabins. However, they aren’t much of a deal at $385 and up per night.
Long story short: If we see any deals, we’ll do our best to report on them! Something has to show up sooner or later.
THANK YOU!!!! We were able to snag Pop for $89 on Sunday Aug 8th through Hotwire app and using the Draw feature. I didn’t jump on the deal at first and lost it. I did the ‘clear cache’ tip on my Android and it showed up again! Thanks for sharing these tips with the community!
Glad you were able to grab a deal! It felt funny reporting on mostly single days, but you gotta work with what ya got. 😉
How does Disney work with guests who use Hotwire? Do those guests get the less desirable room views? Are they standard rooms only? Can you request a room with Touring Plans assistance for a specific room if you have a Hotwire reservation? Our family has favorite rooms!! Thanks for all your info!
Hello! The good news is that once you connect these rooms to your My Disney Experience, they pretty much act like any other room reservation.
While 3rd party resellers tend to sell different blocks of rooms than Disney at any given time, from all reports I’ve had they aren’t any different types of rooms than the ones Disney is selling directly.
There have even been a few drops of deals where the majority of hidden deals booked were Preferred rooms – one really large block of Yacht Club rooms in 2019-2020 come to mind. There were also a group of Animal Kingdom Lodge deals where people had Savannah View. (I’m keeping my fingers crossed my own upcoming Coronado booking ends up being a Preferred.)
When booking a hidden deal, a good tip to see if you can find any clues about the room type is to try viewing it using different methods. Sometimes the desktop browser shows different room descriptions than the iOS app, which may be different than the Android app. (Hotwire is weird, especially now.)
So, in one of those apps you might get a choice that specifically states Standard room vs Preferred or Water View etc. If so, you might also get a choice that has the cheapest deal as “Let Hotwire pick the room”, but for an extra $1 or so you could lock into a Standard or an extra $20 lock into a Water View.
This was especially helpful with recent Caribbean Beach deals – on the desktop browser there were no room clues at all, but when on the iOS app the room types were “Pirate Room” and “King Room”, which was particularly helpful in giving the room type and resort away. 😉
Anyway, once you have added your reservation to MDE, you can surely use the Touring Plans room request, or speak to your TA if you are using one.
Good luck!