Hotwire: Yachting It Up Again In September
Well, this is getting a bit ridiculous now, isn’t it? But, it’s a good ridiculous.
Back in July, before I ran off with my family to the wilds of Coronado Springs, I wrote of some terrific Half-off Yacht Club deals in August. This morning, I spotted a new fleet of Yachts on Hotwire.
Did I think I’d see more so soon?
But, sometimes it is good to be wrong. In that previous post I went into detail on how to identify Yacht Club in HotRate deals, so be sure to jump back there for more info. For your immediate edification, here’s an example of a hidden deal paired with a transparent one from further down the search results.
These new deals are in the same price range as the last group: about 50% – 60% off. That’ll get your jib going, won’t it matey?
(Note to Touring Plans fact-checking personnel: A jib is a nautical thing, right? Maybe ask those cruise people to ask Captain Mickey?)
What’s especially nice about these is that each deal I sampled had Water View as the room type. So, who doesn’t want a view like this?
Before I go into the Calendar of Deals, I just want to add one bit of new-ish info:
In the past I’ve suggested using the Draw feature in the app to help zoom in on one resort and force Hotwire to give the resort away. That still works well, but lately I’ve found that because of the close proximity of the Epcot area resorts to each other, Draw can be a little wonky in the results it returns. When I tried to draw a circle only around Yacht Club, I wasn’t always successful in getting the deals to appear even though I was positive about the resort.
But, when I widened my circle a bit they did appear – so while using Draw on the map is still an excellent tool in your hidden deal toolbox, be aware it ain’t perfect. Oh, it will still help you most of the time – but in a case like below, you may have to do a little sleuthing to decide this deal was for Yacht Club.
In this particular example, neither the Dolphin nor Beach Club have the same exact rating as Yacht Club, so they were easy to discount as possibilities.
TWO Calendars of Deals
Now, on this post I am going to give you a real value: TWO Calendars of Deals. When searching in September one day at a time I initially found a few orphaned deals, rather than multiple days strung together. Which isn’t always how people book rooms, right?
So, as I’ve suggested in the past, I began to try various windows of dates and see if some more deals appeared. As usual, they did! I added some notes in the following more comprehensive calendar on the start and end dates I searched to get some of these additional days to show up. As with anything Hotwire these days, your nautical mileage may vary and you may see more or less deals as the Hotwire Gods allow.
Good luck in your own search for all the deals in September!
If you find any good ones or you have any additional silly nautical puns I can use for future posts, let us know in the comments!
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Hi John,
If I already have a weeklong Disney Resort reservation and am within the 30day mark for travel, is there a way to convert the reservation to a Hotwire one instead? This would allow for a HUGE resort upgrade for less money but concerned that dining reservations, etc are linked to the confirmation number. How do I go about doing this? Or do I need to leave it until next time? We are seasoned Disney World travelers and Touring Plans subscribers but Hotwire is brand new to us.
Hi Amy,
First the easy stuff:
Since this post was published the Yacht Club deals thinned out a lot, and I have not seen any for several days now. (They may be out there still, but might need a new start and end date combination I just haven’t found yet.)
1. I do not believe you can convert any 3rd party booking to a reservation that already exists with Disney.
2. Dining reservations are not actually linked to a resort reservation, so any ADRs you have should be fine whenever you change resort bookings.
3. Park reservations should also be good if you have non-package tickets from Disney or a 3rd party reseller, BUT I am not sure what happens to those if you cancel a package with tickets and then book something new. I would tend to think cancelling a package with tickets and would lose any park reservations tied to it, but that needs more research for me to be sure.
Back to the resort reservation:
Because you say you are within the 30 day mark, am I correct in assuming you have a package booked, as opposed to a room only reservation?
If so I believe you can still cancel BUT you’ll get hit with a $200 cancellation fee.
(Please check your reservation info on all of this, I’m just pulling this from my general well of brain-knowledgeness.)
So, if you were to cancel and try the Hotwire deal – you’d really want to make sure it is worth it to you with that extra $200 on top of the Hotwire rate. Personally, it would have to be a REALLY big savings and resort increase for me to take that hit. ;D
Finally, If I was incorrect in my assumption and you do happen to have a Room Only reservation (and separately purchased tickets) – there really shouldn’t be any issues jumping to a Hotwire room as long as you were more than 5 days out from check-in.
Just to be cautious, I would first secure the Hotwire room and add it to MDE before cancelling the original room, though. I’d want to see that Hotwire room attached to my profile just in case some weird 3rd party hiccup happened. As rare as those kind of hiccups might be, anything can happen in the land of Disney and 3rd party bookings and I’d hate to lose any original deal I booked too.
Thank you so much for this very detailed response, John. I think, at this point, my husband and I agree that we will stay the course as there are potentially too many risks for our trip in mid-September. However, we are excited to begin exploring these options as we have just become empty nesters which gives us a whole lot of flexibility when it comes to travel. We are ALWAYS looking for new Disney strategies.
While we are quite comfortable with Disney World, we have very little experience with Disneyland. We will be traveling to the Anaheim area in November and will spend one day in the park. I believe it will be California Adventure. Currently, we have a Hilton family reservation. Do you know if the three Disneyland resorts offer similar discounts? The Hilton cancellation policy is much more forgiving.
I’ve looked at the Disneyland resorts a few times, but haven’t seen any hidden deals for those – I suspect it may be a less competitive ecosystem for Disney over there!
Next time Yacht deals appear, you could call them The Codfather of Disney Resort Deals. You could say that your research puts Pier Pressure on your Disney tribe to book another trip. Are you the King Yacht Club Deal Finder? Yeah Buoy!
Haha! That was a hull lot of yacht puns.
Ahoy! If some deals only show if you select a longer window, is there a way to choose a shorter timeframe once they appear?
Hard to say definitively, but I haven’t been able to do that.
It often seems to be a matter of finding the magical starting date that makes the “extra” deals appear.
On one of my previous posts I noted that I had to start my search window on one specific Saturday to get any deals past that date to show. Then I could book for weeks after that, but I had to book the whole shebang, couldn’t do a subset of days unless it started on that Saturday.
However – the next day someone was able to to the same thing by using a different starting date in the following week.
Seems to be different each day, or for each app or browser. If we all keep trying things and sharing the info we can help the Disney Hive Mind – so let me know if you discover anything by fiddling around!