Priceline Falls For You
If you’re hoping for a nice end of summer jaunt down to Orlando, Priceline has come back from Disney Dormancy and released hidden deals we think you’ll find tempting.
You can find good deals from about August 9th through the end of September at All-Star Music, Coronado Springs, Art of Animation (Family Suites!), Animal Kingdom Lodge – and after a years-long break, a surprise return of the Grand Floridian!
If you are new to booking Priceline hidden deals, we suggest you head back to our last post Priceline’s Spring Fling for some tips to help you get started.
Sorting for Fun and Profit
You may remember that in our last post on this topic we suggested that sorting your Priceline search by “Guest Rating & Number of Reviews” is a simple way to have them do most of the hidden deal identification work for you. This will be even more helpful this round because their site has once again gone glitchy and stopped displaying guest ratings and review counts for all Disney resorts – except for Art of Animation. But, with that sort tip, you should see each hidden deal listed directly below a regular listing for the same resort.
The examples below show pairs of regular listings along with their hidden deals when using the Guest Rating sort. You can see with the first Art of Animation image that it is easy to compare the guest and review counts just to be extra sure the hidden deal is for the expected resort.
When looking at the following Priceline result pairs without the ratings or reviews, in most cases you can still see an extra data point within them to match them up: the crossed out price will often be the same value on each. This may not happen if the hidden deal is for, say, a standard room but the regular listing is for a Preferred. That sometimes happens when room types begin to sell out on the regular listings as they can be different room blocks for sale. But, even so – Priceline is handing you a large clue to the hidden deal resorts by the sort order alone.
Complete Price Comparisons
Before we get to the deals calendars, here are some comparison tables showing the kind of savings you might be able to take advantage of. Disney’s Stay Longer & Save and Annual Pass discounts are still active, so we’ve looked up some random deals to see how these hidden deals fare – and they fare well!
For example, in the All-Star Music example below, you can see that the hidden deal for that date saves more than $47 per night compared to the Stay Longer discount and $29 vs the AP discount. (Those amounts include all taxes and fees as shown.) For Animal Kingdom Lodge and Grand Floridan, the savings can be more dramatic – more than $200/night. That’ll buy you a few more Mickey bars, for sure.
Calendar ‘O Deals
Time for the reveal – here are all the hidden deals we found when searching for single nights in August and September. Remember, you may see different deals appear depending various factors including the number of days you search for, starting and ending dates, in the Priceline app vs a desktop browser, and if you are facing the direction of Cinderella Castle as you hit the search button.
For example, when I searched almost one full week in August where the individual days were $96, I was presented with All-Star Music for $78/night for the whole trip. So, play around with those dates if you can be flexible.
Also, don’t forget that Retailmenot will often have discount codes for hidden deals in the 7% or 10% range. (They tend to have a maximum savings of $50 these days.)
If you’ve booked any of these deals and want to tell the world, let us know in the comments!