Booking Holiday

If you are locked into your dates and want to book a deluxe you might want to consider renting DVC points. Home resorts are bookable 11 months in advance. First 2 weeks in Dec are the cheapest weeks in the year and book right at the 11 month mark. Renting points is a final transaction so you have to be positive that you are going to go when you book.

We went from the 14-26th this year. It wasn’t bad until about the 19th or so. The first few days were great. We said we wanted to do Christmas once at MK. We did. I don’t regret it, but wouldn’t do it again. Ever. Took an hour to get to the park from AKL and then an hour home. We could only tolerate 2 hours in the park. The crowds were nuts. We also don’t feel like we had Christmas. It was a little sad.

There’s a website called TouringPlans that has crowd calendars. They’re very accurate. We have a TP membership ($15/year) and use it to plan our vacations based on the crowd calendars. They also help you pick your fastpasses and will plan your whole day from ride to ride, if you want that much planning. I highly recommend it.

You’re in the right ballpark. You CAN book 499 days out. So about 1 year and 4 months out, meaning December 2020 isn’t possible yet.

Once it is (roughly August of this year) if you know your dates and where you want to stay, there’s no harm in booking that far out. You put down the cost of a night or $200, depending on what you’re booking. It will be rack rate for awhile, but a deal may come out later and you can change your package around based on that. You can either keep checking yourself or you could book it though an authorized Disney travel planner (I recommend this in part because it’s convenient for you and part because I am one, though if you already have a good TA you know and trust, go through them!) who can rebook it for you at the lower rate if/when it comes out and help you at every step of the process and won’t cost you a penny.

The best time to book is at least 6 months out so you can make (or have your TA make) dining reservations at 180 days out. Anytime even sooner is fine once you know what/when you want.

Early December has been a decent time to go in recent years. But I will caution that kind of advice will probably be out the window starting in 2020, since Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge will open at the end of 2019 leading to a few absolutely crazy years at WDW. There’s already no true slow time and that will only become more true a year from now.