How do you do it?

[Wrigley]

We are trying to decide the best way to do all of our booking for our upcoming trip next Oct. Do you book your room/park tickets before airfare, or do you do get airfare first. Since our trip isn't for quite awhile and the Disney packages come out first we aren't sure if we should wait until the airline dates/times come out to make our reservations. If we book our package and find out that our airline doesn't fly to Orlando on the dates we had made reservations for and we need to change the date of our trip-is there a penalty for changing the dates? Sorry if this sounds confusing!:blush:

[scootch713]

I book my room for whatever dates I want...(usually do AAA room only package). I make all my ADR's at 180 day out... and you can pretty much tell flight schedules by looking at previous months. THis year I wanted the airtran or usairways flights down... so that is booked(for Nov) and Southwest isn't into Nov yet, but they have a late flight out every friday night around 8pm every month leading up to Southwest. All the airlines that go to MCO usually have more than one flight per day.... if your month isn't out, then just compare the months preceeding it. I usually get my tickets(thru broker) once I have figured everything else out. I will typically buy one a month to spread the cost.....

[gmgdisneymom]

We always book the rooms first then the airfare. We have the DVC and it is better to be safe than sorry. Airfare usually cannot be changed without big costs

[comicguy]

We always book the WDW portion first then watch for decent airfare to match our dates.

[Beast_fanatic]

If we book our package and find out that our airline doesn't fly to Orlando on the dates we had made reservations for and we need to change the date of our trip-is there a penalty for changing the dates?

For room only reservations, there is no penalty to make changes until you are within 5 days of your arrival. For packages, there is no penalty to make changes until you are within 45 day of your arrival (which corresponds with when the package has to be paid off).

[Marceline]

I used to book package first and then airfare but this year I got the feeling that fares would be higher closer to our date not lower (with fuel prices going up up up and all)....so I booked air a.s.a.p.

I will only fly Midwest however, since I can get a direct flight and they have great service IMHO, so competing airfares doesn't mean much to me.

[mrsgaribaldi]

We get the room first. The flight we get maybe 2 months to 1 month before the trip. We've never had a problem yet. We always fly Jet Blue and 99% of the time out of Newark NJ. Once or twice we flew out of NY but Newark is much closer to us. :mickey:

[Momof2boys]

We book airfare first - usually flights within a few days can be significantly higher or lower. Once we have our airfare, we work on hotel.

[teambricker04]

We are the crazy ones that fly standby (generally) or buy our airfare at the last possible minute. On our trip back, we purchased our tickets at the airport on our way home! I don't recommend that, but sometimes it can work in your favor.

Our next trip is in January and we haven't booked our hotel yet, but we have our airfare. We used frequent flyer miles for two of them so we figured we should just book them. If we have to stay off site, that is okay, but we prefer to stay at WDW.

So I guess that I can say we are fly by the seat of our pants travelers!!!

OH, and I rarely make an ADR and we have ALWAYS gotten into where ever we want to eat. Luck? Maybe...