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Why Should you buy Disney Gift Cards?

There are lots of reasons to purchase Disney gift cards before a trip to the parks. Maybe you’re shopping throughout the year and picking up a gift card at the grocery store here and there, to help spread out the expense of the trip. Some people find it helpful to budget by purchasing a specific amount of gift cards, to keep park spending from getting out of control. Families often ask for Disney gift cards for kids’ birthdays or Christmas, so their children have extra spending money for the parks. And still others like to search for discounted Disney gift cards, then use those to pay for vacation expenses.

Whatever the case my be, we’re covering everything you need to know about Disney gift cards in this post. Here’s what you’ll learn:

Who Sells Discounted Disney Gift cards?
Our Favorite Credit Card for Buying Disney Gift Cards.
Disney Resorts and Disney Gift Cards
Erasing Charges off Your Room With a Credit Card Trick
Reloading Disney Gift Cards
Consolidating Disney Gift Cards
DisneyGiftCards.com
Disney Parks & Disney Gift Cards

Who Sells Discounted Disney Gift cards?

Target. If you have a red card at Target.com, you can buy $500 disney gift cards for $475.

Sam’s Club. You can typically get a $500 gift card for $485. Not a huge savings, but sometimes every penny helps. They often have deeper discounts around Christmas; recently it was $475 for a $500 card, and on their Black Friday sale e gift cards were 50.00 off a 500.00.

Chase Discounts & American Airlines Shopping Portal. From time to time, various Chase cards will offer 10% back at ShopDisney.com, up to $50 per credit card. This often lines up with an American Airlines shopping portal offer to earn miles at ShopDisney.com. In this case, you could navigate from the AAdvantage shopping portal to ShopDisney, and by using each Chase credit card offering 10% back to purchase a $50 gift card, you save 10% & earn American Airlines miles in the process!

Our Favorite Credit Card for Buying Disney Gift Cards

Open a Chase Ink Business Cash Credit Card and earn $750 when you spend $6000 on the card in three months–for not annual fee! If you have a premium Chase card like the Sapphire Preferred or Reserve, or the Ink Business Preferred, then you can convert that $750 into 75,000 Ultimate Rewards. The best feature of this card is that you can earn 5% back or 5x Ultimate Rewards shopping at office supply stores, which often sell Disney gift cards. So head to your nearest Staples or Office Depot and stock up on your Disney gift cards!

Are Gift Cards Accepted at Disney Resorts?

You can use Disney gift cards to pay when you purchase Disney packages including Resort and/or admission through Disney.

If you’re staying on property at a Disney World or Disneyland Resort, there’s also a way to pay for park purchases with gift cards: link your MagicBand to your room and use it to charge park purchases back to your room. Then head to the front desk each night when you return to your resort, and pay off your purchases with a gift card. Make sure to stop and do this every night of your stay; if you don’t, the resort will periodically charge accumulated MagicBand purchases to the credit card on file!

A Credit Card That Lets you Erase MagicBand Charges

What if I told you there was a way to ERASE the purchases charged back to your room on your MagicBand? Open a Capital One Venture Rewards card and when you spend $4000 on the card in three months, you’ll earn $750 worth of Capital One miles (for a $95 annual fee). Tie the card to your Disney resort, charge MagicBand purchases back to your room, and when you get home after your trip, use the purchase eraser to remove $750 off your bill!

Are Disney Gift cards Accepted in Disney Parks?

You can use Disney gift cards almost everywhere inside Disney parks. Use gift cards for quick service meals, snacks, sit-down meals and souvenirs. You can also use gift cards to pay at Droid Depot, Savi’s, and Bibbity Bobbity Boutique. Not every restaurants and shop in Disney Springs and Downtown Disney accepts them, but many do!

The only thing you can’t purchase with gift cards are the balloons!

Are Disney Gift cards Reloadable? Where?

Visit Disneygiftcard.com to reload your Disney gift cards. This is especially convenient if you’re allowing children in your traveling party to roam around with gift cards in the parks. You won’t want to load up the card for the whole trip because they could potentially lose their gift card–and if this happens, by the way, quickly head back to Disneygiftcards.com and move all the money off their card onto another!

Can I Consolidate Them?

If you’ve purchased or been gifted multiple Disney gift cards, one of the easiest things to do is combine them all into one gift card on Disneygiftcard.com. You can name your cards differently (for instance, name one for each person in your traveling party if you’re headed for the parks), or some people like to budget for each day by naming the cards by the day of the week (Monday card, Tuesday card, Magic Kingdom card, etc.). You can consolidate up to $1000 on a single gift card.

A Digital way to use Disney Gift Cards in the Parks

Our favorite way to use Disney gift cards in the parks is by loading them into our digital wallets. That way, you can simply pull up the gift card in your phone’s wallet and have the merchant scan the barcode when you check out. You can either manually enter gift cards into your digital wallet, or scan them in if you have physical gift cards. No cards to carry around, keep track of or lose!

Technically, you can’t add a physical gift card to a digital wallet, but here is a possible work around:
1. purchase an egift card on ShopDisney.com & send it to yourself. When you receive the email, choose the option at the bottom to “add to digital wallet.”
2. Visit Disneygiftcard.com and add both your egift card and the physical gift card information to your account there.
3. Transfer the funds from the physical gift card to the egift card
*note: the dollar amount shown on the digital gift card image in your digital wallet will always indicate the initial amount of the gift card, and doesn’t change as you add or subtract funds from the card.

Limitations to Using Disney Gift Cards

Disney gift cards do not work at Disney parks outside the U.S., on their websites or in their parks.

It’s tricky to use gift cards for anything having to do with My Disney Experience or the Disneyland app, because you can’t store gift cards in the apps. You have to enter the gift card number every time you purchase an item, which is a pain. That means if you’re mobile ordering food or simply trying to purchase Genie Plus or a Lightning Lane, you’ll have to have your gift card handy and manually enter the number.

For more on using Disney gift cards to purchase Disney admission, check out this episode of The Disney Points Podcast:

Takeaways

Disney gift cards are a convenient way to budget for or save money on your next Disney vacation. Remember to register and store then on Disneygiftcard.com for your safety and protection, and you’ll always have a way to move balances around when you need to.

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