Best Disney Deals

By Mark Hoerrner

Walt Disney once said, "I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing—that it all started by a mouse." It’s fitting, then, that the web site for the best deals on travel to Disney is called Mousesavers.com.

Almost any deal can be found on Mousesavers.com if one looks hard enough. Currently, the site has information on how visitors from the United Kingdom can get a free food package for their entire stay, how to save 80 percent and get free shipping on goods from Disney.com and how to get up to $1,000 off a vacation that begins between Oct. 1 and Dec. 23.

That’s just for starters.

Mary Waring, the "ears" behind the site, constantly works to negotiate special deals on travel, merchandise and dining with Disney. She’s tosses out exclusive deals which no other travel site is able to offer. She stresses, however, that she doesn’t operate a travel web site and that she’s not a travel agent with the ability to book vacations. She’s simply a discount bloodhound with a penchant for the Mouse.

Mousesavers.com, however, began as a hobby.

In late 2000, Waring decided to open her own business. In February 2001, she added a confidential, unpublicized link to her business page that featured some deals at Disney. Since she and her husband had been married there, she wanted to return but found the trip costly. She used every tactic she knew how to cut costs and posted the results on the page that would become Mousesavers. Six weeks later, she had 23,000 hits. The website now receives 800,000 unique visitors and has an email newsletter that serves 136,000 subscribers.

She added exclusive deals on Disney toys, books and CDs just a few months later. By October of that year, MouseSavers started offering deals at other Disney vacation destinations such as Disneyland Resort Paris, Disney's Vero Beach and Disney's Hilton Head resorts. By the end of the year, Waring added bargains on Disney software, magazines, music and videos, and featuring exclusive rates at Disney World-area hotels.

Since that time, MouseSavers has added information about savings at Disney’s Cruise and on Disney's live shows. For those visitors to Disney that want to sample the rest of Orlando, the site has sections devoted to deals at Universal Orlando and other major theme parks.

Perhaps the best perk of the site is that visitors get all the information they can handle for free. Waring doesn’t charge for her deals and Mousesavers is not rife with ads the way many travel and discount sites are.

Waring operates the site with the aid of her husband, Michael, who is a retired engineer and by many accounts, a pretty good world explorer. She also employs a small staff which keeps the site full of new and interesting ideas for saving money on rooms, merchandise, food and special events at Disney.