How Our Rates Work and Quotes are Created

The way that our systems deals with rates is to assign them to various seasons throughout the year, which tend to consistently follow particular dates, the first of the month and so on. These are referred to as Regular Dates.

In addition to these larger seasons, there are holidays and special dates which move around each year, like Easter, or the Walt Disney World Marathon, whose dates change each year. So the system refers to these as Special Dates and superimposes them over top of the larger fixed seasons. The pricing, and dates of both of these types of Dates are shown on our website.

This information is for general use only, to provide guests with an idea of what the rates are at various times of the year. That is not to suggest that the numbers aren’t accurate; they are, but if you look at Veteran’s Day for example, an amount is shown, but only applies for three days, so a weekly rate really doesn’t make sense. The number shown is calculated by taking the nightly rate for that Special Dates time and multiplying it by seven.

This also means that the actual amounts that a quote is calculated from may be not be consistent with the numbers that appear in the ‘weekly’ schedule. Our rates are actually done by night, and for a number of seasons throughout the year, Friday and Saturday nights have a higher rate than the rest of the week. So it is possible that the amount that you are quoted for a particular set of dates could be higher or lower than the weekly total shown in the chart above, depending upon what weekend nights are included or not.

So to use your dates as an example, they included four nights of Value (Low) Season dates, which were all week nights, not weekend nights, so the actual ‘weekly’ rate (if you simply take the nightly rate that applies and multiply it by seven) would actually be $763, lower than the $783 that you see in the chart on our website.

In addition to those four nights, your seven nights included three nights from the Veteran’s Day weekend, which as you can see from the chart are $149 per night. So your quote was based on three nights at $149 per night, and four nights at $109 per night, which is where the $883 total comes from. You can see details of this in the attached image labelled calculations.

I realize that this is a rather detailed explanation, however I want you to see where the number comes from. We don’t make things up as we go along, but our pricing is extremely sophisticated and complicated to reflect the intricacies of our business in Orlando, and in particular the Disney World area.

We analyze seasons and appropriate rates up to two years in advance and set them, but in actuality a rate is derived from this data for each individual night of the year. We don’t price by the month or the week, it is really by the night, and a lot of different factors go into these calculations.

The chart shown on our website is automatically generated by adding the nightly rates for each week shown to provide a total, which gives guests a good idea of how our rates vary throughout the year. We rarely provided detailed explanations of how rates are calculated, because most guests simply don’t care – they just want to know what the total amount will be. Plus, we want to keep things as simple as we can for them.

You did ask however, so I thought I would take the time to explain in detail the work that goes into setting our rates, and why they might not at first glance equal what you see in the rates chart on our website. If you take all of the information from the chart, and do all of the math, you will come up with the same number, but as you can see, it is a bit of a complex exercise.