Walt Disney World has released resort room-only discounts for the rest of 2025, covering travel dates this Halloween and Christmas seasons for the general public, that includes a ‘free’ $50/$75/$100 dining gift card if you convert to a package with tickets. This shares the special offers savings, a comparison to last year, commentary about availability and the slowdown, sample pricing, analysis & other info.
This isn’t the only discount that’s currently available for October through December 2025. If you’re eligible for them, there are also better discounts for residents of Florida and Georgia (a new addition!), as well as up to 30% off for Annual Passholders through Christmas week. Of course, many of you don’t reside in Georgia/Florida or are not an Annual Passholder, so this is your best bet.
Beyond that, there’s still the Stay Longer & Save Up to 30% running through October 11, 2025. Not to mention spectacular summer savings. For everything else, see All Current Walt Disney World Discounts in 2025. There are promos available for pretty much all dates between now and Christmas, so that’s worth checking out if you’re debating a trip anytime this year, except the week leading up to New Year’s Eve…
Here are the official details from Walt Disney World:
Plus, when you upgrade to a Walt Disney Travel Company room-and-ticket package that includes non-discounted 4-day or longer standard theme park tickets, you’ll get a Walt Disney World Resort Dining & Shopping Promo Card. The card value varies based on Resort Category:
- $100 promo card for packages at Disney Deluxe and Deluxe Villa Resort hotels
- $75 promo card for packages at Disney Moderate Resort hotels
- $50 promo card for packages at Disney Value Resort hotels
Here’s the resort by resort savings chart provided by Walt Disney World:
Offer excludes the following room types: Campsites, 3-Bedroom Grand Villas, Cabins at Copper Creek Villas & Cabins at Disney’s Wilderness Lodge, and Bungalows and 2-Bedroom Penthouse Polynesian Tower Rooms at Disney’s Polynesian Villas & Bungalows.
Additional per-adult charges may apply if more than 2 adults per room at Value, Moderate and Deluxe Resorts and Studios at Deluxe Villa Resorts. Maximum length of stay under this deal is 14 nights. Cannot be combined with any other discount or promotion.
The digital Walt Disney World Resort Dining & Shopping Promo Card is redeemable at select participating food, beverage and merchandise locations at the Walt Disney World Resort. Card expires and is not valid for use after January 8, 2026.
Reservations may be made online, by phone, or via your Authorized Disney Vacation Planner.
If you want to help determining which discounts are available for your travel dates and which resort will work best for your family, we highly recommend requesting a quote from Be Our Guest Vacations, a no-fee Authorized Disney Vacation Planner.
The agents there will do the math for you, booking your vacation with the best-available special offer, and monitoring your package for future discounts that can be applied retroactively. Beyond that, they help take the stress out of planning and will assist with itineraries, dining reservations, and much more.
Here’s a sampling of what we found for available rates for this discount:
This search is for the night of December 2, 2025. On the rack rate chart spectrum, this is the second-least expensive time to visit Walt Disney World in October to December 2025.
Also, it’s our favorite week of the year at Walt Disney World and when we’ll actually be visiting, so I was curious about prices. As it turns out, the options are pretty good at the lower end of the spectrum–much more hit or miss as we move up.
The least expensive rack rates dates will be most Mondays to Thursdays from October into early December 2025. Base prices are slightly higher (but still relatively reasonable) until mid-December. Depending upon your resort and room category, the discount discrepancy could end up making the difference more or less a wash. (I found post-discount rates to be best during non-holiday weeks in October and November before Thanksgiving, but YMMV.)
Friday through Sunday nights are all going to be more expensive, and less consistent. In general, Friday and Saturday will be the most expensive days of the week, with Sunday through Thursday costing less–but still more than Monday through Wednesday nights. Holiday weeks–and dates closer to Christmas–are also more expensive. Basically, room rates are higher any time when kids are out of school.
For more on timing your trip to coincide with the lowest prices, see When’s Cheapest to Visit Walt Disney World in 2025? That covers price increases and other variables that impact the cost of a vacation beyond just room rates.
For reference, last year’s discount for Halloween and Christmas was up to 30% off resorts for stays most nights from November 24 to December 25, and up to 20% off stays most Sunday to Thursday nights from October 6 to November 21. There were a bit more quirks to the special offer, but that was the basic contours of the deal.
Discounts were as low as 10% off some Deluxe Villas (Wilderness Lodge and Animal Kingdom) as well as the Polynesian and all Value Resorts. At the other end of the spectrum, most Deluxe Resorts were 30% off during December. Each of the last two years offered historically great special offers for the holiday season, far superior to what we saw in 2021-2022 (which was nothing at all for many of these dates.)
Last year, there were also additional discounts for Florida residents and Annual Passholders: Save up to 40% on rooms for stays most nights from December 9 to December 25; Save up to 35% on rooms for stays most Sunday to Thursday nights from October 6 to November 21, and most nights from November 24 to December 25. (As always, APs got superior savings, with the discounts being 5-10% less for Floridians, depending upon dates.)
Last year’s release of this discount was part of a trend of discounts that have been on par with or better than their counterparts in 2019. Since then, we’ve pointed out several occasions when Walt Disney World is “pulling from the 2019 deal playbook.” We should note that the 2019 version of this deal maxed out at 20% off, so the Late 2025 is more or less part of that playbook. (Plus the dining card, but also plus a bunch of other add-on fees we didn’t have back then.)
The big difference for the 2025 round of this discount (vs. 2023 or 2024) is that the Moderate Resort tier doesn’t drop at all–it’s 20% off at the high end, just like the top tier of Deluxe Villa and Deluxe Resorts. From there, the Value Resorts drop 5%. The end result is that the official chart is 10% worse for Deluxe Resorts, but only 5% worse for Moderates and Values, mostly.
The actual dollar cost of rooms is all over the place, owing to the fact that this is the stretch of year with most variance in pricing, going from some of the lowest rate charts of the year to the absolute highest in the span of 3 weeks. So while you can find Value Resorts at $148/night, Moderates at $272, and Deluxes at under $500, you can also find dates when low prices are around double those numbers. And across the board, prices are higher than last year’s lows. In some cases, the differences are fairly negligible–including for our favorite week of the year. In other cases, they’re much more extreme.
If you need help choosing where to stay, be sure to check out our new Rankings of ALL Resort Hotels at Walt Disney World from Worst to Best. Several of the resorts mentioned above–and with the biggest savings–are in the top 10!
I’m not sure that analysis of the tiered $50/$75/$100 shopping & dining gift card is really even necessary. This gift card is per reservation, as opposed to being per person or even per night. It’s something to be filed under “better than nothing.”
As we noted previously, a 4-night stay works out to be $25 per night (via the gift card deal), whereas 10% off Disney’s BoardWalk Inn (about middle of the road when it comes to Deluxe Resort rack rates) is $77.60 for the least-expensive holiday season travel dates. In other words, you’d be better off forgoing the discount in favor of 30% off Deluxe Resorts (like last year) as opposed to 20% off plus that gift card.
This gift card strikes me as mostly a marketing move. It’s a great headline addition–who doesn’t love free money back in their pockets to spend during the trip?! But once you start doing the math, you should be able to see that the prorated cost per person, per night is not much. Again, better than nothing–but not better than 2023-2024 versions of this deal.
The obvious question that’s going to be asked is why these deals are worse than last year? Perhaps more immediately, why would Walt Disney World offer lesser deals than last year given the scorching summer sales? One straightforward explanation is what we discussed at length in Why Summer is the New Low Crowds Season at Walt Disney World.
The whole point of that post is that attendance and occupancy are not down across the board; that this phenomenon is confined to the summer. This is why we cautioned readers against wanting to confirm their own narratives about Disney pricing out the middle class, higher prices, fewer perks, or Disney’s declining reputation.
The only explanations that work for the crowds slump were ones unique to summer. Because the rest of the year, especially winter, is getting comparatively busier due to guests shifting their trips away from what used to be the summer tourist season. That alone could explain the increase in discounts for May through September, but a decrease in deals for October through December. (Expect a similar story in January through March; the discount decrease then might be even more pronounced as winter crowds increase.)
Beyond that, CFO Hugh Johnston expressed enthusiasm for the Parks & Resorts segment during the company’s most recent earnings call, indicating that Walt Disney World performed better than expected for the fiscal quarter. As discussed in Walt Disney World Bookings Are Up for Rest of 2025, resort reservations for the remainder of this year are outpacing last year.
Johnston revealed that bookings for Walt Disney World are trending up 4% in the third quarter and up 7% for the fourth quarter. Not only that, but the first quarter of 2026 (which is actually October through December 2025), Disney previously guided to 6% to 8% growth. Given the numbers that the CFO was seeing (as of May), the actual growth is probably going to be at the higher end of that for the Experiences business for this year.
While those year-over-year increases sound impressive–and are given the surrounding circumstances–keep in mind that last year was down as compared to the prior year. So the baseline was lower, and this is more a reversion to the norm. It’s also possible that these numbers are up so much because of discounting. July is part of the third quarter that’s trending up 4%, and we’re seeing unprecedented deals for this month, in particular.
In other words, it is possible that Walt Disney World is fueling strong results by continuing the aggressive discounts for otherwise lower-occupancy months. That strikes me as highly plausible again for August through September 2025, which is why we’re still of the belief that something on par with the sizzling summer Disney+ subscriber deal could come out of left field. That seems much less likely for October through December, though. There just isn’t the same need for discounting to incentivize visits, as that’s happening organically as summer hollows out.
To Johnston’s point, we’ve already noticed that there’s limited availability for some resort/room/date combos for this discount. That’s fairly common with the October through December promos, as it’s a fan-favorite time to visit. It’s difficult to complain that this discount isn’t that good on the one hand, and then turn around and also complain that availability isn’t that good. The latter complaint is precisely why Disney isn’t offering particularly stellar savings. They don’t need to.
Suffice to say, you should book sooner rather than later and be flexible in your resort and room preferences. Don’t be complacent since special offers, generally, have had better availability in 2025. There are a lot of times when we advise you to not be part of the ‘drop day’ madness, and instead sit back and wait out the chaos. This is not one of those occasions. For the best resort and room availability, we highly recommend booking ASAP.
Again, the final few months of the year are very different from the summer. What we’ve been seeing the last few months with discounts (and hopefully will again in August and September) is highly unlikely to repeat itself around Halloween and Christmas. If you’ve been accustomed to waiting for better deals, you’re playing a dangerous game during the final three months of 2025.
Even during lower attendance dates from October through December, hotel occupancy (which is not indicative of crowds since most guests come from off-site) is high. We often book hotels last minute, and have gotten “stuck” at Coronado Springs or All Star Sports many times from October through December due to a lack of availability elsewhere. (A big part of those resorts being where we stay the most is lack of other options!)
If your travel dates are flexible and you’re wondering which dates are best, check out our Best & Worst Weeks to Visit Walt Disney World in 2025 & 2026. Four of our top 10 weeks of the entire year are covered by this promo, and as we explain in those rankings, another week during the holiday season would’ve probably made the list if we weren’t trying to spread out the dates a bit more.
That should underscore precisely why and how these dates between October and December are popular with longtime fans. These are qualitatively the best times of the year to visit Walt Disney World, and can be from a quantitative (crowds) perspective if you plan wisely. But I’m probably preaching to the choir–you are reading a Walt Disney World fan site, after all.
We’re also guessing that Walt Disney World regulars will be disappointed by this discount, as it’s the first big example of a year-over-year deal downgrade. Perhaps more importantly (since a year is a long time and many of us have short memories), it’s seemingly at odds with the incredibly aggressive summer deals, and many fans were probably hoping for a continuation of those. Then again, who knows, “free” is a powerful marketing buzzword, and perhaps people will mentally grant a lot of weight to that free dining gift card? I’m guessing not.
As usual, you can still do better with Disney Vacation Club Point Rentals–and that assumes you can find DVC availability in the first place. (As explained in the latest update to that, we wouldn’t be worried about going that route via a third party broker.)
If you’re on the fence, definitely do NOT wait for something better. Even though occupancy has been trending downward this year, that likely won’t hold true for the holiday season. As always, plan on being flexible with your hotel choice, room category, and even travel dates for the biggest savings. That’s doubly true here, as there have already been several discounts that have dropped for this date range–including the fan-favorite Free Dining deal (which ended early).
This should be an interesting saga to follow, and it’s almost certain that we haven’t seen the end of Walt Disney World’s efforts to woo back former fans, compete with Universal Orlando, and pull “levers” to incentivize more demand and guest spending. This is just a pause in them until 2026. We will be closely monitoring what’s released and will notify subscribers of our free email newsletter when any Walt Disney World discounts are released or rumored!
Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!
YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you think of these Walt Disney World resort room discounts for October through Christmas 2025? If you booked this, do you think you ended up with a good price or do you feel like you’re overpaying? What was available or unavailable for your dates? Is this deal enough to convince you to book a trip, or can you not justify these prices? Do you agree or disagree with our assessments? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!