Kaleb,
Hello, fellow Hoosier!
Yes, you absolutely can use Disney gift cards to pay for purchases and dining at Walt Disney World. Venues in the parks and Disney hotels will accept Disney Gift Cards for payment, and you can even have the value of a gift card pre-applied to your Disney Resort Hotel account, if you are staying at one of their properties. Visiting
Steakhouse 71 at
Disney's Contemporary Resort seems like an ideal way to spend some of that gift money!
While you can just break out the card at these venues to pay for things, I mentioned the option of applying the value to a Disney Resort Hotel account. Why would you want to do that? Well, while Disney still requires you have a traditional credit card down on your hotel room, you can have the value of the card put on your account so that any charges you make back to your room come off that gift card credit before they would charge your credit card account. This means you can just use your MagicBand, instead of having to carry gift cards around with you all day long.
What I like to do, and what I think will help you with your money management planning, is this.
Sometime after checking in to your hotel, visit the front desk and have the gift card credits applied to your Disney resort hotel account. When you charge food or other purchases to your MagicBand the purchase will go on your resort room account. With that balance of your gift cards already put onto your hotel account, they deduct those costs from your credit balance rather than bill the credit card you have on file for your room.
Do be sure when you charge food or merchandise that you select the option to apply the charge to your room bill. Sometimes the
My Disney Experience App will initially opt to a different payment type, like Apple Pay. You just have to select your room as your primary charge, or toggle to it when paying.
BONUS TIP #1One very important note to be sure of. If you have several cards, I do not recommend that you put all their balances over to your resort hotel account at the start of the trip. Why? Well, Disney cannot refund any of those transfers to you, so if you put $100 of a gift card onto your resort balance and only spend $90 of that, you lose the $10 balance.
When I go, I put down only that amount that I know I will spend, and every couple of days I will return to the front desk and use more cards as I get closer to spending that credit balance. Oh, and remember that you can always check your balance from your My Disney Experience App!
BONUS TIP #2Gift cards are a great item for kids to list on birthday or Christmas wish lists. My teenagers have a hard time finding gift idea suggestions for relatives that are reasonably priced, so this gives them a lot of flexibility. It also gives the gift giver a lot of room to give what they deem appropriate.
Please feel free to
write me back if you have any follow-up questions.
Have a Magical Vacation!Doug