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[grovesie]

As we know trips to DLP are not cheap and once there the costs do not get any cheaper. I have looked around the site and I could find one central post that gives other travellers money saving ideas. (sorry if there is a post, but a search only listed multiple threads)

I will start it off...

Our favourite is to take the 3-in-1 coffee sachets and ask for cups of hot water in the park, these are free and for me taste a lot better that the coffee they sell. Our local poundshop sells an eight pack of Nescafé. It's nice to know that in the colder months its not going to cost you am arm and a leg for a warming drink. You could also do the same for tea and hot chocolate.

Please add you ideas here

[Pete's Dragon]

What we used to do was take as much fruit as we could from the buffet restaurants at dinner time and use them for lunch the next day (along with a few extra croissants from breakfast).

Also there a few nice restaurants at the Val D'Europe that are slightly cheaper than at the Village; plus it makes for a nice change of scenery

[mackemlad79]

Take the UHT pots from Morrisons cafe and a cheap kettle for tea for your room.

Use the little concentrated juice bottles for adding to water from fountains

[bad-pink-tink]

On my last visit I was there for 4 days. I bought 4 bottles of soft drinks, one for each day at my local Tesco cost €1.30 each and packed them in my carry on. In the parks the same bottles cost €3.00 each! I also brought other snacks such as crisps and chocolate from home and alcohol from the airport.

I am a regular Starbucks drinker and have a Starbucks card. The Starbucks card is a prepaid card. I loaded it with money before I left home. You can use the cards in Starbucks in Disney Village and you can use any Starbucks rewards you have on the card.

You can also sign up to Earl of Sandwich mailing list and get vouchers / coupons. I did this one year for Disneyland California, not sure if they are valid for Disneyland Paris.

Im sure Rainforest and Planet Hollywood would do the same, I havent tried for Disneyland Paris.  Usually its one voucher per email signup, so if there are 4 people in your party you would need to sign up with 4 different email addresses.

[rocker]

Yep, all about money saving for me too. 

Firstly accommodation, Trivago has worked well for me, but also, as I always go my Eurostar, once you've booked you get a link to Expedia that offers an extra discount, which is actually pretty good & I've used it a couple of times.  I've stayed at The Cheyenne & Santa Fe, but all other times I've been in Val d'Europe.  Now that breakfast is no longer included at Disney accommodation, that makes Val d'Europe hotels (with Breakfast) a more appealing option.  I try to book with a cancellable rate so that if I find a better deal at a later point I can switch my booking.  I'm a Dream passholder & once managed 4 nights at the Cheyenne for under £200 total!

My main meal of the day is breakfast, where I fill up & my daughter is instructed to do the same.  Will grab some fruit & croissants & smuggle them out.  I'll also bring cerial bars, dried fruit, fruit, cheese strings, Frubes, BabyBels & some cans of coke from home.  Yes you can get all this stuff at Auchanne val d'Europe, but I'd rather not waste an hour doing that.  Also when we stay at Hi-Park hotel, which has a kitchenette, I'll bring microwave popcorn, bought from Lidl for about £2 for 3 sachets.  Microwave it in the morning & take it along.  Pay 5 Euro for a bag in the park...no way, more like 50p & it is a bit of a treat, albeit an extremely cheap one.  I take those new super concentrated squash bottles plus bottles of water to fill up in the park.  Oh & when I stayed at the Santa Fe, I also popped out the to garage just outside for snacks & sandwiches too.

Big breakfast plus snacks later on will get me through to dinner time.  If I'm in the park, then I'll try & ask at the Lucky Nugget Saloon what time the band is on.  If I'm going to pay DLP prices to eat, then getting some entertainment thrown in makes it seem more worthwhile. Cowboy Cookout also has a band sometimes too...and I really like thier curly fries.  Portions at Cowboy Cookout are pretty big, & if I'm not particularly hungry, I'll just get a kids meal, which is pretty big for a kids meal but much cheaper & comes with an ice lolly 

If I've left the park, then The food Court at Val d'Europe works well.  Loads of options there.  They have a Subway (10Euro for 12" sub meal) plus there's a pizza place that do take out for around 12Euro for nice pizza, to munch on back in the hotel room.

[seraphelle]

Love this thread 

Fill up at breakfast is a must.

We generally stay off-site now because we can stay for so many extra days for the same price as staying just a few days on-site. We go on the first day to Auchan and fill the hotel room kitchen, and maybe pop back again to top up if we're there for a while.

Take drinks bottles for kids and make sure they have their own little rucksacks or handbags they can manage to carry a lunch in. I usually make mine a little packed lunch of stuff they can eat on the go (little rolls as sandwiches, tube yogurts, fruit flakes, veggie sticks, cereal bars, crackers, etc), plus a bottle or two of made-up squash for them to drink through the day.  Each of you carrying a couple of drinks and a few snacks is easier than Mom or Dad lugging a good few litres of drink around all day, or spending a fortune on stuff in the park.

The same goes for the popcorn someone above mentioned - we buy popcorn to pop ourselves if we have the facility in our room, or we buy the large bags of crisps and some sandwich bags and just make them 'packets of crisps' to take into the park.

We used to go for a meal every evening, and discovered that Rainforest Cafe give a discount voucher for you to use during the following 2 days at King Ludwigs. And when you eat at King Ludwigs, you get a similar discount voucher if you eat at Rainforest Cafe during the following 2 days.

There are places that deliver pizza / take away for excellent value to the various hotels in Val d'Europe - so worth considering if you fancy sacking out with some junk food in your hotel room one evening.

Most hotel TV's have USB slots, so before you go it's worth loading some video files onto a USB to watch whilst there, or even take a HDMI lead and an adaptor to your phone if you're particularly savvy with that stuff. If you have a chromecast - that's an option too if your hotel has free WiFi?

During cold months - the flask-style cups are a must. We have a couple of Starbucks ones that we take with us with a hot drink in, and then we have little sachets of coffee / sugar / milk powder that we can use to make further hot drinks throughout the day (a few places are cool with you asking for hot water).

[Marie2003]

Obviously wouldn't work for everyone, but going by coach is an excellent money saver! It's the only way myself and my family have ever been able to afford to go.
Our local coach company does 3 night trips, staying in the Cheyenne or Santa Fe, with return coach travel and a two-day park hopper ticket, which this year cost £214pp for two adults in mid August! We also had a hotel breakfast included every morning of our stay, which was both unexpected (after reading here about the changes to breakfast) and highly welcome. The year before we were even able to upgrade to the Sequoia Lodge for £39 (per room, not per person!), which was an absolute dream come true and something I never thought we'd be able to afford. 
The journey there and back does take a very (very) long time: we left our local pickup point in Devon at 4:15am and arrived at the Cheyenne at about 8:30pm French time, with stops at various service stations along the way (out return times were 8am departure and about 10pm arrival if memory serves). I definitely wouldn't recommend it with very young children (I was six the first time we went and was fine with it), but if you don't mind sitting on a coach for that long, it's definitely worth it!! 

[Crush]

I agree with the poster above - coach trips usually work out very cheap and are quite an easy way of doing it if you don't mind the travel. I am on the return coach from DLP as we speak! We did have a panic a few weeks ago when the holiday we were originally booked on got cancelled, but we managed to find another.

The travel days were long but in our case, not quite as long as the previous poster. We left our pick up point 10.30am on Sunday and arrived at the Cheyenne around 8pm, and today we left at 11am and are due back at our pick up point at 6pm (home is another hour by car) so all in all, not too bad.

We also had breakfast included which was a great way to fill up. We then had snacks that we'd brought from home (biscuits, brunch bars, flapjacks etc) at lunchtime and a cheap meal in the evening. Can't go far wrong with McDonalds or the meal deals in New York Style Sandwiches.

We nipped out to the train station to get bottles of drink and these were half the price of in the parks and hotels.

Daft question alert - I was always under the impression not to drink tap water in France! Have I been horribly mislead for all these years?! Lol! I have always avoided the water fountains for this reason.

[grovesie]

Ludwigs happy hour . all local beer and house wine half price..... Happy Times

[loladelorean]

Ludwigs happy hour . all local beer and house wine half price..... Happy Times

Came here to say this too  I'm glad I'm not the only one prioritising cheap drinks! We never miss happy hour at Ludwigs!

I also recommend (even if you're not staying there) walking to the Cheyenne bar - good theme as a cowboy saloon, and it has cheaper cocktails and other drinks than the hotels round the lake.

Sometimes restaurants or shops will give you a receipt that has a voucher on it for free hot drinks around 3pm the same day, check receipts for these!

[claire2281]

Daft question alert - I was always under the impression not to drink tap water in France! Have I been horribly mislead for all these years?! Lol! I have always avoided the water fountains for this reason.

Tap water in France is absolutely fine to drink.You might find it tastes odd depending on how different the mineral content is to where you are.

[Sass]

We haven't been for a few years but last time we went we travelled by eurostar and took a suitcase with just food in it! We stayed in Golden Forest rooms so made the most of breakfast, took snacks from home into the park to keep us going until a late lunch which we had in McDonald's or the Earl of Sandwich on the way back to the hotel for a sleep at about 1-2 as our kids were still small then. We then had the afternoon snacks and stocked up on bottles of water from the lounge (the fridge in GF rooms is great for keeping the drinks from the lounge cold) before going back to the village for dinner and then into the parks again for the evening. We have just booked for next year and plan to do the same sort of thing.