There’s pretty much no denying it — Disney vacations are expensive!

You’ll easily shell out a couple thousand dollars, sometimes regardless of the time of year or the fanciness of your accommodations. But could you save money by going on a Disney cruise instead of visiting Disney World? Let’s do the math together!

Before we dive into the pricing, let’s set the parameters so that we can make this as fair as possible! I’ll be pricing vacations each time for a family of four with two children ages four and six. I’ll also only be giving prices for the cheapest room options I can find for each date. The mid-range and higher tiers for Disney World hotels and Disney Cruise Line staterooms aren’t as directly comparable, so it’s easier to match up at the bottom level and just vary on dates.

I’ll also only be choosing cruises that sail from Port Canaveral, Florida. This is the port closest to Disney World, and therefore travel to and from these destinations would be similar. Now it’s time to crunch the numbers!

Disney Cruise Pricing

3 Nights in September

Starting out our comparison with the cheapest option, let’s look at a 3-night cruise in September 2027. Pricing a trip for a family of four with two children in an inside stateroom, you could sail from September 10th-13th on the Disney Dream starting at $3,285.

This particular cruise is a Halloween on the High Seas sailing. There’s similar pricing for a few other 3-night sailings in September 2027 as well. The price will increase depending on which room you select, as those with more advantageous locations have higher rates. 

4 Nights in November

For a bit longer of a sailing, the same family of four could do a 4-night Very Merrytime sailing from November 8th-12th, 2027. This cruise is also on the Disney Dream, and the inside staterooms would start you at $4,457 for the whole family.

This itinerary includes stops at both of Disney’s island destinations, so you’d really get maximum Disney magic with this particular cruise. It could be a wonderful time!

5 Nights in December

The last cruise I’ll price is for five nights in December, running from December 3rd-8th, 2027. This is also a Very Merrytime cruise, but this one sets sail on the newer Disney Destiny cruise ship. With stops at Castaway Cay and Cozumel, inside staterooms for this sailing start at $5,861 for a family of four.

This itinerary gives you nearly a full week of Disney Cruise Line excitement to enjoy, and it falls outside the peak travel season of the month, so hopefully it’ll be less busy than other weeks.

Disney World Pricing

3 Nights in September

Alright, now this is where things start to get tricky. We have quite a few costs to add up for Disney World in order to match the same value of the cruise. We’ll need hotel rooms and tickets, as well as food costs, considering breakfast, lunch, and dinner are included on a Disney cruise each day.

The cheapest room option for September 10th-13th, 2027 is a Standard Room at All-Star Sports Resort. To compare this most directly with a cruise, I’m choosing a 3-day ticket option. When you board a cruise ship, the activities start right away, so we’ll do the same here — tickets for the arrival day, as well as the two full days staying at the hotel, but nothing for the checkout day (because you don’t really get to do anything on the last day of your cruise except get off the ship). The total with room and tickets is $2,519.44.

However, we also have to add in the cost of food. Onboard the cruise ship, you can have breakfast and lunch (typically quick-service-style) and a sit-down dinner. You also have pretty much unlimited opportunities for snacks, so we’ll include one per family member. Starting with breakfast, a food item for each family member plus a beverage for each family member (because sodas are included on a Disney cruise) would be about $45. Applying the same rules for a quick-service lunch, you get a cost of about $60. 

Now, the real kicker here is dinner. The cruise ship’s rotational dining restaurants offer meals with prix fixe menus, and each person can choose a beverage, appetizer, entree, and dessert. Since these meals often include some kind of in-restaurant entertainment and servers are generally flexible on allowing guests to order and try multiple items, the most similar cost we could compare this to in Disney World would be an all-you-care-to-eat character meal. A dinner like that would run you somewhere around $225 (and that’s not including tax or tip). Add in four $7 snacks per day (that’s about average), and your total Disney World food cost for three full days would be $1,074.

All in all, this means that if you lived it up in Disney World just like a Disney cruise, your 3-day Disney World trip would cost $3,593.44 plus tax and tip on the food. Shockingly, that is $300 more than the Disney cruise for the same time period!

4 Nights in November

Let’s move on to the November cruise and see if Disney World can redeem itself. Once again, we’ll do a Standard Room at All-Star Sports Resort, this time for November 8th-12th, 2027. I’ll bump the days on the tickets up to four, and that gives us a room-and-ticket package total of $3,658.26. 

Using that same daily food estimate of $358, the total food budget for the 4-night Disney World trip would be $1,432. This means that the trip total would be $5,090.26, which is more than $600 more expensive than the cruise on the Disney Dream! 

5 Nights in December

Okay, so Disney World is 0-2 right now, but what about the 5-night trip? Staying at All-Star Sports from December 3rd-8th, 2027 with 5-day tickets costs a total of $4,347.52. The room price gets a good bit higher in early December than it was in November!

The food budget for five days would be a whopping $,1790, which means that your total cost for this trip — to make it as similar to a Disney cruise as possible — would be $6,137.52. Once again, Disney Cruise Line wins, this time by about $300! And one big thing to note here is that you’d be sailing on one of the newest cruise ships for that price.

Factors to Consider

However, things aren’t quite as simple as crunching the numbers and comparing directly. There are some factors to consider that could change your budget in either trip case. For starters, your travel expenses make a big difference. Driving vs. flying can modify the cost, and if you are flying, you need to budget for airport transportation to and from your destination.

A lot of the time, folks going on Disney cruises will book a hotel for the night before their cruise so that they can prepare to board the ship first thing in the morning, and a flight or travel delay won’t ruin their plans. So, if that’s your go-to strategy, you’ll need to add in that cost. And it goes without saying that if you’re sailing out of a different port altogether, your travel costs could vary wildly.

The last thing to remember is that you may need to crunch these numbers again if you’d like to go for a fancier stateroom or a nicer Disney World Resort. Going bougie ups the price by a significant margin, and as I mentioned earlier, that update doesn’t always translate apples to apples.

No matter which type of vacation you choose, you’re sure to have a magical time making memories with your family! To get more tips on how to plan for your Disney cruise, check out our YouTube video below.

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What vacations are you planning in 2027? Tell us in the comments!