When planning our Feb 2020 trip, I looked into all the surrounding non-Disney hotels (ones comparable to POP) and also DS hotels. I couldn't find anything cheap enough that would take me away from Disney resorts. I took everything into account (not just the per night rate): car rentals, resort fees, resort parking fees, park fees, etc, and we ended up choosing Pop. This doesn't mean that I won't still do comparisons the next time we go to Disney. I'm sure we'll stay offsite at some point; it just all depends on cost!
You may have already done this when checking off site hotel rates, but as a reminder to people who might not know, definitely join the hotel chains loyalty programs. Doing so triggers emails containing special offers with low rates for loyalty customer members.
The second thing you must know is what the cycle is for the sale pricing for a specific chain.
As an example I just booked Cabana Bay at Universal for an end of April beginning of May stay. As an Annual Pass holder, I know the cycle for AP discounts for their hotels. I know that the discounts at Universal tend to come out 3 months before the dates that are offered for discounts.
I also keep track of their other room rate offers. So, when calling to book for this 'April beginning of May stay' I took advantage of a special "low" rate of $126.75 per night. (I think the regular room rate at Cabana Bay is something like $189.00 a night.)
The Annual Pass discount rates were gone when I made the call to book but they were running this other special. I suspect that Universal offered fewer AP Discounts rooms and apportioned more of their rooms for the discount that I wound up using.
I have no idea what the AP holder discount was for this period but I'm thinking that it couldn't be much lower. As an aside it's kind of driving me crazy that I don't know what that rate was, but I suspect that for maybe 1 day of a month, when hardly anyone books the resort, the come on rate might have been $99 a night for an extremely limited number of nights with an extremely limited number of rooms available to use this discount.
We will have to pay parking fees at Cabana Bay but we are willing to eat the $17 bucks a day. We could have found a hotel on Palm Parkway that had free parking, free breakfast , happy hour and Wi-Fi etc, but we wanted to stay at Cabana Bay (My happy Place) which is right next to Volcano Bay (My other happy place).
Back in the day Disney used to offer resort room discounts that were very attractive. Now, Disney advertises that they are running a discount offer, but when you call you can't get it because it is highly limited on what resort is offered, and how few days qualify for the discount, and then on top of that, it might only be a handful of rooms at a specific resort that is offered. You really have to "thread the needle" to navigate these discounted room rates offered by Disney.
It's basically gotten to the point with Disney where the discounted rooms they are offering are virtually nonexistent. These come ons are also designed to move you into a higher resort category. That means more money for Di$ney! So, Disney will bang the drum that they are having a "sale" on resort rooms but for all intents it's unusable.
That sale come on is designed to get you to forget about how overpriced a Disney vacation is and start thinking about GOING to Disney for a vacation. You see that commercial and you start to justify it in your mind that, even though it's overpriced, if you can get that room at a bargain (Nope! Not happening...) you would go because it would be worth it. Then the "Disney Math" starts and we all know where that goes. Pretty soon you've found that you wound up booking club Level in the presidential suite because of the 'discount' you got.
When considering a Disney resort stay, I should probably just be using a calculator that inflates my numbers using a "Disney Math Algorithm". I'm thinking it would need to multiply every number by 4.35.
~NM
FYI; All the DS hotels offer have FP+ at 60 days and I heard more hotels will be added.
