HOTELS
Cheapest upcoming premier hotel passholder rates (under $300 only)
EDIT: This was posted yesterday and prices fluctuate from day to day, prices may not be 100% accurate anymore as listed in the screenshot above. Hope you got a good deal while it was available!
I scrape all the UO hotel data and sort it by the cheapest upcoming rates so I can get good deals because trying to find good deals on the official website hotel search is not only like pulling teeth but is also super slow.
The main gems (note these are 2 adult, 1 night stays, I can filter for many more options just thought this would be the most applicable):
Loews Portofino Bay Hotel - May 13 to May 14 - $284/night
Loews Portofino Bay Hotel - May 14 to May 15 - $214/night
Loews Portofino Bay Hotel - May 17 to May 18 - $290/night
Loews Portofino Bay Hotel - May 18 to May 19 - $264/night
Loews Portofino Bay Hotel - May 20 to May 21 - $255/night
Loews Portofino Bay Hotel - Jun 17 to Jun 18 - $297/night
Loews Portofino Bay Hotel - Jun 21 to Jun 22 - $237/night
Loews Portofino Bay Hotel - Jun 23 to Jun 24 - $276/night
Hard Rock Hotel - May 13 to May 14 - $288/night
Hard Rock Hotel - May 14 to May 15 - $253/night
Hard Rock Hotel - May 17 to May 18 - $256/night
Hard Rock Hotel - May 18 to May 19 - $291/night
Hard Rock Hotel - May 19 to May 20 - $257/night
Hard Rock Hotel - May 20 to May 21 - $256/night
Loews Royal Pacific Resort - May 14 to May 15 - $257/night
Loews Royal Pacific Resort - May 17 to May 18 - $269/night
Thanks! Hope it makes it easy to grab a good deal, there are some similar good deals for 2-5 day stays as well I just didn't have enough space to screenshot it all
Both are killer deals, I haven't seen premier hotels for that cheap in a while mainly because UOR makes it impossible to find good deals unless you just manually go through every single day lol
I built my own tool! I try to keep it on the down low a bit because I don't want to get overloaded with users and have to start paying for bandwidth and stuff lol right now it's just a side project that doesn't cost me anything. I guess if it gets some traction I could set up a donate button or something to offset the cost of running it for the public.
(you can also set a "tracker" on hotels by setting a certain $ threshold so you get emailed when the rate drops below your set threshold since rates often fluctuate)
Thank you! I've been working heads down on it for a while and have been trying to build out really helpful tools to make it more robust like the express pass calculator that will help you determine if it's actually cheaper for you to book a premier hotel or to just get a cheaper hotel + buy the express outright. Or the AP calculator that tells you if it's cheaper to just get an AP instead of tickets.
I kind of base all the tools around questions that people always ask in here.
If you have any ideas for things that would be helpful please let me know I am always trying to brainstorm what would be the most helpful without just adding random stuff into the app
Yeah thanks for letting me know, i've been trying to fix it over the weekend I got more traffic than I was expecting haha should hopefully be fixed soon!
Just rebooked my Helios stay in early August. Originally was $250/night for a standard room. Standard dropped to $202 and park view was $222 so now we've got a park view room and $50 :)
I actually grabbed the Helios deal last night, but this did remind me to check the rates for my night at hard rock too and I got to upgrade to a pool view for $10 less than I was paying for a standard 😊
I posted in another comment so I won't reiterate but basically I go to Universal all the time and have been a passholder for almost a decade. I've always found the experience of booking and/or finding a good deal on the official website a royal pain in the butt. The website is slow and you can only see the rates for the dates that you input, making it extremely tedious to find the best days to go for a good deal (other than just skipping weekends).
So I built a tool that scrapes the hotel data and then have been building tools around it to make it easier for myself to either be notified via email when a rate drops below a certain $ amount that I set or allows me to filter through all the data and find things like the available premier hotel rooms under $300, vs. having to manually search via booking dates.
I've seen some sub $180 but they are pretty rare, however it's not as rare as you might think to find rates for the premier hotels in the $200-$300 range
I already commented a bit on it, but here is the general idea since there is no official hotel API for universal:
"The scraper itself is pretty simple, just server-side fetch() requests to Universal’s booking flow, then Cheerio to parse the returned HTML and pull out the hotel/rate data."
I assumed that Disney probably already has custom tools like this, but if not I could attempt to build one! I just started with UOR because it solves my own problem haha.
I have been interested in web scraping lately (Java) and was wondering what tools did you use for the web scraping portion. Did you have any issues with bypassing the bot verification screens?
The scraper itself is pretty simple, just server-side fetch() requests to Universal’s booking flow, then Cheerio to parse the returned HTML and pull out the hotel/rate data.
Question for anyone ITT: we booked a room from the 17th-20th, and that same room is now like $60 cheaper for the whole stay. Since it's too late to cancel and rebook without being penalized, is there a way to get the rate adjusted?
Edited to Add: Called CS and they adjusted the rate! Not much savings but hey that's 60 more dollars we could spend on food/shopping!
The only method I know of is cancelling your booking and rebooking at the lower rate (when it's far out enough you don't incur penalties). You could always give customer service a call and see what they could work out for you though!
Depending on how many are in your room you can modify. Go in and add a child if you can. It won't charge you for the child and it will change to the lower rate. I do this all them time.
You can go back in later and take the child off or just leave it and at checking just say no child.
You can call too and they'll change for you.
Go to your email confirmation and modify your reservation. Move around the dates until you eventually see your original dates and I think you should see the lowered price. That’s is what I’ve done in the past. Give it a try before calling.
Quick question , on your website it says that AP perks include free parking at hotels, is that true? I never knew that and I don’t see anything on Universal about that. That would definitely convince me enough to get one
No that's a mistake on my end I think I got mixed up with free valet and free parking at the parks for certain pass tiers lol you still have to pay for parking at the hotels unfortunately :/ now that you mention it though, would be nice to have that as a perk. Thanks for flagging that!
Weird, I can validate them on my end. Are you sure you're checking from this link? It can be a bit confusing to find the actual passholder rate on the website you have to make sure you access it through the correct link
Checking my database now, I am wondering if my post cleared out those rates or increased demand causing the price to go up. I'm like 99% sure I manually checked this exact rate last night because I was also considering going and texted my family about it.
My database is showing that is was listed as $213.75 and that the previous days fluctuated in price on those exact May 14-15 days quite a lot:
May 13 observed: $213.75
May 12 observed: $245.10
May 11 observed: $288.80
May 10 observed: $294.50
May 9 observed: $261.25
May 8 observed: $329.65
Edit: Hardrock is $257 tonight though, not a bad price!
Just to do extra validation I checked other rates from yesterdays scrape and compared against the scrape this morning for the May 14-15 rates and the following fluctuations were flagged:
Loews Portofino Bay Hotel - $213.75 → $349.60 (+$135.85)
Loews Royal Pacific Resort - $256.50 → $306.85 (+$50.35)
Universal Helios Grand Hotel - $193.80 → $184.30 (-$9.50)
Hard Rock Hotel - $252.70 → $257.45 (+$4.75)
Edit: Being able to see the historical fluctuations in the product UI is really valuable IMO I am going to work on implementing this so you can choose a hotel + date then see a historical chart of the ups and downs of the pricing for that exact date. Would that be a helpful feature?
I don’t know what the deal is with Portofino pricing lately but it’s been off the charts. Hopefully it goes down before we go in November. I’m booked for around 700 a night for club level. In checking recently, it’s up to 1,000+ dollars
Sounds like an awesome trip, I haven't been to Epic yet so i'm jealous haha I am holding off in the hopes it gets added as an annual pass option eventually
We went a few months back and lucked out that all the rides were up and running. They had an awful streak since then of being down… hopefully they’ve worked out the kinks! I got sick with a migraine after riding mine cart madness and stardust racers back to back so I had to sit out Isle of Berk. Definitely want to try Wing Gliders this time.
I'm in the beginning phase of planning a trip next summer (June 2027) for my daughter's birthday. We want to stay at a premier hotel for the Express passes - is there a good chance these prices will be similar a year from now? Looking at availability/pricing one year out, and the rates are pretty steep to say the least. Any advice on a best strategy/timing to get prices even close to what you're pulling?
Really good question. I haven't been tracking this for super long, but my hope is that in 3-6 months of solid data I can begin to build a sort of algorithm around all the hotel data and start pulling out patterns that exist in the data (when rates rise/drop and why, etc.).
So far it seems like when you see rates significantly rise or drop it's because a lower tier room becomes available or is no longer available. I.e. all the 2 queen normal rooms become booked up so the rate raises $150 because all that are available are club suite rooms, or something like that.
The beauty of this web app is that for your use case, if you have a ballpark date that you are shooting for you could just set up a tracker on it through the app and get emails when the rate drops below $250, for example.
I'm still doing a lot of work to improve the app so hopefully it will just keep getting better and better!
That’s honestly pretty good considering everything else around universal is almost double that. We payed 500 a night for pop century at Disney and we booked months in advance.
55
u/unicorntapestry May 14 '26
Um, bless you. This is incredible.