Orlando

About Orlando

Orlando has more hotel rooms than almost any city in America, and that oversupply is a traveler's best friend. With hundreds of properties competing across every price tier, rates move constantly — and the member rates that aren't displayed on the open web are often where the real movement shows up. The difference is meaningful some nights and more modest others, but in a market this deep, checking both prices before you book is just good discipline. The park tickets are the fixed cost of an Orlando trip; the room is where the budget flexes.

Geography matters more here than in most cities because Orlando is really several destinations sharing an airport. Lake Buena Vista puts you at the doorstep of the Disney parks; International Drive runs the gauntlet of Universal, the convention center, and every wax museum and upside-down building the tourism economy has ever invented. Celebration, the master-planned town Disney built in the 1990s, offers a front-porch calm ten minutes from the gates. And Winter Park — brick streets, museums, boat tours through cypress canals — is the elegant, grown-up Orlando most visitors never discover.

Our Travel Editor's Orlando advice: match the hotel to the parks you're actually visiting, because cross-town traffic on I-4 can eat an hour of park time each way. Book January, early February, or the gap between Thanksgiving and mid-December for the best combination of crowds and rates — and never judge an Orlando hotel by its public weekend price alone.

— Our Travel Editor