Category — e. What to Budget for Walt Disney World

Update: Disney World theme park ticket prices increased in February 2020.  I’ll revise this page with the new figures as soon as I can!

DISNEY WORLD TICKET PRICES

On October 16, 2018, Disney World moved to a new date-based ticket pricing approach.

New Disney World theme park ticket prices vary based on how many park days they are purchased for, as they always have; prices now also vary depending on the first day of use they are eligible for. Moreover, both prices and eligible use dates can vary depending on which ticket type you buy, and even how you buy them.

So you now have to make four decisions before buying your tickets:

1. Buying as part of a package or separately, and if separately, on-line or at the gate
2. Whether to go with a base ticket, a Park Hopper ticket, or a Park Hopper Plus ticket
3. The number of ticket days you want
4. Your targeted first day of eligible use of these tickets, and the first day they will actually be used to visit a park—which are not always the same dates

There are two bits of good news here. First, you can always add features to a not-yet-expired version of one of these tickets, so if you start with a six day base theme park ticket, and then decide halfway through your vacation that you really needed an eight day Park Hopper ticket, Disney World will allow you to pay the price difference to upgrade your base theme park ticket. So the risk of buying too little ticket is low. Second, you have me to guide you through the process!

To actually purchase a ticket, you have to know answers to all four of the questions above. But, because almost everything can be seen as a variant of the base “1 Park Per Day” theme park tickets, I’ll start with that, and then build on it.

WHAT IS A “1 Park Per Day” DISNEY WORLD THEME PARK TICKET?

What Disney calls “1 Park Per Day” tickets—which to save a tree I will call “base tickets”—are tickets good for one park per day for between one and ten ticket days.

On any base ticket day, you gain unlimited entrances and exits to one single theme park during its regular operating hours. So on one day you can go to Magic Kingdom, leave and return, and on a different day you can go to Epcot, leave, and return again. You can go to any one park on any eligible day.

What you can’t do with base tickets is go to two different parks in the same day—for that you need the Park Hopper add-on, discussed below. For any given ticket length and eligibility period, base tickets are the least expensive tickets available to the general public.

WHAT OTHER DISNEY WORLD TICKET TYPES ARE AVAILABLE?

In addition to base tickets, you can also buy two types of add-ons to base tickets, and a third modifier to base tickets that takes out some of their restrictions.

The “Park Hopper” add-on gives you the ability to visit more than one park in a day. Returning visitors commonly enjoy the extra flexibility that Hoppers give them, but I counsel first-timers to only add them after they are sure they need them. Each Disney park takes more than a day to see, and travel between parks can take longer than first-timers might imagine.

Adding a Park Hopper costs an additional flat fee for the entire length of the ticket. For a one day ticket, it costs (including tax—all of our numbers include tax) $63.90. Adding a Hopper to a two or three day ticket costs a flat fee of $74.55, and adding it to a three to ten day ticket costs a flat fee of $85.20

The “Park Hopper Plus” option is an add-on to a Hopper ticket—you cannot add it to a base ticket. It allows, in addition to the number of theme park days you’ve selected, and hopping among them, a specific number of visits to Disney World’s “minor” venues, such as its water parks, mini-golf offerings, and nine-hole golf at Oak Trails.

This add-on costs a flat fee of $26.33 per ticket, and allows you a number of visits to the minor venues equal to the number of days in your base ticket, except for one day tickets, where you get two. Returning visitors planning multiple visits to the minor venues—especially the water parks—can gain real value out of this add on, especially if they had already planned to buy a hopper. First timers generally will gain more value by focusing any extra time they have either on rest or on the theme parks, rather than on the minor parks.

The “Flexible Date” ticket is a variant of all the options above. Selecting it frees you from the narrow usage windows and expiration dates that the other options have—which we will discuss more below. These tickets expire December 31 of the calendar year after they are purchased, and can have their first use for any date in that window.

Because they can have their first use during any date in that window, including the highest-priced dates, they are priced a little higher than what would otherwise be the highest not-flexible price of the year.

The main other option available to everyone is Annual Passes, of which there are various types, which provide unlimited entry to the parks over most or all of 12 months. Narrower populations—most significantly Florida residents, visitors from the UK, and members of the US Armed Forces—can often find different or special offers. Check the Disney World website for eligibility, prices and terms of these.

HOW SHOULD THESE DISNEY WORLD TICKETS BE BOUGHT?

Base tickets and their add-ons can be purchased separately, or as part of a Disney World package that also includes a Disney World hotel room.

If purchased separately, they can be purchased on-line or at the gate. Tickets of three days or longer purchased separately will be $21.30 more expensive if purchased at the gate rather than online. Base, Hopper, and Hopper Plus tickets purchased as part of a package will be the same price as tickets purchased separately online, but have either the same or a better usage window than tickets purchased separately.

So if you are also planning to book a Disney-owned hotel room, in many cases it will be best to purchase your tickets as part of a package; if you are purchasing three day or longer tickets separately, buy them online.

WHAT ARE THE ELIGIBLE USE PERIODS OF THESE DISNEY WORLD TICKETS?

Base, Hopper, and Hopper Plus tickets must have their first day of eligible use identified before you can purchase them. Except for one day tickets, which must be used that exact day, these tickets come with varying usage windows—that is, for example, you don’t have to use a four day ticket on four precisely consecutive days. This lets you fit in days off, visits to other Orlando attractions, water park visits, etc., and lets you roll a bit with family or weather issues.

Base and Hopper tickets not purchased as part of a package have the following usage allotments: two and three day tickets get two extra days for use; four through seven day tickets get three extra days; eight through ten day tickets get four extra days. So if you buy a three day ticket whose first day of eligible use is May 3, 2019, you can use this ticket any four days of the seven day period that begins May 3 and ends May 7.

Park Hopper Plus tickets get one additional day of use—making it easier to fit the water parks or mini golf into your visit. So the three day ticket in the above example would be usable through May 8.

Base, Hopper, and Hopper Plus tickets purchased as part of a package get a usage period of whatever is longer—the usage periods noted above, or the length of the hotel reservation they are booked with, figured as the number of booked nights plus one. So if you bought the same three day May 3 ticket noted above as part of a seven night Disney hotel package, your usage period would be eight days (seven nights plus one), extending through May 10.

Flexible Date tickets have a usage period of 14 days—so you can begin the use of this ticket anytime during its eligible period (for tickets bought in 2019, that means through December 31, 2020) and use whatever additional days you bought anytime the thirteen days after. SO if you buy one of these, and first use it May 3, you must complete your park visits by May 16.

WHAT ARE THE PRICES OF THESE DISNEY WORLD TICKETS AND HOW DO THEY VARY?

If you buy Base, Hopper, and Hopper Plus tickets, the price of the tickets will vary based on the length of the ticket, whether it is for someone ten or older or three to ten years old at the time of their visit (kids younger than three are free), and, new as of October 2018, when the first day of eligible use is.

Prices per day always go down with longer tickets compared to shorter tickets with the same first eligible day. While the new date-based pricing means how much they go down will vary over the year, typically the least expensive days to add are days five through ten, each of which costs on average over 2019 just $$9-$17 per day to add. The first ticket day, and days two through four, cost an arm and a leg.

Tickets for kids three to nine cost ~$5 to ~$20 less per ticket than tickets for those ten and older, with the larger saving applying to longer tickets.

More profoundly, the ticket price also varies depending on the first start date. In the longer ticket lengths—five days and longer—in 2019 prices for tickets of the same length vary over the course of the year on average about $140—that’s a $600 difference for a family of four. See the table for the price range by length for base tickets.

Basically, tickets are more expensive during the times when it is most convenient for families with school-age kids to go, so they will be typically higher during holiday periods, common vacation periods, and over weekends.

The most expensive tickets are during the popular vacation periods before and after Easter and near the Christmas holidays. For longer tickets, the least expensive tickets are during the common semester-beginning periods of August through most of September; there’s also a period in the first half of May that sees lower prices.

To see exact prices for your potential dates go to Disney’s website here (or navigate their from your My Disney Experience account—at the upper left, click “Parks & Tickets,” and from the drop-down menu, go down to “Admissions” and under it select “Theme Park Tickets”), and select your ticket type.

From there a monthly calendar will open. After you first select the number of ticket days desired, the calendar will show you the average daily ticket prices by first day of eligible use for every day for which ticket prices have been released. These prices are rounded, and pre-tax, but will illuminate for you the various prices for various possible start dates.

If you have many potential dates you could visit, then the chart below might be helpful for honing in on the lowest ticket prices during the periods available to you. It shows the rounded average price per day for every start day from April 1 through December 31, 2019 of four different ticket lengths—four (blue), six (orange), eight (red), and ten days (black). (I selected this subset because if I included all ten possible ticket lengths, it would be a mess, and I do care about you).

I’ve also posted an color-coded calendar for 2019 base ticket prices. A color coded-calendar for 2020 ticket prices is here.

The way it basically works is that the more and the darker green you see, the better; the more and the darker red you see, the worse, and if there’s no color, you are seeing typical or average prices.

Here’s an example from the analytic calendar:

The full 2019 ticket price calendar is here, and the color coded-calendar for 2020 ticket prices is here.

WHAT FIRST ELIGIBLE DAY SHOULD BE TARGETED FOR THESE DISNEY WORLD TICKETS?

Because usage periods for all ticket lengths greater than one day are longer than the number of ticket days, and because average daily prices can be different from day to day, some may find ticket savings by picking as their first eligible day a date somewhat earlier than the first day they plan to be in a theme park.

Some of the most extreme examples of this are near Christmas.  If you are committed to the parks the five days beginning 12/20/19, a 5 day ticket that begins 12/20 will cost you $525.44.  But a five day ticket whose first day of eligible use is 12/17 can also be used for the five days beginning 12/20, and will cost $479.16.  That’s a savings of $46.28 per ticket–or $185 for a family of four.

Note that this won’t work if you are buying a package—if you have a package, your first day of eligible use will be set as the day you check in to your hotel.

WHAT’S THE PRICE TO ADD A DAY TO DISNEY WORLD TICKETS?

Back in the olden days—that is, before October 16, 2018—it was pretty straightforward to figure out the extra cost of a ticket a day longer. Adding a sixth through a tenth day cost a flat $10.65 per ticket per day.

Now that prices vary so much over the course of the year, you can only know for sure the costs of adding days by comparing tickets of varying lengths with the same start days. On average, the cost to add days five through ten is around $9 to $17, but for any specific date, it can vary from a dollar or two more than $30 per day.

WHAT’S NEXT WITH DISNEY WORLD TICKET PRICING?

When Disney World first announced that it would be moving to date-based pricing, there was some concern that, since resort hotel prices change over 2019 as much as 65%, that ticket prices might see a very large increase in effective prices for the most popular dates of 2019.

At first, this did not happen. At the first release of 2019 prices, no date at any ticket length in 2019 was more than 20% higher than the lowest cost version of that length during the year.

The new prices released in March 2019 show much greater differences in highest and lowest pricing, with the most expensive tickets of the year now as much as 45% higher than the lowest prices.  There’s’ now a particularly strong incentive to avoid the later December period, which is where all of the very highest prices are to be found.

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Disney World’s date-based ticketing system for theme park tickets came out yesterday, for all new tickets purchased from Disney, and for all tickets once authorized resellers like The Official Ticket Center run out of inventory of the old Magic Your Way tickets.

The new pricing approach is explained here. Basically, you pick a ticket type (for example, hopper or not) and a ticket length (e.g. six days). You can then see on a calendar the average price per ticket day for every day between now and December 16, 2019.

Here’s an example of the calendar for a seven day adult non-hopper ticket in February. What Disney shows is the rounded, pre-tax price for beginning the ability to use a seven day ticket on every day of the month, and every month through half of December 2019.

If you click a day (on Disney’s website, not here, you goober), you’ll see the un-rounded pre-tax price—for example, the period from February 8th through February 13th all shows a rounded number of $62, but if you click each day, you’ll actually find that the six “$62” days actually have four different prices. And don’t forget the 6.5% tax!

The effective price rises were not as devastating as some had feared, and for select dates and ticket lengths in January and February, prices actually went down a little bit. (Note that annual pass and parking prices went up as well). But my main point of curiosity was to understand how ticket prices varied over the course of the year, and how this might, or might not, change behavior—that is, when people go to Disney World.

To figure this out I used the rounded, pre-tax figures that Disney posted for 2019 for those ten and older, not using a park hopper—which gave me 3,500 data points. Lucky me, I then entered them all into a spreadsheet.

So take for example this screenshot of one day tickets for February. It’s interesting because it shows all four one day price levels (so far) for 2019—pre-tax they are $109, $114, $122, and $129.

Pay no attention to anyone who classes ticket prices into “value, regular, and peak”—they are missing a number, and moreover, I expect Disney to add a fifth one day price of over $130 as a “holiday” price for later December 2019. (The prices that came out today only went through December 16th—and no, that has nothing to do with the opening date of Galaxy’s Edge. Disney learned with Epcot not to set an opening date 15 months in advance…The famous line from Tishman about the too-early announced October 1, 1982 opening date of Epcot  was “It’s not the October 1 I have a problem with. It’s the 1982.”)

The average daily prices of longer tickets are related to the average pricing of the one day tickets available for the eligible periods the longer tickets encompass. It’s a little complicated, as while a one day ticket must be used exactly on the day selected, two and three day tickets have two additional days they can be used; tickets with four through seven days of park admission have three extra days, and tickets with eight to ten days have four extra days.

So for example a ten day ticket must be used by fourteen days after the start date you pick.

(Note that if you book your tickets as Park Hopper and More tickets, you get one more day, and if you book them as part of a Disney World package, your tickets will be valid for whichever is longer–these defaults, or the length of your hotel booking.)

Here’s a chart that graphs the average daily rounded price of a ten day ticket on the vertical axis compared to the average price of one day tickets over the fourteen days starting with the first day of the ten day ticket, on the horizontal axis.

As you can see, in general there are some pretty tight correlations between them, except for some tickets at the $49 level that overlap with $48 tickets—this comes from the anomalous pricing of June 30 one day tickets, which I can’t (yet) explain.

So anyhow I loaded all this stuff into a spreadsheet, and did some analysis of ticket prices by date.

• The first takeaway is that there’s not a wild difference between the lowest and highest price over the course of 2019, for any ticket type. No ticket length’s highest rounded price is more than 9.5% higher than its average price; no ticket length’s lowest price is less than 7.8% of its average price. Differences in hotel seasonal pricing levels dwarf these date-based ticket pricing effects.
• The second takeaway is how consistent these lower and upper percentages are across all ticket day lengths—I won’t publish these numbers as the errors created from my using rounded daily prices will dwarf their specifics, but the maximums and minimums as a percentage of average was very close across all ticket lengths.
• The third takeaway is how well the ticket “price seasons” track to what you’d expect—at least when you get into the longer-length tickets. This can only be illustrated graphically.

This chart (which is not helpful, but which I include for completeness–the charts get better soon) shows the price of tickets as a percentage increase over the lowest price of that ticket type in 2019 for every ticket length and every start day.

Each colored line represents a different ticket length—so in this one, for example, the blue line that flies all over the damn place because of in particular weekend upcharges is the one day ticket price by date, and the well-behaved dark gold line is the more sedate 10 day ticket price by date. The ten day line is more sedate because, as discussed above, since it is affected by the one day prices of the 14 days beginning its first day of possible use, it averages out all “normal” weekend effects (as does any ticket whose use period is a multiple of seven days—we’ll come back to that).

More helpful is this chart, which tosses out one, two and three day tickets, and thus sees much less bouncing around.

But my favorite analytic tool is this chart, which shows four day, six day, eight day, and ten day tickets. I like this especially because it has two well-behaved lines—the 10 day line, as noted above, and the four day line (four day tickets get three extra days to use them, so the four day ticket with its seven day use period line also averages out normal weekend effects). The six and eight day lines add some gritty reality, and make the chart more broadly usable to my readers. This is the chart I expect travel agents to blow up and tape on their walls.

You can see pretty clearly in this chart the seasonal pricing over the course of the year, and it all makes immediate intuitive sense except July and perhaps late October-early November.

In January you see prices collapse from the 2018/2019 holiday season peaks (the holiday season in early 2019 extends to January 6th). Prices then ramp up for the period around President’s Day—long weekends begin on the Thursday before President’s Day, and many northeast school districts have the whole week of President Day off, and come to Disney World then—then slip back down until we see the first spring break peaks in later March.

Prices then go down again, and then, because of the late Easter in 2019, see a second spring break peak in later April. They roll back down in early May, but then build over the course of the month as they include Memorial Day weekend and summer rates.

The new Disney World tickets prices bump around more in the summer than I would have guessed. June 30, as I noted above, is an anomaly that affects the prices of tickets whose eligible dates include it. Perhaps Magic Kingdom is closing at 4p on June 30 for a blogger-only party that date? One day prices go up for the 4th of July, then down again on July 7, then up again on July 15—perhaps tying to South American winter breaks. Note that the effect on longer-length tickets of these changes begins before the actual date of the price increase, as its effects are averaged into the longer ticket.

Prices then go down over the course of August until they hit their second-lowest levels of the year late in the month, a pricing level that continues into late September. Prices then stairstep their way up into higher levels by the Columbus Day weekend, and stay largely at that level until we start seeing the effects of the Thanksgiving upcharges, which dominate later November, and, if you are pursuing a long ticket, start kicking in as soon November 12.

I would have expected to have seen more of a drop in late October and early November. If you look closely you can see such a drop in the shorter tickets, but it gets averaged away in the longer ones.

As you would expect, prices then drop in the lower-demand days just after Thanksgiving and in early December. Prices stop after December 16, but I would expect daily prices for later December 2019 to be on the order of $135—that is, about 5% more than December 2018.

The fact that your ticket price for longer tickets in particular will be influenced by an extra three or four days of eligibility for use will create some interesting questions for those booking their visit to end just before a price increase.

So for example, if you are buying a seven day ticket for a pre-President’s Day visit February 9th through the 15th, you could set your first eligible day as February 9th, pay $62/day, and be done with it. But you can visit the parks February 9th through the 15th with a ticket that has its first eligible day as February 6th, and pay just $59 a day—not a huge difference, but worth noting.

Another observation before I get to my big one is that “cost to add a day” has become complicated. Until now, the cost to add a day was straightforward—it cost for example $10 (pre tax, for consistency) to add an eighth day to a seven day ticket any time of the year.

Now, the cost of the eighth day is affected by the variable one day price not just of that eighth day but also of one more day, as seven to eight days is the break point for between three and four extra days to use your tickets. Depending on when in the year you add it, adding an eighth day will cost anywhere from next to nothing to $27.

On average over the year, adding a second day to a one day ticket costs about $100, adding a third day to a two day ticket $96, a fourth day $84, a fifth day $17, and a sixth through tenth days $10-$12 each. This average roughly follows the patterns of prior years. But date-based effects mean that your actual mileage to add a day will vary, A LOT.

Back to the beginning—my main curiosity on the new Disney World date based pricing was whether the differences between lower cost and higher cost vacations would be enough to drive people in big numbers out of lower-crowd days and into higher-crowd days.

But with variations of just +/- ~10% around average prices in 2019, and, as you can see on the charts, most dates seeing ticket prices between in the narrow range of 3% to 11% higher than the lowest of the year (for example, ~76% of the released prices for five day tickets in 2019 are between 3 and 11% higher than the lowest of the year, with about 12% of dates either above or below those levels), I just don’t see enough energy in these prices to have much effect on park date choices.

Yes, I do think more people will choose less expensive dates, and avoid more expensive ones, than when ticket prices did not vary by date, but not enough to profoundly shift the crowd patterning that we’ve seen over the past few years.

At least for 2019, and at least as long as the current set of prices remains in place, I see them as having more the effect of increasing Disney’s monetization of highly-demanded periods than materially shifting crowds away from them.

That said, Disney can change prices and offer 3,500 more data points for me to play with at any time, and likely will once it has better visibility into the opening date of Galaxy’s Edge, or simply has one of its moods.

With all the focus on the late 2019 open of Galaxy’s Edge, we sometimes forget that 2020 will be the year of Star Wars. I see 2019 date based pricing as a way to test the effect of +/- 10% price changes on crowds, and for Disney to use its learning from that to figure out how to use 2020 prices to really push people into lower crowd times, so that Star Wars waits don’t exceed 24 hours… Expect to see much sharper price differences in 2020.

All the data is in a spreadsheet that you can download by clicking the link. And the long-time travel agent partner of this site, Kelly, can help you book–or avoid–any date! Contact her using the form below!

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ARMED FORCES SALUTE RENEWED FOR 2019

Late last week my buddy Steve Bell reported that the Disney Military Salute has been renewed for 2019, and eligible dates (not all the block-out dates are out yet) extend well into December 2019, to December 19, 2019, similar to the 2018 salute.

The long duration of eligible dates in 2019 was a bit of a surprise, as there was a school of thought that an early end (e.g. September 30) would create more room for full-paying Star Wars folk once it opens in late fall 2019.

So either DIsney is intentionally not giving away it’s Star Wars opening date through the timing of this dela; by late fall opening of Galaxy’s it really means late fall (one definition of fall has it ending December 21, 2019); or–and this is perhaps most likely–one part of DIsney is not talking to the other.

As always, the best source of info on the Armed Forces Salute deal–the best Disney World deal out there, serving the best set of people in the world–is available on Steve’s MilitaryDisneyTips.com.  Start with his info on the Armed Forces Salute renewal for 2019 here.

CARIBBEAN BEACH DINING TO OPEN OCTOBER 8

Multiple sites are reporting that our long dining nightmare at Disney’s Caribbean Beach Resort will be coming to an end next week. While I have not yet seen anything official from Disney, lunch and dinner reservations at the new waterside table service, Sebastian’s Bistro, are available beginning October 8.

Other changes that may or may not happen then are the reopening of a redone gift shop and counter service area, the shift of check-in from the Custom House to the same main central building in Centertown where the gift shop and counter service will be found, and the shift of the entrance road from Buena Vista Drive to Victory Way.

Also reported is that Trinidad South will be changing its name to Barbados, and Trinidad North to simply Trinidad. In the longer term this name change, if it happens, will be a great move, especially for the dyslexic like me, but in the short term it will replace one set of confusions with another.

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Several new Disney World deals for 2019 came out this morning, of which the two most important are a room rate deal (covered on this page) and a Play, Stay and Dine Offer which I will cover later.

The new room rate deal is complicated:

• It covers most periods between January 1 and February 14, 2019 and February 17 and April 27 2019
• However, during the first period (until February 14) at the value and moderate resorts, only the Sunday-Thursday night parts of your trip will be discounted–you can still stay on Fridays and Saturdays, but with no discount.
• At most resorts, stays during either period will be discounted more if they are booked by January 2, 2019

As always, there’s a limited inventory of rooms available, and not all resorts or room types are included.

VALUE RESORTS 2019 ROOM RATE DEAL

No resort is totally excluded, but at Art of Animation, as usual only Family Suites are included. Discounts are limited to Sunday through Thursday nights until 2/14, and are higher if you book by 1/2/2019.

MODERATE RESORTS 2019 ROOM RATE DEAL

No moderates are excluded, but the deal is less valuable at Port Orleans Riverside and Port Orleans French Quarter. You’ll face the same patterns as at the value resorts–no discounts on Friday and Saturday nights through February 14, and better deals (except at the Port Orleans Resorts) if you book by January 2, 2019.

DELUXE RESORTS 2019 ROOM RATE DEAL

No deluxe is excluded, nor do they have Friday/Saturday night exclusions from the deal, but you will find not as good a discount at the Polynesian Village, Contemporary Resort, and Wilderness Lodge. Except at these three, discounts are better if you book by January 2.

DISNEY VACATION CLUB RESORTS 2019 ROOM RATE DEAL

At the DVC resorts, the Villas at the Grand Floridian and Bay Lake Tower are excluded, and at the Polynesian Village, only the Studios are in the deal.

Moreover, the Polynesian studios are at a lower discount.

Like at the deluxes, there are no Friday/Saturday night exclusions from the deal. Except at the Polynesian, discounts are better if you book by January 2.

HOW TO BOOK THERE DISNEY WORLD DEALS

Full reviews of each of the resort options begin here.

Disney World’s page on this deal is here.  You can find the other deals that came out today here (scroll down to find the ones with a 2019 date).

Today’s set of deals for 2019 is complicated, especially for families aiming at a value resort. The long-standing travel agent partner of this site, Kelly, can figure out and book the best deal for you. Contact her by using the form below:

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As has been expected for some time, Disney World yesterday announced that theme park tickets purchased October 16 or after will have varying prices based on the start date of the ticket.

The prices themselves were not announced—that’s expected on the 16th itself, although rumors, some accurate, will come out before then. Many were confused by apparent prices being used in an explanatory video—even though every image in that video had material like the following:

The way it will work is that ticket purchasers first select a ticket form or type.*

You choose from among the current ticket types:  “regular” one park per day tickets, “hopper” tickets that allow visiting different parks in the same day (multiple visits in a day to one park are covered by “regular” tickets), or “hopper plus” tickets that also include pre-paid admission to the minor parks (waterparks, mini-golf, etc.).

The next choice you make is how many park days.

With these two choices in hand, you then pick your first possible day of use from a calendar that shows average daily prices by start day for a ticket of the already-selected form and number of days.

With a date clicked, the cost per day is highlighted…

…and the system will then show the total cost of the tickets…

…and also the days the tickets are eligible to be used.

Except for one day tickets, these tickets have eligibility ranges greater than the actual number of park days that can be used. Two and three day tickets have two extra calendar days they might be used; tickets with four through seven days of park admission have three extra days, and tickets with eight to ten days have four extra days.

This allows guests some flexibility for off days, visits to other Orlando attractions, or for working around family, illness, or weather issues. It also allows, I would guess, for a bit of start-day arbitrage for guests who are willing to give up some flexibility.**

For guests with calendar flexibility, the system will also let you seek low cost days…

…and for those who want to lock into a set of tickets and not worry yet about start dates, an option to pay more for flexible dates will also be available. This option also provides the longest date range of eligible use—fourteen days—regardless of the actual number of days in the ticket.

Disney has two intentions behind this change.

• One is to shift guests from higher-wait periods to lower wait ones, thereby increasing the satisfaction of the shifted guests (though not that of those who had already planned to go those dates because they held the promise of be see lower crowds)
• The second is to extract more value from those who, regardless of pricing, choose the more popular dates

Both these have already been in place at Disney World in some fashion for years. Resort prices have worked this way from time out of memory. And over the last three years, Disney World has restructured the prices of its various types of annual passes to shift many people into lower-cost pass options that block out many of the most popular dates—resulting, for example, in starkly lower summer waits the past three summers.

The new approach to date-based pricing is much less complicated than many had feared it would be. Yes, you need to pick a date or pay a premium for flexible dates—but you always have had to pick a date; this new approach will simply incent that choice to even earlier. And yes, you will pay higher prices for some dates than others, even if you have no real choice in your dates—but this has also always been true for hotel prices.

The impact on park waits is still to be seen, and will be partly shaped by the actual price differences among dates. Higher price differences will level out crowds across the year to some as-yet unquantifiable extent, making formerly bad dates better and formerly good dates worse, although the impact is yet to be seen and good daily planning will still pay off quite a bit. Lower price differences will have less impact on the flow of crowds across the year.

*All screenshots are from Disney’s video here.

**For example, say you plan to be in the parks for three days, on exact dates—e.g. February 3 through February 5. The two extra calendar days your ticket can be used on a three day ticket means your start dates could be February 1, February 2, or February 3. If you are willing to give up the option to use your tickets on February 6 or February 7, then picking February 1 or 2 as your start day, rather than February 3, in some scenarios might save you some money.

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While I was caught up in my day job—I just started up with a new strategy and management client, and it’s a lot of work to get it off the ground—a new Disney World deal came out, and another had its “book-by” date extended.

First, before getting into the details of the new deal—the “book-by” date for Disney’s popular Free Dining promotion has been extended to August 1, from its former July 7.

The new deal is a room-only discount that comes in two parts.

• For stays booked by October 7 that include stay dates October 8 through November 8, the discount applies to “most” Sunday through Thursday nights—that is, Fridays and Saturdays are not discounted.
• For stays booked by December 24 that include stay dates November 11 through December 24, the discount applies “most” nights—that is, Fridays and Saturdays are not explicitly excluded.

As always, there’s a limited inventory of rooms available, and not all resorts or room types are included.

VALUE RESORTS DEAL

No resort is totally excluded, but at Art of Animation, as usual only Family Suites are included.

MODERATE RESORTS DEAL

No moderates are excluded, but the deal is less valuable at Port Orleans Riverside and Port Orleans French Quarter.

DELUXE RESORTS DEAL

No deluxe is excluded, but you will find not as good a discount at the Polynesian Village, Contemporary Resort, and Wilderness Lodge.

DISNEY VACATION CLUB RESORTS DEAL

At the DVC resorts, the Villas at the Grand Floridian and Bay Lake Tower are excluded, and at the Polynesian Village only the Studios are in the deal.

Moreover, among those in the deal, the Polynesian studios and Boulder Ridge at the Wilderness Lodge (but not Copper Creek there) are at a lower discount.

HOW TO BOOK THERE DISNEY WORLD DEALS

Full reviews of each of the resort options begin here.

Go to Disney World’s pages on these deals– here for the room rate deal, or here for Free Dining.

Or the long-standing travel agent partner of this site, Kelly, can book it for you—and she will also check to see if this is the best deal for you among your options. Contact her by using the form below:

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