Category — p. News and Changes

VERSION 2 OF THE BEST WEEKS TO VISIT DISNEY WORLD IN 2012 IS OUT

I’ve just updated my list of 2012 Weeks to Visit Walt Disney World, Ranked in Order.

The update reflects

• Disney’s release a week or so ago of final 2012 prices
• My final analysis of 2011/2012 school break calendars (the last of which became available this week) and
• The impact of those school calendars on my draft 2012 crowd calendar (which I’ll release later next week)

I’ve also been a little less of a knucklehead in some elements of the logic.

For example, a group of weeks with similar crowd levels (and similar in other key characteristics) but with different prices are now ranked in price order…

The result of the update is that many weeks shift a bit, a few shift a lot, and there’s a new number one week!

There’s more here on what moved and why, but for the moment let me just thank Carl at Dad’s Guide to WDW, who has been recommending one logic change for years!

Click here for the revised 2012 weeks in order.

DISNEY’S 2012 PRICE SEASONS

Walt Disney World released its 2012 price seasons last week–for details on these 2102 Disney World resort hotel prices, click here.

Besides the usual flow of the seasons, several new or interesting things emerge:

• Disney resort hotel prices overall are up 2%-9%
• Value resorts, which used to be all the same price, are now in three different price bands
• The Value 2 price season–the late summer time when prices drop substantially–starts a couple of weeks earlier than in recent practice.

DISNEY WORLD RESORT HOTEL PRICE INCREASES

[Read more →]

Frequent readers of my disclosure page 🙂 will have noted that last week I inked a deal to become an affiliate of TouringPlans.com.

I’ve been recommending the tools and resources of TouringPlans.com for more than three years.

Over the same period I’ve published at various times frank reviews of their stuff. I’ve never found TouringPlans.com to be perfect, just simply much better than any alternatives.

The affiliation won’t change this–I’ll still publish reviews and call ’em as I see ’em–but it does mean that if you sign up for a TouringPlans.com fee-based product after arriving there from a link from this site, TouringPlans.com will share a bit of the fee you pay with me.

I’m grateful that TouringPlans.com has created the opportunity to become an affiliate, as it permits me to be compensated a little for the time I put into this site while still recommending and reviewing their products.

Lots of important news over the last few days…

DISNEY WEBSITE OPEN FOR BOOKING 2012

You can now book most 2012 dates on Disney’s website.

This is a couple of months earlier than Disney has made this possible in past years.

You still can’t book Disney World more than 500 days ahead, so the website only lets you book (as of today) through late October 2012.

This means that most 2012 Disney World prices are out as well–I’ll update this site over the next few weeks based on these prices. You can see the new Disney World 2011/2012 ticket prices here.

YOU CAN BOOK THE ART OF ANIMATION RESORT

Disney’s Art of Animation Resort is open for booking, for arrival dates beginning May 31, 2012.

See this on MousePlanet.com for more details.

DISNEY MILITARY SALUTE TICKETS: UNLIMITED USE?

Update 7/7: only a total of 12 tickets can be used over the 2011-2012 period, wth no more than 6 activated at a time.

Steve at MilitaryDisneyTips.com is reporting here, based on new instructions to Disney ticket window staff that he has seen, that the discounted Military Disney ticket offer can be used multiple times–“unlimited” times–so long as no more than 6 tickets are purchased each time.

The details of the extension of this deal to 2012 are still not on Disney’s website; MilitaryDisneyTips.com has a lot of the specifics of them here.

DISNEY WORLD TICKET PRICES GO UP A FEW MONTHS EARLY

Now that WeinerStep seems to have petered out I’ve shifted my attention to rising Walt Disney World ticket prices.

In recent years, Disney has increased its ticket prices in August, but it announced Friday a set of (in some cases stiff) ticket price increases effective today.

You can find the effective new Disney World ticket prices here.  For even more detail, see this.

STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN WALT DISNEY WORLD TICKET PRICES

All prices except one are rising.

In particular, the per person, per day, cost of days after the third has gone up ~50%, from around $6 to around $9.

This is still a bargain compared to the $80-$90 per person per day costs of the first three days of a ticket, so it doesn’t affect any of this site’s recommendations.

Also, the structure of the park hopper add-on has changed.

• It’s still a flat amount per ticket (around $58 after tax) for tickets of 2-10 days, but
• The cost of adding it to a one-day ticket is now only $35 plus tax rather than last year’s $55

This is interesting, but also does not affect any of this site’s suggestions, as there are no one day adventures included in it!

Thanks to Dave Lavender at the Herald-Dispatch for his link to the site in this article!