Consider a guest making a seven-night, eight-day visit in late February 2013. The guest wants to sta

If you re a UK resident, there are 14-day Disney World ticket options available to you. You lovely Brits can move along now, nothing to see here. But if you re a North American car rentals vancouver canada visiting Disney for two weeks, you ll quickly see that there s no immediately apparent ticket option that makes sense for you. There are 10-day Magic Your Way tickets, but nothing longer than that. What to do?
First lets look at some basic numbers. A ten-day basic, one park per day, adult ticket currently costs $318. But let s face it, if you re going to Walt Disney World for an extended period of time, you ll want a Park Hopper ticket, which runs $375. Given that as a starting point, if you re staying for 14 days, your ticket options are:
Add the Water Park Fun More option to your 10-day Park Hopper. This involves only a slight bump up in price, making your ticket cost $397 instead of the non WPF Hopper car rentals vancouver canada at $375. Adding WPF gives you ten admissions to the water parks, DisneyQuest, ESPN Wide World of Sports, a round of 9-hole golf, and some daytime minigolf. This is plenty of additional car rentals vancouver canada fun to fill four non-theme-park days.
Add a four day ticket car rentals vancouver canada to your ten day ticket, giving you a full 14 days of theme park admissions. Let s say that for these four days you don t need Hopper car rentals vancouver canada capabilities. A basic adult four-day, car rentals vancouver canada non-Hopper WDW ticket costs $256. Add that to your previously purchased $375 10-day Hopper car rentals vancouver canada and you re looking at a ticket outlay of $631.
Compare this to the current price of a standard car rentals vancouver canada Walt Disney World adult annual pass: $611. Clearly, for a 14-day visit, if you re going into the theme parks every day, then an annual pass makes sense. You ll save at least $20 getting the pass versus getting 14 days of park tickets in Magic Your Way form.
Consider another scenario: You re making two separate trips to Walt Disney World in one calendar year. A seven-day visit and a three-day visit. A seven-day Park Hopper costs $345; a three-day non-Hopper costs $242; for a total of $587. Not far off from the $611 annual pass price. And if you tweak your ticket needs just a little by making that three-day ticket a $299 Hopper, then you re at $644. Again, this is over the price of the annual pass. So, if Hopping is important to you, and you re taking two trips totaling ten days within one calendar year, then an annual pass likely makes sense for you.
Considering this situation, some guests who have a visit Disney once per year mindset, plan to take their year one trip on, say, the first week of April, and then their year two trip on the last week of March. Doing this, you re effectively taking your two trips a year apart, but getting both covered by the same annual pass. This can potentially save over $300 per person on ticket costs.
Consider a guest making a seven-night, eight-day visit in late February 2013. The guest wants to stay at a moderate level resort. A week at Port Orleans Riverside will cost $1,402 during that time period. However, Disney is running a hotel pricing special for annual pass holders during this time period. Annual pass holders car rentals vancouver canada booking a late February car rentals vancouver canada stay at Port Orleans prior to the end of 2012 are eligible for a 35% discount off the room rate, making their room cost $911, a savings of $491. This guest might normally have purchased a $289 eight-day car rentals vancouver canada basic Magic Your Way ticket. However, by spending an additional $322 to get the annual pass, the guest reaps the $491 in hotel room savings, car rentals vancouver canada a net gain of $169. Only one member of a party needs to have an annual pass to get the room rate benefit.
If these folks have also booked their Port Orleans car rentals vancouver canada stay with the annual pass discount, they ve now saved over $250 by having one person in the group buy an annual pass for a simple one week stay. That s enough to cover their souvenir budget.
Of course there are many other factors to consider, including Florida resident and Disney Vacation Club member passholder discounts which can make annual pass purchases a near no brainer, car rentals vancouver canada room rate discounts available to the general public which make the pass discounts superfluous, and required travel dates which don t overlap with available discount dates.
The moral of the story is that you have to do the math based on your family s unique circumstances including length of stay, total number of trips per year, preferred resort, travel dates, merchandise and recreation spending, and dining habits including possible purchase of the Tables in Wonderland card.
Passholder benefits are listed on the Walt Disney World website. car rentals vancouver canada In general, if you re staying at Walt Disney World for a week or more during a calendar year, it pays to do some investigating about whether getting at least one annual pass for your family car rentals vancouver canada makes financial sense.
So Disney travelers, what have been your annual pass experiences? Have you found the discounts to be worth it? Have you even purchased an annual pass even if you were only making a short Disney visit? Let us know in the comments below.
car rentals vancouver canada Great article, Erin. Another benefit of the AP discount over the general public discount is that you can book the discount pretty much up to the date of arrival. With the general public discount, the booking window typically ends about one month prior.
Excellent. Yes, in September I found a huge discount using the pass holder rate I saved money by buying a Premiere annual pass vs a regular California Premium annual pass. So my contribution? If you visit both Disneyland and Walt Disney World, run the numbers for that, too. Also, note that if you re dead set on booking a package deal, eg one that might qualify for a free dining promotion, car rentals vancouver canada you can t do that with just a pass holder hotel reservation. However, if you book a vacation package with tickets, you should be able to go to a guest services window and have them apply the value of your park ticket toward an annual pass (or pass upgrade).
I ve been a WDW annual passholder forever. I made a brief trip to DL this summer and waivered whether to get regular tickets for DL or upgrade to the Premier Pass. I decided to upgrade because of the increased merchandise discount (20% for premier vs. 10% for regular WDW AP) because I buy an absurd amount of Disney car rentals vancouver canada merchandise. At the time I didn t realize that DL and Premier passholders also get 15% off most quick service restaurants at DL. This was a huge bonus and make my borderline Premier Pass purchase totally worth it.
Your information here is very helpful. I hoped we could buy regular tickets then upgrade to a premier pass. We re purchasing a Disney Cruise for the first time. If we can combine any park tickets with our package, we can use our Disney Visa to get 6 months same as cash. And since Disney car rentals vancouver canada doesn t let us include a Premier Pass in that package, this helps us spread the cost of the majority of the PP over 6 months if we upgrade after the fact.
It is worthwhile for us UK people if DVC members due to the huge discount on it at the moment. It is cheaper than any of the 14 day options I have seen for next year and great for us as we are not going until next October so should get a couple of long trips from it for 2013 and 2014!
Even without the current car rentals vancouver canada AP-plus deal, DVC members get $100 off for standard APs. I think I usually figure car rentals vancouver canada if we get two trips a year of at least 8 days total, it s better to go with the APs. There s also a slight additional car rentals vancouver canada savings if you renew your APs instead of buying new ones. You can t really factor in hotel discounts as a DVC member staying on points, of course. And a lot of the AP shopping discounts are the same as the DVC discounts.
I suppose that would depend on the dynamics of your group. In my family, I always get the AP because while the whole family goes for one big vacation car rentals vancouver canada annually, I also take several shorter quick trips throughout the year. If you re unsure, you do have to take a gamble on who has the most likelihood of having a random extra visit or two during the year.
I just upgraded to the Premier Passport after having the WDW AP for a few years for the reasons you mention: several short visits, sometimes hotel discounts (not always available, sadly) and flexibility: if I am in town in business, I have an incentive to make a 2-hour visit for dinner and a few rides rather than having to jam everything in one day. I almost never rent a car at WDW I either use ME Disney Transport or the Orlando Lynx 111 line, but once in a while I savour my free parking as well.
Because I have become addicted to runDisney, I found that I have started to visit both parks each year. Recently I began to consider the Fla-Calif PP and did the deal last month on a non-running trip to DLR/DCA. I was *bowled over* by the much better benefits of the PP in California. Discounts all over the place every time I went to buy a food, beverage, or trinket, people were throwing 15% discounts at me. Made the Florida discount kind of disappointing in comparison! Yes, it s spendy, but there are foreigners who will find the big-ticket passes worthwhile.
My biggest complaint is AP perks like New Fantasyland previews were not available to foreign AP holders. I was going to be there at the time of the preview events, but could not even register car rentals vancouver canada for the preview (or the preview lottery) because I am on record as foreign. Boo. Thanks for appreciating car rentals vancouver canada my investment and loyalty, Mickey.
What I want to know is: Why is it only the UK who gets the awesome 14 day pass? I guess I kind of understand why it s not available to US visitors (the notion here being that international visitors are more likely to want to stay those big long visits) but why not open it up to ALL international visitors?
car rentals vancouver canada I was told only Disney packages could get 6 months same as cash on the Disney Visa. And that the annual passes could not be rolled into that purchase, but regular park tickets could be. So I m getting car rentals vancouver canada the most expensive park tickets, then will upgrade afterwards and pay the difference in cash.
I was told only Disney vacation packages could get 6 months same as