Five years ago, I took a long, hard look at the history of the ticket price to visit Disneyland and Walt Disney World. I then tried to predict, based on those numbers, where the cost to visit might be over the following ten years. In early 2019, attendance levels at Disneyland, in particular, were expected to swell to unheard-of levels due to the highly anticipated opening of the very first Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge-themed land.
Since then, a lot has happened, including the global pandemic. In 2020, Covid shut down the entire Disneyland resort and both theme parks for over a year. Since then, the cost of just about everything, including basic needs items such as food, housing, insurance, medicine, and fuel, has soared to new levels.
The combined impact has caused a lot of stress and strain on the majority of today’s household budgets. Throughout it all, the basic desire to just “get away from it all’ has never been stronger. The thought of escaping your daily routine is always there in the back of your mind. The thought of taking a mental health day where you can unwind and de-stress is an alluring temptation. And, for many of us, a trip to a Disney theme park may be just what the doctor ordered.
Unfortunately, much like any unexpected medical expense, the bill you get at the end can be a bit shocking. As we predicted five years ago, the cost of visiting a Disney theme park has continued to rise, along with some interesting new wrinkles. These new creative wrinkles have found new ways to try and disguise some of those price increases, as well as creating unprecedented revenue streams for Disney theme parks.
Disney ticket costs: the early days
Firstly, a bit of history for everyone. Disney ticket prices were fairly low, with infrequent increases until the late 1980s. Several changes led to this, starting in 1982 when Disney retired the use of A through E-Ticket books to ride the various attractions.
Up until this time, guests paid a flat fee to enter the park. They received a booklet with a set number of attraction tickets, and each attraction was ranked as requiring an A, B, C, D, or E-Ticket to ride.
This is where the themed entertainment term “E-Ticket Attraction” comes from. Only the best Disney attractions required an E-Ticket to ride. Once your tickets ran out, you could either leave the park for the day or opt to buy more individual tickets at various booths set up throughout the park.
Diseny retired this ticket system and presented a simpler POP, or Pay One Price, admission model. Under this model, guests could ride as much as they wanted throughout the day and no longer worry about running out of tickets.
In California, Disney wasn’t the only park that used a ticket system. Nearby Knott’s Berry Farm also used a similar ticket system. However, once a second park, EPCOT, was added to Walt Disney World in 1982, there was a need to simplify the experience across the board. At this time, the admission cost for Disneyland was just $12 while a Walt Disney World ticket, good for either the Magic Kingdom or EPCOT, was just $15.
A new chapter
Shortly after, the arrival of a Disney icon, Michael Eisner, former chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company from 1984 to 2005, was announced. While things may have gotten a bit shaky at the end of the Eisner era, he was a smart and shrewd business executive who elevated the various divisions of the company in many successful ways.
As a former studio exec from rival Paramount Pictures, this included elevating the company’s failing animation studio away from box office bombs like The Black Cauldron and Oliver & Company to herald in a new era of classic films such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty & The Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King.
Eisner was also savvy enough to strike a deal with Pixar. This allowed Disney to champion and guide the era of computer animation films into the mainstream.
Furthermore, Eisner had a good idea of where he wanted to see things done with the company’s theme park division. He set the masterplan that led to the development of more theme parks and countless resorts at Walt Disney World, as well as deals with Hollywood creators to bring outside IPs into the Disney parks. This led to popular attractions based on Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Twilight Zone.
It also led to the creation of the co-branded Disney/MGM Studios theme park in Florida.
Disney ticket costs continue to rise
Throughout the next two decades, the cost of visiting the parks climbed steadily. By the year 2000, a ticket for Disneyland was $43. And a ticket to one of the Disney World theme parks was almost $50. In 2010, the price had risen to $76 for either of the two California parks and $82 to visit any of the four Florida parks.
Rival parks also began raising prices. However, in most cases, price increases were slow as the parks experienced different levels of push-back from their local markets, resulting in attendance drops or declining season pass sales.
Believe it or not, there was a period when many felt that a $100 price point might serve as a ceiling. In 2015, a Disneyland ticket was $99, and a Disney World ticket rose to $105. Disney found a creative solution to blast past the notion of a price ceiling by creating new tiered pricing levels.
Today, this is more commonly known as dynamic pricing or even surge pricing. Theme parks are typically busier on weekends and holidays, so operators charge guests more on those days. A visit during the busy summer season, Spring Break, or the Christmas season will cost you more than an off-season visit in January.
When Walt Disney World first added the new tiered pricing system in 2016, it kept the pricing of the lower (less busy) tier days at the same level as the year before but increased the ticket cost of the other days. This trend has continued since. However, the number of days that this tier is offered has shrunk, along with the creation of even higher tiers above it.
In the summer of 2019, the cost of admission to Disneyland on a top-tier day had climbed to $149, while Walt Disney World charged $129.
A tiered system
Jumping ahead to 2024 pricing, while the cost for one of those extremely rare Tier 0 days to visit Disneyland is just $104, the top of the 7-tier system, if you visit on a Tier 6 day, has leapt up to $194.
In Walt Disney World, things get a little more complicated. In addition to having seven different tiers, they have now ranked the parks and created different pricing for each. Disney’s Animal Kingdom is at the bottom, followed by Epcot and then Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Tickets to the Magic Kingdom cost the most.
For example, if you are looking to visit Disney’s Animal Kingdom, your cheapest ticket option would be $109. And that is available only for a couple of days in January, August or September. A visit to Epcot will, on average, cost you about $10 more, and visits to Disney Hollywood Studios or the Magic Kingdom, even more than that. So, on the busiest day in 2024, a visit to the Magic Kingdom will cost you $189 for a one-day ticket. That is quite a jump from a dead-day ticket to visit Animal Kingdom at $109.
Walt Disney World has already begun posting even higher ticket prices for the early months of 2025. In this system, a Tier 0 visit to Disney’s Animal Kingdom in 2025 will rise from $109 to $119, a visit to Epcot will cost $129 and a ticket to Disney’s Hollywood Studios will start at $139. If you opt for a visit to the Magic Kingdom, your best price would be $144.
I can only guess that the max tier for Walt Disney World parks in 2025 will reach $199 to $205.
New revenue streams
Unfortunately, the price prediction chart I created in 2019 has been fairly close to reality. If anything, Disney’s price increases have become even more aggressive than expected.
The prediction data was created by tracking the actual ticket prices from the 1980s to 2019. So, at the time, with the information known to us in early 2019, I anticipated a ticket to Disneyland in 2025 would cost $198 and a Ticket to Walt Disney World would be $185. By this same chart, the anticipated price of tickets to Disney theme parks was expected to rise to somewhere between $242 and $269 a day by 2030 for those max tier levels.
What I didn’t anticipate at the time was that Disney would abandon its free FastPass program and replace it with the extra-cost Disney Genie+ ride reservation system. This has created an entirely new revenue stream for the Disney theme parks division. Nor did I expect to see the launch of the Individual Lightning Lane pass system, which allows guests to pay extra prices, upwards of $25 per guest, for a pass that lets them cut right to the front of the line for select attractions.
Of course, Disney’s most profitable attractions are those that would have been classified in the past as classic E-Ticket Attractions.
This now makes me wonder if we ever might come full circle on this concept. Will Disney ever give up on the idea of Pay One Price admission and take us back to the concept of the old attraction ticket books? Yes, this might seem like a huge step backwards. But I can’t say that anyone else predicted the day would come when Disney would be essentially selling E-Ticket ride tickets once again, just this time on their mobile platform as Individual Lightning Lane passes.
Disney ticket costs: when will enough be enough?
So with that in mind, what do you think the average guest would prefer in 2030? Would they prefer to pay over $250 for a single-day ticket to visit one park, not counting any extra cost items such as parking, Genie+, or Lightning Lane passes? Or do you think they would rather pay something closer to $50 to get in the park with a small collection of digital access tickets to use on select basic attractions and the choice of paying extra for any big E-Ticket rides they want to experience at a time?
It’s something to think about while I ponder at what price point the general public may finally say, “Enough is enough,” and opt to find another way to entertain themselves at a cheaper price point.
After all, when it theoretically costs over $1000 per person to buy a ticket to visit the four Walt Disney World theme parks, which doesn’t include travel, lodging or food, you start to realize that perhaps those 4 or 5 or 7-night cruises aren’t such a bad deal after all.
