Tickets to any Disney theme park are not cheap. However, that doesn't stop people from filling them during peak season. In response, Disney is considering new pricing policies that may help deal with the crowds. Disney Parks already have different ticket pricing based on what time of year guests visit, however, a new plan being considered would potentially make tickets cheaper the further in advance they are purchased.
If you were to buy a three-day pass to Disneyland today, you'd have until January of 2020 to use it, but that ticket would be valid anytime you want between now and then, though you only have 13 days to use the remaining days on the ticket once the first day gets used. This makes the tickets quite flexible for the user, but for Disney Parks, it makes things difficult when it comes to predicting what crowds will be like on any given day. Even though a day at Disneyland will cost you upwards of $97 per person, the park regularly fills to capacity during the summer season and the Christmas holiday.
Disney wants the parks full, but it doesn't want to turn people away, and so one method being considered is a change in ticket pricing. Under this proposed plan, tickets would be purchased for specific days, rather than simply a nebulous number of days in the future, and the further in advance tickets are purchased, the cheaper they would be. This would remove some of the flexibility that tickets currently have, but it would give people an incentive to plan their trip far in advance, which, in turn, would give the parks a better idea of what to expect from the crowd on any given day.
According to the Wall Street Journal, these changes are still being considered so we'll have to wait and see what Disney parks actually decide to do with the crowd issues. Of course, the question of what the actual pricing would be is an important one. It seems unlikely that even the cheapest tickets under this new plan would be anything less than what the cheapest ticket costs today, but if Disney Parks really wants to incentivize people to plan their trips early, a significant discount would certainly help.
For guests that are traveling a long way, this might not be that big a deal. Families flying to Disneyland are going to be planning their trip far in advance, and since airfare is also cheaper the further out you book, buying park tickets early, too, is probably no big deal. If you're a more local, spur-of-the-moment sort of person, (who doesn't already own an Annual Pass) there could be a significant price increase for buying a ticket on the same day.
What do you think of this new pricing idea? Would it change the way you go to Disneyland and Walt Disney World? Let us know in the poll, below.
Image Courtesy Disneylandnews.com/Disney
This poll is no longer available.
