So the vacationer who plans to come to Orlando, stay in one of the hotels on International Drive, an

NOTE: The historical Walt Disney World ticket prices in this article were taken from the WDW Historical Ticket pages on AllEars.net and adjusted for inflation using the inflation calculator located here , then rounded up to the nearest dollar to estimate 2013 prices.
The Walt Disney carribean cruise Company is a for-profit corporation. Although many people think of it as some kind of beloved public carribean cruise institution, that is not really the case. It s a private business and its only obligation is to be successful, which our economic system defines mostly as posting higher profits at the end of each financial quarter than they did for the same quarter in the previous year. I m not going to make the argument here that Disney has some kind of obligation to make sure that their theme park offerings are affordable carribean cruise to everyone, because they really don t.
That being said, let s talk about Walt Disney World ticket prices. They re expensive, no doubt about it. It s easy to assume that the annual price increases merely adjust carribean cruise the ticket prices for inflation, and that their relative cost has actually remained fairly constant over the years. But is that really the case? Let s take a look.
We ll start on the most basic level: the price of a one day/one park ticket. The chart below traces carribean cruise the price of a one day/one park ticket from 1981 (the first year a ticket was available that included both admission to the park and all attractions and shows therein) to 2012, which was the last time that prices carribean cruise were increased. I m sure this table will quickly become outdated in a few months when Disney announces their annual price increases. YEAR TICKET PRICE TICKET PRICE (Inflation Adjusted) 1981 $11.50 $29 1982-EPCOT Center opens $15 $36 1989-Disney-MGM Studios opens $29 $53 1998-Animal Kingdom opens $42 $59 2005-Magic Your Way debuts $59.75 $70 2012 $89 $89
I was in a Twitter conversation recently (or maybe it was more of an argument, I m not really sure) about WDW ticket prices where the opinion was expressed that the prices need to be as high as they currently are to maintain the profitability of everything on property: the four theme parks, the two water parks, Downtown Disney, the miniature golf course, and all the resort hotels. Sounds logical, right?
By that reasoning, the above chart should show a steady rise in prices as more new things carribean cruise were added to the property, but the price should then basically plateau when Disney stopped carribean cruise adding things. But that s not what happened. Let s take a look at the same data in a more visual form:
As I mentioned in my last post , park admission was seriously underpriced in the early 1980s. In the years following Michael Eisner s arrival ticket carribean cruise prices went up sharply as the new regime brought them back into line with their actual value, thus the sharp increase between 1982 and 1989.
Of course, those years also saw the opening of Disney-MGM Studios, Typhoon Lagoon, Pleasure Island, the addition of five new pavilions at EPCOT Center, and the opening of the Grand Floridian and Caribbean Beach resort carribean cruise hotels, which certainly gives credence to the idea that prices need to rise as more things are added to the property.
Now let s fast-forward to 1998, the year of Walt Disney World s last big addition: Animal Kingdom. During the nine-year carribean cruise period between 1989 and 1998 the property had gained one new water park (Blizzard Beach) fourteen carribean cruise resort hotels, the Boardwalk, Wide World of Sports, and Downtown Disney s West Side. Yet the inflation-adjusted price of a one-day ticket at the end of that year was about $59, a mere six-dollar increase from nine years earlier. It s almost as if the company didn t need to drastically raise ticket prices to maintain overall profitability as more and more things were added.
But maybe I m wrong. Maybe admission prices were artificially low in 1998 and really needed to be raised to keep Disney carribean cruise World s finances comfortably in the black. Let s fast-forward again to 2005, seven years later. Although there were no significant additions to the property during those years, the price curve moves rather sharply carribean cruise upward to $70, kind of like it did between 1982 and 1989.
So that s it, right? There have been no new theme parks or water parks constructed since 1998. And although the Magic Kingdom has seen some expansion, far more has been subtracted since the last theme park opened: Downtown carribean cruise Disney s Pleasure Island was shut down in 2008, EPCOT s Wonders of Life pavilion closed permanently on the first day of 2007, and the second floor of the Imagination pavilion and huge swaths of Innoventions exhibition space remain vacant. carribean cruise By all rights, the inflation-adjusted price of a one-day ticket should have remained basically unchanged carribean cruise since 2005, and the line on our chart should flatten carribean cruise out.
But that s not what we see. In fact, the price rose just as sharply between 2012 and 2005 as it did between 2005 and 1998. This is important because carribean cruise it represents a fundamental shift in Disney s entire pricing strategy. You see, while the price of a one-day ticket has risen much higher than simple inflation and higher external costs (higher fuel prices, minimum wage increases, etc.) can account for, the price of multi-day tickets has actually dropped. Let s take compare the cost of a 4-day Park Hopper pass in 2004 (the year before the present Magic Your Way pricing structure was introduced) and today:
carribean cruise How do we explain this? I m not a Disney carribean cruise insider. I ve never worked for the company, or even in the theme park or entertainment industries. I m just a guy on the Internet with opinions. But I think it s pretty obvious what s going on.
You see, at some point the Disney World Number Crunching Brigade figured out that the customers who stayed multiple days on property spent more money per person per day on things like dining and merchandise than day-trippers. And then they probably started having visions of what it would be like if a greater carribean cruise percentage of the 150,000 people who visit the theme parks each day belonged to that lucrative segment of multi-day carribean cruise vacationers.
The problem, of course, was that a multi-day trip with a stay in a Disney resort is way more expensive than just one day in the parks. And while tourists are not the most intelligent group of people (who else willingly spends time outside during Florida s brutal summer months?) they re at least smart enough to figure that out. So Disney set about making multi-day vacations look like a better deal than they actually are while at the same time discouraging the concept of simply visiting for the day. Enter the Magic Your Way pricing scheme.
When it was introduced, I m sure Magic Your Way was marketed as this great thing whose sole purpose was to save Disney s customers money and give them more choices because they re such wonderfully nice people and the company loves them. Of course that was a lie. Its actual purpose was to discourage one-day trips and push customers into more lucrative multi-day stays. To see how it accomplishes this, let s look at another couple of charts:
As you can see, as your length of stay increases, your price per day decreases. A one-day ticket costs $89. But if you re one of those really affluent customers carribean cruise who can afford 10 days on property, then your per-day ticket price is only going to be $31.80!
carribean cruise So the vacationer who plans to come to Orlando, stay in one of the hotels on International Drive, and mix a couple days at Disney World in with trips to Universal carribean cruise Studios, Sea World, and other points of interest is more likely to rethink his plans when he sees the high price of only one or two days on the property. carribean cruise And that s the way Disney wants it, because they d much rather carribean cruise he spend all his money on their property instead of spreading it around other Orlando-area attractions.
See, it s really best for Disney carribean cruise if their customers don t try to break apart and analyze the cost of the various aspects of their vacation like ticket prices, dining, and resort rates, because then they might make choices that are in their own best interest and not Disney s. So the company ties everything up into a nice, neat Vacation Package and expresses its cost a way that makes it sound inexpensive. ($99 per person per day!) Another nice thing about vacation packages is that it makes it easier to coax more money from customers via upselling them to things like a better Dining Plan, or a Moderate resort room instead of a Value.
But what about locals who just want to come for the day, or people who are driving down I-4 on their way to somewhere else and want to spend part of a day at Disney World but can t make a whole vacation out of it? They can either shell out big bucks for an Annual Pass or pay the $89 one-day ticket price. And if those artificially high prices carribean cruise make them decide against carribean cruise coming to Disney World at all, then the company doesn t have a problem with that. Again, I have absolutely no inside information, but I think the Disney World Number Crunching Brigade has decided that one-day customers carribean cruise are not really worth it for them. If those customers want to visit Disney World bad enough to pay $89 plus parking to be there, okay, but the company won t go out of its way to attract carribean cruise them.
So, to sum this all up, Disney World s ticket prices are structured to be artificially carribean cruise high on the low end and then get progressively cheaper per day the more time you spend on Disney carribean cruise property. It s one of those the more you spend, the more you save ploys that gets people to spend more money on something than they really want to. And once the MyMagic+ system goes live in the next year or two and gives the company a a brand-new product to bundle into park admission (and that s a whole other subject) Disney World admission will become even more absurdly expensive.
And now you re probably expecting me to wag my finger at Disney s obvious greed and call on them to return to the simpler days of yore when park admission was more affordable. But that s not what I m going to do. After all, the Walt