The Walt Disney World Ticket Price Inflation

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 Company is a for-profit corporation. Although many people think of it as some kind of beloved public 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 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 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 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 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 I’m sure this table will quickly become outdated in a few months when Disney announces their annual price increases.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 were added to the property, but the price should then basically plateau when Disney stopped 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 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 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 period between 1989 and 1998 the property had gained one new water park (Blizzard Beach) fourteen 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 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 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 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. By all rights, the inflation-adjusted price of a one-day ticket should have remained basically unchanged since 2005, and the line on our chart should flatten 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. How was Disney able to do this without igniting a firestorm of consumer outrage? Easy. They just rigged the system to make multi-day trips look like a better deal.

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 percentage of the 150,000 people who visit the theme parks each day belonged to that lucrative segment of multi-day vacationers.

^{The visions looked a lot like this}

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:

Days	MYW Base Ticket Price	Price Per Day
1	$89.00	$89.00
2	$176.00	$88.00
3	$242.00	$80.67
4	$239	$59.75
5	$268	$53.60
6	$278	$46.33
7	$288	$41.14
8	$298	$37.25
9	$308	$34.22
10	$318	$31.80

Here’s a visual expression of the same data:

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 who can afford 10 days on property, then your per-day ticket price is only going to be $31.80!

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 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. And that’s the way Disney wants it, because they’d much rather he spend all his money on their property instead of spreading it around other Orlando-area attractions.

Another way that Disney steers customers toward its most profitable offerings is with clever marketing, like this TV commercial:

See, it’s really best for Disney 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 make them decide against 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 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 them.

So, to sum this all up, Disney World’s ticket prices are structured to be artificially high on the low end and then get progressively cheaper per day the more time you spend on Disney 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 Disney Company doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It operates in an economic system that encourages and rewards greed. If there was not an obvious financial benefit to the way Disney’s offerings are priced, then they would not price them that way.

Everyone should do their homework. Don’t blindly plunk down however much money Disney wants from you just to get your dose of “Disney Magic”. Use the Internet to look up prices. Analyze how much your vacation is really going to cost, not just in airfares, room rates and ticket prices, but also in food and merchandise prices.

Maybe you’ll decide a Disney vacation is worth it, or maybe you won’t. But at least your decision will be based on solid information and an honest assessment of what’s right for you, instead of the feelings aroused by the clever marketing of a corporate entity that, at the end of the day, doesn’t love you back.

UPDATE: The original version of this article contained a chart stating that the inflation-adjusted price of a 4-Day Park Hopper pass had dropped from $504 to $313 between 2004 and 2013. That was not correct; in fact the inflation-adjusted price of a 4-Day Park Hopper ticket was around $264. I have no idea how I made such a gigantic error. This post has been edited to remove that chart and the erroneous conclusion that was drawn from it. Huge thanks to commenter M.C. Bold for pointing out my mistake.

Echoes of the Vacation Kingdom

I was going through a shoebox full of old family photos recently, and I discovered a couple relics from some Disney World trips we took in the early 1980s.

First, here’s a parking ticket from April 1981. There’s so much to love here; the classic Walt Disney World logo at the top of the ticket, the sailboat/Contemporary/castle logo at the bottom, and most of all, the 50-cent price. In case you’re interested, when you adjust for inflation that 50-cent parking ticket would cost about $1.25 today. Obviously, the current $14 parking fee represents quite a substantial markup. Of course, back then the Transportation budget did not include maintenance on a large fleet of gas-guzzling buses.

Here’s the back side of the ticket, with a nice map of the Magic Kingdom parking lot:

Here’s another interesting little relic of a bygone era: it’s a rare Magic Kingdom park ticket from 1983:

 

You see, before the Walt Disney Company mushroomed into an international multimedia conglomerate, its Orlando arm wanted to play nice with other Florida businesses. My dad worked for the Lakeland-based Publix Supermarkets, and every year we’d take a trip to Disney World during the period when Disney offered discounted admission for Publix employees and their families.

Another interesting factoid: the date stamp on this ticket is October 10, 1983, the day after Disney raised the price of a one-day adult ticket from $15 to $17, making the discounted price of $11 quite a bargain, especially since it included parking. Note that this is after the attraction ticket books were phased out. Imagine paying only $11 for a day in the Magic Kingdom! These days you can hardly get a hot dog at Casey’s for that price.

Also, notice that the “official” name of the park was “Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom”. I think I like that better than the “Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort” nomenclature that the company uses today.

Park admission was seriously underpriced in the early 1980s, and not long after Michael Eisner took the reins of the company it increased sharply. In fact, between the beginning of 1985 and the end of 1986, the price of a one-day park ticket was raised six times! Those price increases (and the end of the “good neighbor” policy that allowed discounted admission for the employees of some Florida-based companies) effectively put regular trips to Disney World outside of my family’s price range.

Still, I’m glad I got to see the place when it was a smaller, more unique Vacation Kingdom of the World.

On Believability, Intelligence, and Underwater Spaceships

CORRECTION: The below poster for Star Trek Into Darkness is fan-made, and not an official poster from Paramount Pictures.

NOTE: This article contains what some might consider minor spoilers for the upcoming film Star Trek Into Darkness, although it’s not anything that hasn’t already been revealed in trailers and the nine-minute IMAX preview. If you’re studiously avoiding any information about the film until you see it, then bail out now.

Although I have always been a huge Star Trek nerd, I’ve mostly stayed out of arguments about the theoretical capabilities of the imaginary technology it depicts. If you examine the early writers’ guides for the Star Trek series that Gene Roddenberry worked on, you’ll notice that there’s very little concrete information about how things like the transporters, phasers, or sensors work. As you watch the shows and movies, you’ll notice that capabilities of the technology are largely dependent on the needs of the plot. The main concern, emphasized over and over again in those writers’ guides, is believability.

I bring this up because a new poster for May’s Star Trek Into Darkness hit the Internet today:

If you’ve seen any of the trailers that have been released thus far or the nine-minute IMAX preview, then you know that at some point near the beginning of the film, the Enterprise is “hiding” beneath the ocean of an alien planet with an atmosphere and gravity similar to Earth, and that it dramatically rises up out of the water and eventually flies off into space in what is sure to be a dramatic and exciting moment in the film.

I don’t like it.

Isaac Asimov once told Gene Roddenberry that he appreciated Star Trek because, although it broke the rules of physics for dramatic convenience, it did so in a way that was still believable and respected the intelligence of the audience. Of the two big sci-fi franchises, Star Trek has always been seen as the “smarter” one. It’s inspired people to become astronauts and doctors and scientists and engineers. Star Wars is more “fun” in the conventional sense, and I certainly respect J.J. Abrams’ attempts to inject some of that audience-pleasing action and fun into Star Trek. Lord knows it needs it, after the late-90s/early 2000s phase when the franchise devolved into endless scenes of characters pushing buttons and spouting technobabble.

But here is my nerdy problem with the Underwater Enterprise. It’s not that I don’t think the ship could survive underwater without leaking. It’s that the Enterprise has always been a huge spaceship that was designed to work in space only. It’s not supposed to be able to land on a planet. A ship that’s shaped like the Enterprise simply couldn’t maintain its structure under Earthlike gravity. Those skinny pylons wouldn't be able to support the weight of those massive engines. That slender “neck” wouldn’t be able to support that broad, massive saucer. And anyway, how’s it supposed to be able to gently coast down through the atmosphere, land in the water, and then lift back off into space again? The only reason for this is because writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (the same crack team that gave us a giant desert behind Washington D.C.’s Air and Space Museum in Transformers 2) thought it would look cool.

And I’m sure it will. But it’s not believable. I’m certain there were other ways to accomplish whatever level of drama and action the scene is trying to achieve without sacrificing that believability that’s always separated the best Star Trek from its less-intelligent brethren like Star Wars or Lost In Space, and once I see the movie I’ll be able to come up with a half-dozen or so.

At this point you might be saying “Dave, you’re overthinking this. Just turn off your brain for two hours and enjoy the movie!” But one of the things that makes Star Trek special is that you don’t have to turn off your brain to enjoy it. To misquote Captain Kirk, I don’t want my brain taken away, I need my brain!

I’m sure Star Trek Into Darkness will be an enjoyable movie. And I’m sure that scriptwriters Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof have peppered their script with classic Trek references just for geeks like me. It’s just a shame that, in the process, we have to lose some of the intelligence and believability that one of the granddaddies of science fiction, Isaac Asimov, enjoyed so much.

The MyMagic+ Backlash and Fireworks Show

For the last couple weeks, the new MyMagic+ program that will soon be implemented at Walt Disney World has been the big topic of conversation in most Disney fan circles. If you’re reading this I’m going to assume you know what’s going on, but I’ll restate some of the basic facts:

On January 5, some sensitive (and no doubt highly confidential) information on the long-awaited NextGen project appeared on an Internet message board. According to the leaked information, a major implementation of the NextGen program is an RFID-enabled bracelet (which we would later learn is called a MagicBand, presumably because the names DreamBracelet and PixieCuff didn’t test well with focus groups) that would be issued to park vistors at Walt Disney World and would serve as a combination park ticket, room key, and FastPass. The document made it clear that, while this change would be marketed as an improvement to the customer experience, its true goal was to enable the company to conduct total surveillance of every customer on their property as part of a gigantic data-mining operation. But what really creeped people out (besides the total surveillance thing, of course) was this passage:

To reach the profit targets and overarching design goals set for this project, as well as export the technology and its fruit to other companies, Disney understood early on that there could be no opt-out for any guest. Application of an 'opt-out mode' would remove the control and thereby defeat the financial gains required of such a massive capital outlay defined publicly devoid of detail.

Amazingly, some people actually had a problem with the idea of mandatory participation in a surveillance/data mining scheme as a condition of doing business with Walt Disney World.

Two days later, on January 7, Disney attempted to regain control of the situation with a post on the Disney Parks blog “announcing” MyMagic+ and also a New York Times fluff piece that read like a company press release. Both articles assured us that customers would be able to opt out of the new program if they wished. However, there were noticeably few details offered as to how that would work. And since Disney is obviously looking to make a lot of money from mining their customers’ data, the consensus that emerged among the level-headed members of the online community that while MyMagic would probably have an opt-out option, the company would likely make it a painful and inconvenient process, and that those who did opt out would be “penalized” with a worse theme park experience.

Then on January 23, Massachussetts Congressman Edward J. Markey sent a letter to Disney CEO Bob Iger in which he raised a lot of the same questions about privacy and customer experience that had been discussed on Internet message boards for the previous three weeks, but which Disney had pointedly failed to address. I’ve linked to the full letter above, but some of the more interesting questions are:

• “Will Disney guests be required to use MagicBand?”
• “If a guests choose not to use MagicBand, what disadvantages, if any, will that guest experience while visiting a Disney park (i.e., longer waits for attractions, etc.)?”
• “Does your company plan to use information collected from MagicBands to target advertisements and marketing at guests? . . . If yes, do you planto target advertisements at kids 12 and under? If yes, please explain the ways in which you plan to target advertisements at children.”

Now, I’m certainly willing to believe that Mr. Markey’s motives in writing this letter are less about genuine concern for Disney’s customers and their children and more about a desire to make himself look like a Crusading Advocate For Ordinary People in advance of an upcoming special election for a Senate seat in his state that has recently opened up.

Nevertheless, the questions he raised are still valid. Most of them are things that the Disney fan community has been wondering about since news of this whole MyMagic+ thing broke earlier in the month. And none of them were directly addressed in the company’s January 7 blog post or the New York Times story they spoon-fed to “reporter” Brooks Barnes the same day.

So, if Disney was really not engaging in anything sinister, and the Congressman’s letter was nothing but a groundless bit of political grandstanding, then it would be quite easy for the company to pop his balloon by simply answering the questions. So that is not what Disney did. Instead, CEO Bob Iger and his lawyers replied to the Congressman with an angry letter that made the following points:

• Disney is a beloved American company, and as such it is completely above criticism.
• The mere suggestion that Disney would ever do anything the least bit underhanded is ridiculous and Disney is offended that the Congressman would dare to even think of such a thing.
• Disney would never haphazardly introduce a program that manipulates children. (Presumably, it would only introduce a program that manipulates children in a non-haphazard fashion)
• Congressman Markey’s stupid questions are answered on Disney’s website, and if he’d spent five minutes reading it before writing his stupid letter, he would have known better than to cast aspersions on Disney and its sterling reputation.
• But, just to shut the Congressman’s big fat stupid mouth, answers to a few of his questions are on an attached document.
• Congressman Markey is ugly and his mother dresses him funny.

To be fair, one of the Congressman’s questions (the one about whether or not Disney will use information collected through the MagicBand program to market to children under 13) was directly answered on the document attached to Mr. Iger’s letter. But the rest of it is nothing but a lot of angry posturing.

Noted Disney blogger and podcaster Tom Bricker put it best, I think, when he quoted this adage: “If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the law is on your side, pound the law. If neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table.” That’s what we’re seeing here. Is that because the facts and/or the law is not on Disney’s side? I don’t know, since I’m not a Disney insider, just a guy who puts his opinions on the Internet. But it sure looks that way.

I think it’s very telling that the only people with whom Mr. Iger’s angry, indignant response seems to have played well are:

1. Fanatical Disney fans who love anything the company does, no matter what it is. If Disney World opened an attraction called “Kill Baby Kittens With A Hammer” these people would squeal excitedly about how “magical” it is.
2. People who, for political/ideological reasons, dislike Mr. Markey and/or the political party to which he belongs.

But that’s a pretty tiny fraction of Disney’s overall customer base, isn’t it? The majority of Disney’s customers are parents who partake of the company’s offerings only because it offers reliably kid-friendly entertainment. They don’t frequent Disney-themed websites or blogs and likely would have never heard of MyMagic+ until they went to book their next Disney World vacation on the Disney website, where the program would be presented in a positive light.

But now the Congressman’s inquiries about the program, and the bellicose response of Mr. Iger and his lawyerbots, are sure to attract media attention. And not the kind of “gee-whiz, look at this excellent and cool new thing at Walt Disney World” attention the company prefers, but the “Disney wants to use a manacle-like wristband to track your children” narrative that the company wanted to avoid at all costs.

I realize I haven’t said a lot about my opinions on MyMagic+. That’s coming in a later post. For now, the backlash surrounding this program makes for one heck of an entertaining fireworks show. Enjoy!

Nova Olympic

In addition to writing snarky essays about Disney World, I have also been known to write Star Trek stories. I haven’t written very many, because good stories are actually really hard to write. It is much, much easier to write a sarcastic essay making fun of a badly-written piece of fiction than it is to write a good one.

But every once in a great while, I have a good idea. Or at least an idea I think is good enough to spend time on. A few years noted publisher of Star Trek fan fiction Orion Press ran a contest in which writers were invited to submit a short story that took place entirely on the bridge of the Enterprise. In my brain, something clicked. I’d recently re-watched my favorite Battlestar Galactica episode, “33”, and I wanted to do a Star Trek story where Captain Kirk was forced to make an impossible decision similar to the one President Roslin and Commander Adama have to make.

At the same time, I’ve always had a special affection for the first few episodes of the original series. Star Trek had a different flavor then: space was a big and lonely place, William Shatner played Kirk in a much more subdued manner, and the Enterprise seemed busier (more extras in the corridors) and more complex to operate. For example, although the ship’s phaser banks were aimed from the bridge, the command to fire actually had to be relayed down to the phaser control rooms.

In an extremely rare occurrence, the complete story popped into my head almost fully-formed. It didn’t win the contest, but I’ve gotten some positive feedback on it nonetheless.

So, if you’re still here you’ll find my short story “Nova Olympic” after the jump. It’s got drama, action, and even a few EPCOT Center references. Enjoy!

Star Trek Into Darkness Teaser Reaction

I love the Internet on days like this. You see, I knew that there was going to be nine minutes of footage from the new Star Trek film shown before the IMAX release of The Hobbit, and I hoped that we’d also see some kind of trailer released to the web around the same time. I certainly didn’t expect to see anything before then. But when I woke up this morning, the Internet was waiting for me with not only a Star Trek Into Darkness teaser, but also HD screencaps and a shot-by-shot breakdown of said teaser!

In case you haven’t seen the teaser, here it is (I’ve linked to the slightly longer, Japanese-subtitled version). Don’t worry about spoilers; it does a pretty good job showing you stuff without really giving away anything, not even the name of the villain:

If there’s one thing the trailer makes clear, it’s that the film’s villain, whoever he is, is mad about something, he believes the heroes are responsible in some way, and he’s out to get revenge by attacking Earth. Sound familiar? It should, because it’s the same plot device we’ve seen in the last two Star Trek films, and here’s where I worry a little bit.

Although 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis and 2009’s Star Trek were very different movies (i.e. one was a tired, derivative attempt to cash in on the Next Generation franchise one last time, and the other was a fresh, exciting, and genuinely entertaining romp) they each featured a revenge-driven villain who was determined to destroy Earth for reasons that didn’t really make sense. In each film, as the villain announced his Earth-destroying intentions you could almost hear the screenwriters saying to themselves “we’ve got to threaten Earth or the audience won’t be invested”. Now, this is not necessarily a problem if the movie is genuinely entertaining, but it can hurt the film in repeat viewings.

A key reason why The Wrath of Khan is still so highly-regarded three decades after its release is because it makes sense. Khan’s actions are what drive the plot, and because those actions make sense the movie has a high rewatchability value. I’m not saying that’s the only reason why Star Trek II is so good, because it’s not, but if Khan was just your regular poorly-written action movie bad guy whose motivations weren’t believable, that fact would become more and more obvious with each viewing of the film, and eventually it would be defined by its flaws. This happens all the time; when Independence Day came out all anyone could talk about was the action and the special effects; now it’s chiefly remembered for the nonsensical plot device of its heroes hacking into an alien spaceship with an old Macintosh PowerBook.

As of this writing, we really don’t know a lot about Star Trek Into Darkness. Hopefully there’s a well-thought-out plot behind all that action.