I am debating purchasing an annual pass for 2018. I am not a Florida Resident, so I only have two options really available to me. The Platinum, and the Platinum Plus. I never go to water parks, so the former is the likely option.
I intend to go to WDW in Jan or Feb, April, October, and around December in 2018.
For other non-Florida residents: is it worth it? How many trips would you say you have to make (park days?) to say it is worth the cost?
I just spent a half day doing the math on this. 1st conclusion: it depends on your desired trip length and cost. Here are my stats and perhaps it will help you get an idea of how to run the numbers for your situation:
1. We like to have a 2-week trip, preferably 12-14 park days, but we can go as low as 10. This is an important factor for us because if we buy tickets, there is no way we would go over the 10 day ticket, as it would be a huge jump in price for the extra days. So if we did tickets, it is limiting us to the 10 park days per trip, and that means we would be less likely to take days off to hang out at the pool and such, which we like to do.
2. For my family of 8, we stay off property and get 2 rental cars ($40/day in parking without an annual pass). For 12 park days, this means an extra $480 for parking per trip.
3. We currently have a pass, and we do use the discounts for food and merch. If there are 20% off restaurants, we do that. So I came up with an estimate of how much that saved us for our average trip. It was a few hundred dollars. (keep in mind that for items #2 and 3, you only need one AP to get these discounts in general)
4. The grandparents sometimes do surprise trips with a couple kids. Having annual passes for the kids means that might happen more often, as the grandparents would not have to pay for their tickets. (not a huge factor, but worth considering for us).
5. If you have a few kids under age 10, tickets are cheaper, AP is the same for all ages. Not a big deal but worth factoring in.
6. We don't do water parks, so that wasnt a factor for us.
The most important consideration then is how often we will go. I put all the monetary factors I just listed into a spreadsheet and compared a 10 day trip with tickets to APs. Obviously, for a single trip in a year, the APs were not worth it. But for us, the break-even point was going 1.4 times per year. At that rate, it would not make a difference in money to buy tickets or APs. We generally go 1.5 times a year (my desire is to go 2 times), so the passes ARE worth it for us. But our next trip is in December, and the passes expire in Feb. Afte that we will not be back until the fall at the earliest. So even considering the renewal discount, it is not worth it for us to renew in Feb. We will get passes again when we go in late 2018, because I know for a fact I will be going in 2019 for Galaxys Edge at least once.
So as you can see there is a lot of math and other considerations. If you can use excell it will help! Hope this has been helpful!