I'm a local, about an hour away from WDW. I have been going to Disney my entire life and my family would always take mini 3 or 4 night vacations at Disney every year. We wouldn't buy park tickets though, we would always go swimming at the hotel (because we never had a pool at home, and still don't) or go to the waterparks. Ever since around 2013 we had the waterparks / DisneyQuest pass. From 2015-17 we would buy the FL resident 4 day ticket when they had a summer deal and would use it. By this time (2017) the mini vacations had expanded to week long ones, with a few one night or two night ones throughout the year. In January of 2018, we bought park passes for the very first time. We were silver passholders and still had the separate waterpark pass. Throughout 2018 we had a few one or two night vacations and had the annual week long one. The reason I keep bring up these vacations is because having a pass had no effect on how often we would stay. We just went there as a getaway from life, and to go swimming lol. In 2019 we did not have the week long vacation, but we did have a bunch of short ones. We would also go very often just for the day. Now fast forward to January 2020, the world hadn't gone completely downhill yet. We decided to take the big leap and upgrade to the Platinum Plus pass. Why? Because it included waterparks, photopass (something we never had before) and no block out dates. We went twice before the parks shut down. We only stayed the night once that year, in September when they were having the 40% deal. We stayed one night at Yacht Club, and guess what we did all day? Used the pool. We didn't go to the parks at all, even though Epcot was a few steps away. After the closures and a few issues, my pass ended up getting extended through the end of last month. The plan was to renew with Platinum Plus, but it was no longer an option. We went with Gold, because it was cheaper and it didn't make sense to pay so much more for Platinum when the only benefit was being able to go on spring and Christmas break, a very crowded time anyways. We don't have water park passes anymore which is a huge bummer. Since Blizzard Beach opened in March, we were milking the pass going almost every week before it expired. Even with typhoon being closed it was still a good deal to have a water park pass. Now looking at the new pass options, I can get any tier of pass and pay $99 extra to get the waterparks, which seems like a good deal to me, considering a standalone waterpark pass used to be more than that. The issue is the price, we paid $899 when we first switched to Platinum Plus. Now to have the Incredi-Pass, and add on the water parks and photopass, it would be $1499. That is a HUGE difference. I don't know if there will be any FL resident discounts but it's still a major difference.
Sorry for the long ramble, the point of my story is that having a pass did not make me want to stay on property more, something that Disney sees as a major money maker. Passholders not staying and spending more money makes us useless in the current managements eyes.
on passholders in general, they are really dumping on Florida residents and blue card DVC members.
