Why Ticket Prices Are Increasing

[POLY LOVER]

Very interesting post. I would be extremely curious to see how a 5th park would do...but I'm not convinced it would be a long term solution. Sure for the first few years people would flock to the new park to see what it was about, but eventually the newness would go away and we're right back to where we're at today. As a lot of people have mentioned, everyone wants to visit the originals.

They can't keep the 4 Parks maintained what would a 5th Park accomplish? We need rides in the 4 Parks ASAP.

 

[JoeV]

They need to get creative in finding incentives to spread people out in all the parks. Epcot seems to have the most space. Kids and families will instantly gravitate towards the magic kingdom park. That's what everyone thinks of when they hear the word disneyworld. But it's just too small for the traffic that results. During our visit, animal kingdom was nearly dead. Epcot was laid back. Hollywood was pretty busy. But Magic Kingdom was just insanify. All the time and any hour of the day the entire week. I am talking out of control zoo with the number of people running about. Our comments were, oh-my-god. How can anyone enjoy this? And this was mid september, one of the claimed best times to visit, at least according to bloggers.

 

[rob0519]

They need to get creative in finding incentives to spread people out in all the parks. Epcot seems to have the most space. Kids and families will instantly gravitate towards the magic kingdom park. That's what everyone thinks of when they hear the word disneyworld. But it's just too small for the traffic that results. During our visit, animal kingdom was nearly dead. Epcot was laid back. Hollywood was pretty busy. But Magic Kingdom was just insanify. All the time and any hour of the day the entire week. I am talking out of control zoo with the number of people running about. Our comments were, oh-my-god. How can anyone enjoy this? And this was mid september, one of the claimed best times to visit, at least according to bloggers.

Exactly. They have no way to thin the herd at MK. No other park has as many attractions for little kids and nostalgia for the parents. Until they solve that problem the MK will be a crowd disaster.

 

[ParentsOf4]

Exactly. They have no way to thin the herd at MK. No other park has as many attractions for little kids and nostalgia for the parents. Until they solve that problem the MK will be a crowd disaster.

Disney has absolute control over how many enter the Magic Kingdom. If P&R Chairman Bob Chapek truly wanted to "spread out our attendance throughout the year, so we can accommodate demand and avoid bursting at the seams" (his words), he could cap daily attendance to whatever number he wanted with a wave of his magic wand. In order to guarantee admission, Guests would have to reschedule vacations to visit during less busy times of the year.

But that might, heaven forbid, impact the bottom line. Wall Street wouldn't like that and it would pretty much assure that Chapek's days were numbered.

As many have written in recent years, there is no 'slow' time of the year anymore at WDW. It's already "bursting at the seams" for much of the year. I just was there during the last week of September and felt that crowds were at near-summer levels from a decade ago. A decade ago, I could pretty much walk onto most attractions after Labor Day in September.

Those days are gone.

Corporate Disney needs to stop spending tens-of-billions on stock buybacks (over $42 billion in the last decade) and start to seriously invest in WDW growth initiatives in order to "accommodate demand".

But Wall Street wouldn't like that.

The latest price increase is all about impressing Wall Street while you, the paying customer, are simply taken for granted. Disney is counting on your presence no matter what the cost.

 

[Mouse_Trap]

I'd love to have some rough numbers on the number of days AP holder typically come.
My theory is not that Disney is trying to push them away, not at all. They still want them all, but that they've done the sums and concluded that AP holders aren't paying enough per visit and aren't dropping enough in-park expenditure to compensate (relative to their greedy nature of course). They figure they'll retain the vast majority of AP holders even after significant increases, but instead get an improved daily rate from them.

Wether this bears fruit for them, who knows.

Also I wonder if they're considering that FP and FP+ to be a major factor in the overcrowding problem.

There are roughly 46100 paid parking spaces at Disney, so they earn nearly $1m/day in parking. Calculate in their estimated costs in running the trams, staffing the lots and the TTC, running the monorails, and ferry..with a very high estimate of $100K in expenses per day, I'd guess that they probably easily earn more than $800K/day. That's seat of pants math though, with no facts other than the rough number of spaces and cost of parking. It also doesn't account for the passholders that lower their numbers with their "free parking".

I'd think there would be someone here would could approximate the number of staff working the parking lots on a typical day.

Exactly. They have no way to thin the herd at MK. No other park has as many attractions for little kids and nostalgia for the parents. Until they solve that problem the MK will be a crowd disaster.

Would it be crazy to think they'd be sensible to just build a major MK expansion?...not something like the expansion illusion FLE was. The only expansion that provided was in the amount of people who could be in lines.

 

[disney4life2008]

I do not anticipate crowds decreasing at any level. For those that have been going to disneyworld for ever will continue to go. Disneyland, those people are dedicated 100 percent and there may be a few outliers but they will continue to go and spend. For those that do one trip every few years this may price them out and even that is questionable.

 

[Prog]

I'd love to have some rough numbers on the number of days AP holder typically come.
My theory is not that Disney is trying to push them away, not at all. They still want them all, but that they've done the sums and concluded that AP holders aren't paying enough per visit and aren't dropping enough in-park expenditure to compensate (relative to their greedy nature of course). They figure they'll retain the vast majority of AP holders even after significant increases, but instead get an improved daily rate from them.

Wether this bears fruit for them, who knows.

Also I wonder if they're considering that FP and FP+ to be a major factor in the overcrowding problem.



I'd think there would be someone here would could approximate the number of staff working the parking lots on a typical day.



Would it be crazy to think they'd be sensible to just build a major MK expansion?...not something like the expansion illusion FLE was. The only expansion that provided was in the amount of people who could be in lines.

That was the idea: more people in lines=fewer in crowds. An MK expansion could prove to be a selling point and actually increase crowds, not to mention the fact that it would continue to make the other gates look like a poor value, potentially causing further concentration to the MK.