Before we went to Walt Disney World, we had a number of family discussions about what ticket media to get. My brother was adamant that we only needed 10 day passes, I was equally convinced we needed Premium Annual Passes (PAP) since we were going for 4 weeks.

However since my brother was going to be buying for himself, his wife and 3 children, cost was weighing heavily on his mind (and his budget).

At the time we were looking at purchasing the tickets, the cost of the 10 day park hoppers + water parks for adults was $US458 (cheaper for children) and the PAPs were $US649 each – with no discount for children.

I was so convinced that PAPs were the better option, so in a fit of generosity I paid the difference between the 10 day and the PAPs for my brother’s family, with a warning that they would never get another Christmas or birthday present ever again … yeah, I’m so mean.

I thought it would be interesting therefore to calculate how much value we got out of our PAPs.  Prices have since gone up, as they regularly do for WDW tickets, but the main lesson from this post is do the maths.  To work out if an annual pass is good value for you, you need to calculate how many days you plan to go to the parks in a given year, either in one trip like us or in multiple trips.

For my value calculation every time we went into a park, I noted down the 1 day entry cost – so if we went to EPCOT, Hollywood Studios or Animal Kingdom I put down $US97, for Magic Kingdom I put down $105 and for the water parks $58 each time.  I realise there are some flaws in this logic but its my blog and my rules 😉

So keeping in mind the 10 day passes would have been $458 and the PAPs $649, the total amount for our daily entry was…

$US2732

So our $649 PAPs were a complete bargain!  Disney isn’t cheap but I do believe it offers a good value for money holiday destination under certain circumstances…