TRUE VALUE

Written by David Indy Graham

,Get your wallets ready, it’s about time for the annual theme parks to increase the price.

Just as anyone in Central Florida knows that around 5pm in the summer you can count on an afternoon thunderstorm to hit the same is true in February you can count on the local theme parks here raise their ticket prices. And much like many of you, I cringe to think just how much more it’s going to cost me to go to our favor parks; however a very interesting article was written by Brady MacDonald in the Orange County Register out in California asking the question is Disneyland under-priced?

https://www.ocregister.com/2020/01/10/think-disneyland-ticket-prices-are-high-heres-why-the-theme-park-is-underpriced/

I know the article was written with Disneyland in mind however this same break down can be applied to the parks here in Orlando just as easy. When I use to take escalated calls as a supervisor at one of the local theme parks regarding the pricing increases each year, the same breakdown Brady used was very common to be heard over the phone with guest often. Yes, I understand for an average family of 4, even if it’s only an increase of about $10 per person on a multi-day ticket that’s still $40 which takes away from food or merchandise or other travel costs. However, based on actual value for what you are getting, then is it the price increase really that is just too much or is it still under-priced as the article stated?

I decided to apply that to the the Central Florida parks to get an idea locally on what it broke down to per hour like Brady did for Disneyland. For this I only stuck with the valued 1 day 1 park tickets for this example. Just to give people an idea of how much ticket pricing has changed over the years for Disney World I found this great link from Allears. 

https://allears.net/walt-disney-world/wdw-planning/wdw-ticket-increase-guide

I started with Universal Orlando with a 1 park $119 value day with the park opened on average about 11 hours which breaks down to about $10.82 per hour. For Sea World Orlando the average pricing was a little different as they had an online discount for a 1 day ticket as well as their weekday and weekend hours varied. So if you were to buy a ticket at the gate it would run $105.99 for the day. If you went on a weekday which seems to be open about 8 hours it came to $13.25, or for the weekend about $10.60 per hour. If you opted to purchase the promo online ticket in advance that same ticket would run you $85.99 which comes to $10.75 for a weekday or $8.60 on the weekend as they are open about 10 hours. 

Surprisingly the value ticket for the house the mouse built for a value day ran about $109.00 for a 1 day ticket across the board with each park open for about 12 hours, so that was about $9.08 per hour.  Just for fun I decided to look to see what the ticket prices were for the Superbowl this today. The Superbowl on average is just under 4 hours but I went ahead and based it on 6 hours cause after all it's the Superbowl and no one is just going to walk in at kick off and leave right after. After many searches the lowest priced ticket I could find in the upper bowl (Sec 320, Row 28) was going for $5,411.00 + Fees. That broke down to about $901.83 per hour for this event. I'll pause as you do the math to figure out how many theme park per hours it would take to even come to that. 



So what do you think based on a per hour breakdown? Are theme parks still over-priced or under-priced based on the value you get for the day? Let us know in the comments below what you think and why.

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