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Have you always wanted to visit Disney World or Disneyland, but were waiting for your kids to be a little older or for your boss to finally approve your time off? The Happiest Place on Earth isn’t far out of reach. But if you haven’t looked at ticket prices for a while, you might be in for a shock. While the Walt Disney Company under Bob Chapek has been “nickel-and-diming” park guests to death for years, now, Disney Parks is preparing to roll out a “premiere access pass” so you can ride a particular ride at a certain time.
Cinemablend reports:
When the Disney Parks reopened following the worst days of the global pandemic they did so without many of the features guests had come to expect. One of those was the FastPass system. While it worked slightly differently at all the Disney Parks, it was a method for allowing guests to bypass most of the line for many attractions. We haven’t heard anything from Disney World or Disneyland about when, or even if, the FastPass system will return, and many expect that when it does come back, it will be with significant changes. We may now have our first look at what those changes could be, as Disneyland Paris has revealed a new replacement for the FastPass system called Disney Premier Access– which will allow guests to jump the queue (for an added fee).
Guests that want to access this feature will pay another $9 to $18 extra per ride. Purchases are made per attraction, thus a single purchase appears to be good for a complete party, with a maximum of 12 persons per time slot. In addition, each attraction, per passenger, and per day, a maximum of three Premier Access passes can be purchased.
This of course is on TOP of the overpriced park passes and everything else that goes along with it. Attendees can now expect to pay $109 for a single one-day pass, $45 for a day of parking, and other costs such as transportation, hotels, and meals. Cinemablend continues:
Fans of both Disneyland and Disney World are waiting to see just what will happen when some sort of replacement for FastPass arrives. On the one hand, nobody is necessarily all that excited to pay more for a Disney vacation; it’s not like it’s cheap to begin with. At the same time, there’s a general feeling that FastPass+ at Disney World simply didn’t work. The necessity of having every single ride in every park use the system resulted in much longer standby queues than many rides would have normally had. A paid option, especially if it only works on certain rides, might be preferable.
“If Walt [Disney] were alive today, he would probably be uncomfortable with the prices they’re charging right now,” Scott Smith, an assistant professor of hospitality at the University of South Carolina, who worked as a cast member in Disney’s Haunted Mansion, tells the Washington Post. “They’ve priced middle-class families out.”
And the price increases might not stop there. There will be new attractions, entertainment, dining, merchandise, and more. As these changes roll out, it wouldn’t be a surprise if prices went up even more.
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