The economics of Disneyland or How much it cost to go to Disneyland?

Long time I wanted to write something here on LeoFinace platform but I’m not a great crypto analyst, nor a great economist. But I found this community very interesting and I’ve learned a lot from their posts.

I’m more a food and travel blogger, light stuff, and never occur to me before something to post in here. Until now.

I thought it might be interesting to share my experience on Disneyland, from an economic point of view, of our last trip to Los Angeles.

To begin with our assessment, I just going to say it’s EXPENSIVE. You don’t need to see it to believe it, but those parks are money maker machines. I think every decision they take is made to make you spend more, and you’ll be happy about it.

Overview of the parks.

I’m talking about the Disney parks in California. There are two Disneyland and Disney California Adventure. In Disneyland you get the classic Disney magic with the castle, the princesses, a lot of classic rides and characters, plus Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge.

In Disney California Adventure you will find many of Pixar characters, the Car’s Land (which in incredible), Avenger’s Campus (meh) and some other stuff.

Both parks are not so big and you can explore them easily in one day each. Maybe you won’t discover all their secrets, but you will at least get a glimpse of everything.

Tickets

The cheapest and secure way to buy your tickets is the official website. If you get it from an agency you will pay the exact same amount for the tickets or maybe plus the agency fee. If you need help planning your trip, you should consider a travel agency.

The cost of the tickets may vary a lot. You can get them from$104 to $164 USD a single ticket for one day. If you buy tickets for 2 or more days, you can get a discount. If you buy 5 tickets for consecutive days, you can get the tickets for as low as $76 USD per day.

The ticket price depends on the season and how far in advance do you buy it? If you want cheap tickets ($104 usd for one day) you need to buy it at least with 2 months in advance and avoid heavy seasons like Halloween or Summer.

We bought the tickets around one month before our trip, so we payed $149 USD. Ouch! But we already had all our travel booked and we really wanted to go.
I think the ideal situation is to spend one day on each park, but we didn’t have the time and we wanted to at least see a little of both parks. In that case you can pay $60 USD more and get a Park Hopper ticket that allows you to go from one park to the other unlimited times after 1 pm until the parks close. We got the Park Hopper option and now out ticket was $209 USD.

But that’s not all. After you select the date and just before checkout you get the option to buy the Genie+ service for $20 USD more per ticket. That allows you to at some attractions to get a fast lane or Lightning Lane as they call it and get unlimited digital pictures of the rides and some photographers scattered around the park. So, we also got it and now our ticket went up to $229 USD.

We are a couple with no kids and just the entrance for one day for both parks with the fast lane cost us $458 USD. I really have no clue how people with 2 o 3 kids spends vacations there.

If we got more time, we could be there 2 days and spend almost the same amount on tickets. But that was not an option for us.

Getting there

I’m not going to count our plane tickets to Los Angeles because that could vary a lot. I’ll just assume you are in LA o somewhere around.

Disneyland is in Anaheim, a town 1 hour way from Los Angeles Downtown. And maybe the cheapest way to get there is by train, that’s around $16 USD per person one way plus the taxi to the park.

But we were not only going to Disneyland and we were aware that public transport in LA was not ideal and taxis are expensive. Because of that we rented a car and that’s also expensive in this city, but I think we got a really good deal. I payed around $440 USD for a car for a week and they gave us an SUV, which I didn’t like it so much at first but made the trip very comfortable.

I’m not going to add the whole $440 to the budget, instead I’ll put the cost of 2 days of the car ($146 USD). The logic behind this is we got there a Thursday night and got back to LA the Saturday morning. We spend there 2 nights. For our park adventure.

Staying there

Because the tickets were very expensive, we decided we needed to maximize our time there and wanted to be there before they opened the park and stayed until they kicked us out of the park. That meant be there around 7:30 am for the rope drop and stayed until midnight.

That gave us another issue, we have to be there one day before our park day and stayed until the next day. That is 2 nights of hotel. But because we were on a one-week trip, we had to pay for the next night even if we got early out of the park. But some people might not need to, but I strongly recommend it because after a heavy park day, you will be tired. Anyway, one night of hotel was around $225 USD.

You can get cheaper hotels from $100 USD or maybe less but you will be further away from the park. The closer to the park higher the prices go. A good deal in front of the entrance of the parks might be around $350 USD. The Disney Hotels are the most expensive ones in the area.

Our hotel was a 12 minutes’ walk from the entrance of the parks. The ones around $100 USD a night might not be walkable. You will need a taxi or a bus, add that to your budget.

Also, you need to put attention that your hotel doesn’t charge you for the parking. Our had free parking, but I saw some hotels charge you for parking from 20 to 50 USD, keep that in mind.

At this point some of you could say: Fuck it, is too expensive and go somewhere else and you might be right, but we didn’t.

The night before the park

If you arrive one night before you can go to Downtown Disney, that’s like the free trial of the parks. Well is not really free, they doesn’t charge you for the entrance but there are just a bunch of stores where you can buy a lot of cool merchandise from all of their franchises.

If you have a car you can buy cheaper stuff at a nearby Target and maybe something to eat too.

The park

As soon as you enter the park, all of the budget that I explained before goes away. You can feel the magic and you forget how much you payed to be there. The best advice you can get to experience Disneyland is ARRIVE EARLY and that means at least a half hour before they open the park, 45 minutes or an hour could be better.

Even if they open the park at 8 am, you can enter the park before and that means you will be closer to the attractions when they open. Maybe the most solicited ride at the moment is Rise of the Resistance. And if you decide to go there as soon as the open you might save 2 hours of standing in line or the $20 USD they charge you for the fast lane pass (specific to this ride, this in not included with the Genie+). By doing this we saved at least 1 ½ hour of line and it was worth it. This ride is designed to make grown-ups man cry.

I’m not going into detail of all we did here, but I can tell you that from 8 to 11 you can hit a lot of rides with lines less than 10 minutes. It almost felt like walk ins. After that the Genie+ got very useful and save us a lot of time but you need to be aware that Genie+ service have complicated rules and you need a strategy. The experts say that in California Parks it’s very useful but in Orlando the experience of this service is not so good.

If remember right, we hit during all day around 19 rides. Which I’ve heard was a pretty good number. That means that for our $229 ticket, each ride cost us only $12. And I think that’s not bad.

The food

If you have the time and patience you can make and bring your food into the park. That is allowed. But we wanted to experience a couple of places inside the parks.

Note: If you really want to go to a restaurant the requires reservation, you’ll need to book 2 months in advance exactly.

We wanted to go to Oga’s Cantina, and we couldn’t get a reservation. Fortunately, they accept walk-ins in a virtual lane, but you need to be close to the cantina to get in line. This place is a Star Wars themed bar. Here you can get alcohol and non-alcohol beverages and some snacks. For tow beverages and a couple of pretzels we payed around $40 USD, maybe less. It is expensive, but not that expensive and I highly recommend it.

We made another at Pym’s Test Kitchen, an Avenger’s themed restaurant. The place is cool but you just go and get your food and search for a table outside. The food is meh, you don’t need a reservation, but you need to order from the app. This one was a little more expensive, I think around $60 USD maybe more or maybe less.

And I think that was all we ate at the park. We had dinner outside the park. And you can easily eat a lot more stuff, but I guess we were busy exploring the parks and rides.

Souvenirs

The merchandise is incredible. It is really hard to not buy anything and you can see all the stuff flying out of the shelves. Specially if you are a Star Wars fan they have a lot of exclusive stuff. I didn’t buy anything because the stuff I really wanted was really, really expensive and big. And I doesn’t have much space at home for display it nor money to spend hahaha!

My wife got a T-shirt and a sweatshirt and that cost around $80 USD

And that was it.

Final budget

Tickets $458
Car $146
Hotel $225
Food $100
Souvernirs $80

Total $1009 USD

Holly shit! That’s a lot of money! I haven’t made this exercise before.

Is it worth it?

Definitely YES! Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge is so cool specially by night. Cars Land is like you are just inside the movie. And while you are inside the parks you forget about everything and focus on the magic of the parks.

I might want to do it again, but not soon.

Do you like this kind of content? Should I do it about other travel content? Tell me more about it.

See you soon.

Eduardo from @elteamgordo

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