Like just about everything else, park tickets for Walt Disney World will cost you more effective today. The news was officially announced Friday but rumors were rumbling on the Internet for several days before that.
I had a room-only reservation for my upcoming trip and was planning to make the final payment and add tickets when I arrive Wednesday. But if I waited, I would be paying the price increase, which for my trip, would have been an additional $36. While it's not a significant amount of money, it basically amounts to the cost of the horse-drawn carriage ride we are surprising our teenage daughters with.
The increase amounts to an additional $4 for a one day park pass. And adding park-hopping to your tickets will cost extra too. But as long as your package or r00m-only reservation was paid before today, the price increase won't affect you.
While there are many ways you can save money on your Disney vacation, park tickets are one thing you usually can't get a discount on. You can get a discounted room rate through AAA or with a code or promotion, but they don't discount the park tickets. And I would not want to buy park tickets from some vendor outside the parks.
Last year when we lost my daughter's park pass in Animal Kingdom, we just went to guest services and told them what happened. They printed her out a temporary park pass and when we got back to our resort that day, they printed her a permanent one just like the original with her name on it. It took very little time and did not put any kind of damper on our trip.
It did however, make me think about what might have happened if I didn't have my tickets through Disney as a resort guest. I would have just been out of luck.