As was expected, Disney World rolled out a new price increase this morning. It featured the “seasonal / tiered / surge” pricing that people had been expecting (Disney calls it “Seasonal” pricing, so I guess that’s what I’ll go with), but (thankfully?) only applied that pricing structure to 1-day tickets. Multi-day tickets will continue to have the same prices throughout every day of the year.

Here is an explanation of the new “seasonal” and multi-day pricing changes: (There will be more analysis and reaction coming in a separate post, later.)

Seasonal Pricing

Seasonal pricing is for single day tickets only and is based on a calendar that’s available when you choose to buy a single day ticket on Disney World’s website (the calendar currently only lists “seasons” through the end of 2016). It divides the entire calendar into 3 different “seasons”: Value, Regular, and Peak (and like Disney’s hotel “seasons”, they don’t align with traditional summer, spring, etc… seasons at all.)

NOTE: As you might expect, you can use a higher tiered ticket for a lower tiered day (e.g., Peak Season ticket on a Value Season day), but you can’t go the other way around.

Here is the breakdown for the Disney World price “seasons” for the rest of the year:

• February 28 through March 3 – Value
• March 4 through 10 – Regular
• March 11 through April 2 – Peak
• April 3 through May 26 – Regular
• May 27 through July 23 – Peak
• July 24 through August 21 – Regular
• August 22 through September 29 – Value
• September 30 through November 19 – Regular
• November 20 through November 27 – Peak
• November 28 through December 21 – Regular
• December 22 through December 31 – Peak

Though I plan on writing about this more later, two things jump out at me: (1) I’m really glad Disney didn’t just make every weekend day part of a Regular Season or above; and (2) it’s interesting that early December (normally thought of as one of the lower crowd times) has been marked as a “Regular” season.

The pricing for the various seasons is as follows (NOTE: All prices are without tax):

Value Season

• Magic Kingdom – $105
• Epcot, Animal Kingdom, The Studios – $97
• Park Hopper- $155

Regular Season

• Magic Kingdom – $110
• Epcot, Animal Kingdom, The Studios – $102
• Park Hopper – $160

Peak Season

• Magic Kingdom – $124
• Epcot, Animal Kingdom, The Studios – $114
• Park Hopper – $164

The Value Season 1 Park tickets are actually the same prices that those same tickets were in 2015. The Regular Season tickets get a $5 bump across the board, while Peak Season gets a whopping $19 per ticket increase over Value Season when talking about the Magic Kingdom, $17 for the other parks and $9 for a Park Hopper.

All 1-Day tickets purchased this year must be used by December 31, 2017 or they “expire.” (Thankfully, you can get the amount you paid for your “expired” tickets as a credit to use  for purchasing new tickets at the then existing prices.)

Multi-day Tickets

Multi-day tickets also got a (more standard) price increase of $5 per day. In other words:

• 2-Day Ticket – $202 ($10 increase)
• 3-Day Ticket – $290 ($15 increase)
• 4-Day Ticket – $325 ($20 increase)
• 5-Day Ticket – $340 ($25 increase)
• 6-Day Ticket – $355 ($30 increase)
• 7-Day Ticket – $370 ($35 increase)

The Park Hopper option went up $5 dollars as well (it’s now $55 for tickets of 1 to 3 days and $69 for tickets of 4+ days).

Summary

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll have more to say about this in a bit, but my initial reaction is that things are not as bad as I was expecting (I was convinced that the “seasons” would be more like Disney Hotels and that all weekend days and holidays were would be part of a higher priced “season.”) The $5 per day multi-day ticket increase is pretty much in line with my expectations.