We are expecting the price increase to happen on Sunday, Feb. 22 at the Walt Disney World Resort and possibly at the Disneyland Resort in California, as well. (Disney raised its ticket prices on Feb. 23 last year.) The one-day price of an adult ticket to the Magic Kingdom will rise from $99 to $105, while the one-day adult ticket price for the other three parks — Epcot, Disney's Hollywood Studios, and Disney's Animal Kingdom — will rise from $94 to $99. Prices for multi-day tickets and park-hoppers will increase down the line, as well.
A Disney ticket price increase typically triggers a response from the Universal Orlando Resort, so if you have scheduled or are thinking about a visit to the Disney or Universal theme parks within the next few months, you would do well to buy your tickets in advance before the weekend, to lock in the current prices. Disney tickets may be purchased in advance and will not expire until 14 days after their first use. Universal does offer some date-specific discounts on its tickets, so check the fine print if you buy one of the special deals offered on its website.
In addition to buying tickets in advance, you can save by purchasing multi-day ticket packages. Frankly, almost no one pays the full price for one-day tickets to Walt Disney World. (That's like paying the rack rate to stay at a hotel.) Most visitors instead buy multi-day tickets, to see more of the four theme parks at the resort. With multi-day tickets, the price per day to get into the Disney World theme parks falls to less than $40 a day on tickets of nine days or more. Similar discounts on multi-day tickets are available at the Universal Orlando Resort.
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Monopolies tend to maximize profits by raising prices and lowering the quality of services (i.e. 2 to 3 hour waits for Disney's best attractions).
If Disney was truly interested in reducing wait times, they would have invested more money in new attractions. Instead they spent a reported $1.5 billion on MyMagic+ (an information gathering system that in theory will help Disney maximize profits, but will probably not do much to reduce wait times for the average customer).
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