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A surprising revelation

So, we’re going to pick a baseline number for a day at Magic Kingdom, and that number is $114 since that’s what it would cost to purchase admission today. For a child, the cost is $108. For the family of five mentioned above, the price of admission at Magic Kingdom is $552 ($114 + $114 + $108 + $108 + $108). Now that we have the baselines, we can compare the era of 1971 to today. Warning: I can already tell that this one isn’t going to go as well as Disneyland did.

$4.50 in 1971 is the equivalent of $26.83 today. $20 in 1971 is $119.22 now. In other words, even after we adjust for inflation, you could almost take an entire family of five to Magic Kingdom for what it costs for a single person today. The explanation for this isn’t what you’d expect, though.

In the Disneyland piece, I noted that Disney anticipates that guests ride nine attractions per visit. That 7 Adventure Ticket Book only offered seven. Factoring in the added cost of two more E Ticket attractions raises the daily expense by $1.70 per person, bringing the cost of an opening day visit to Magic Kingdom to $6.20 for adults. Even when we perform inflation adjustments on that total, it’s still only $36.96.

What’s the explanation for why Disneyland hasn’t seen a lot of ticket price inflation while Walt Disney World has? It’s the simple one. On opening day, Walt Disney World offered much better than value than its counterpart. To wit, the calculations we evaluated in the last piece revealed that a day at Disneyland cost $8.70. Adjusting that for inflation from 1955 to 1971, that’s $13.15.

Image: Disney

You’re not reading that wrong. A 1955 visit to the Happiest Place on Earth cost the equivalent of $13.15 in 1971. Meanwhile, an opening day visit to Magic Kingdom in 1971 only cost a guest $6.20 for the same number of attractions. It was less than half! Disney simply didn’t charge as much for their first Florida park. I cannot for the life of me understand why, though. Looking at the data, they really low-balled those ticket costs in 1971. I fully understand why they felt compelled to charge for transportation.

As a straight apples to apples comparison of Walt Disney World in 1971 versus Walt Disney World today, the numbers are alarming. What cost $37 then is $114 today. That’s an increase of more than triple.

To a larger point, the stomach-turning inflation adjustment we see for Walt Disney World from 1971 to today is more reflective of what a terrific value the park opened in 1971. If we swapped in that Disneyland number instead, it would have an expense of $78.37 in current dollars. Today’s admission price during peak season of $114 exceeds the price of 1955 Disney park admission by only 45 percent, which is less than the 52 percent increase that Disneyland itself has seen in that time frame.

In other words, the cost of attending a Disney theme park today as opposed to 1955 is cheaper percentage wise at Walt Disney World than at Disneyland. To be clear, that’s using the surge pricing option for Disneyland, which is $119 as opposed to $114 at Magic Kingdom.  For our proverbial family of five, their cost went from $119.22 to $552. Yes, it costs roughly 4.6 times as much to visit Walt Disney World today than in 1971. Even acknowledging that part of the explanation was the excellent opening day value back then, it’s still a staggering number.

 
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