Well the angst is over. Disneyland fans have spewed their piece over the "astounding", as Al Lutz called it, ticket price increase. Of course there are the Disney apologists who will maintain Disney always raises prices and that's perfectly fine because everything Disney does is good and because, well, it's Disney! It appears income has a lot to do with being a Disney apologist. On the other end of spectrum I have read about people saying they have officially been priced out, especially in the annual pass categories. One fan said she cried over how the price increase seriously impacted in a negative way a reunion trip she had scheduled in June. Some stories out there were down right sad. I feel bad for them. The apologists make me angry.
After thinking about it for a couple of days, I can honestly say that the latest price increase will most likely have altered my future plans with trips to Disneyland forever. Mrs. DisneylandTraveler and I, over the last several years, would buy a park-hopper package, go on our trip, then convert the park-hoppers to annual passes before we left. And once you have that annual pass in hand, you immediately begin thinking about your next trip, and maybe the next trip after that to gain maximum value from the expense of the purchasing the annual pass. Three trips to Disneyland in a twelve month period? Disney would have loved us since we always ate at the park and Mrs. DLT loves to....shop Disney. The annual pass we normally buy is now $469.00, up over $200 from when we first got into the annual pass routine. I don't plan on spending $469.00 for an annual pass unless, as they say, my ship comes in or I win the lottery or something (hard to do when you don't play though).
I think from this point forward, Mrs. DLT and I will park-hopper our trips. We will not convert them to annual passes. We will plan a trip for a select number of days. I think we will also take the option where if you just visit one of the parks on given day instead of "hopping" you can save a bit more. Disneyland loses out on this. Instead of 2 or 3 trips in twelve month period, we may be good with just making one. The pressure is off to "need to go to Disneyland to use of our annual passes". We'll go when we are good and ready.
Does Disney care that our trips may have been cut back because of the latest price increase? All depends on how many others there are like me.
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