Annual passes vs 14 day ultimate ticket?

[Disneyfan.UK121]

I'm rather confused ( it doesn't take me much!!!) with lots of news regarding AP price increases, different tickets, parking price increases I just wondered if anyone has had any experience with purchasing either an AP at the guest relations desk when you were there allowing all the AP perks (imc free parking) or upgrading a UK ultimate ticket at the guest relations desk. We will only be going for 3 weeks next Easter. I don't know whether to buy ultimate 14 day tickets for my husband and two children in the UK (8 and 4) and buy an AP for me when I'm there? will it save money on parking? Thanks in advance.

 

[Elise79]

With the price of APs now I would say no it won't - even if you go every day for the 14 days of your ticket it will cost you $280 for parking.

You get free MM with an adult Ulimate ticket anyway so the photos have no value.

The only other benefit is the 10% off in shops.

If you are planning WP you will need the platinum plus AP which is about $882. We got $500 for our 14 day tickets in August which means you need to spend $1000 in shops to break even!!

Without WP the pass is $798 which is closer to breaking even however you are giving up the WP.

 

[Minniesgal]

I think for the annual pass to make sense you need to do more than 1 trip in its life. Which is hard to do.

If you only bought 1 annual pass you would only have photos of the person who owns the pass so the UK included MM is a better deal.

Now depending on how many park days you want US tickets can be a better deal. We decided we only want 8 days so with water parks and more option we saved about £180 against a 14 day ultimate

 

[tttessa]

There is one other disadvantage with the AP - you can only book 7 days FP+ at 30 days

 

[steve_rob]

Funny enough, we've been talking about exactly the same thing today. We're currently in Florida (going home tomorrow- boo hoo!) and were doing 19 nights off-site, with 9 visits to Disney parks and obviously got stung by the parking price changes mid-holiday. We've just worked out that if we'd bought an annual pass and one 21 day Ultimate ticket (instead of 2 x 21 days) we've have saved about £15/$20 overall once taking free parking into account - not exactly a huge saving. It was about the same when using the new AP / 2016 UK ticket prices. Maybe we'd have saved a bit more with merchandise / restaurant discounts on the AP, but our spending is mainly off-site, so probably not that much. Still something worth considering for our next trip however.

 

[Jon84]

There is one other disadvantage with the AP - you can only book 7 days FP+ at 30 days

Unless you stay at a hotel.

For us, we are making 2 trips next year. We've booked with Free Dining, MM, and Disney $, so 2 separate lots of tickets work out cheaper than an AP

Last year we did AP as we had 2 weeks off site, and one week onsite

 

[saintrob]

To get the value from an AP you really need to have two trips per year. We visit in summer and Christmas and have purchased the AP for the last few years and it's worked out very cost effective. We're DVC members so get the additional discount. There are some good perks too which we take advantage of such as discounts on Fantasia golf.

The greatest benefit for us from the AP are the room discounts which can save us up to 35% off the rack rate during the summer.