Breaking Point for Disney Cost

[DisneyPrince1982]

What's your breaking point for deciding the cost no longer justifies the experience?

 

[Tonka's Skipper]

The magic and pixie dust is well worth the price!


AKK

 

[loves to dive]

I can't imagine one for me. I've been going since the time I was a single mother with a young child and it took me two years of saving to get to go until the child is grown and married and I can go twice a year. It's really no more expensive for me than a trip to my favorite hotel on the beach in southern Georgia.

 

[Gru]

I'm about there....

 

[Nohal]

It would end up costing me more for a week at the Jersey shore than it does for a week at Disney. To me it is well worth the cost but its just me and DH and we go in September - free dining - rooms cost less - and we stay in a value.

 

[DemonLlama]

If you'd told me in 2000 how much I'd be spending for a trip in 2015 it would definitely have been far below that!

Frogs in the slowly warming water don't see it that way.

We did finally reach the threshold for MVMCP this year, first time in 7 trips at Christmas we won't be attending.

 

[danny1649]

Mjns was easy a $18,000 Mickey Rolex or $79,95 for nice Mickey watch with similar band to Rolex..No Rolex but happy with my $80.00 watch.

 

[PSUGuy]

It's more about my breaking point for what WDW eliminates. I would have said closing the Adventurer's Club and Comedy Warehouse, but since we still go yearly, that's not it. If you told me those were to go AND Off Kilter AND World Showcase Players I'd have predicted that that would do it but that didn't happen. Now since we're Food&Wine people I'd say that if Disney makes Eat to the Beat concerts on weekends only as is Flower&Garden we'd be done. Who knows.

Bill From PA

 

[JennyDrake]

I'm far from my OVERALL breaking point as I travel solo and I feel very safe at WDW. I make 3-4 trips/year (work takes me to Orlando, then I stay n play with The Mouse) and BUT I have CUT BACK and here is what HAS changed for me:

No more deep discounts of AP rates on value rooms-just a handful of year ago I could stay for $69-79/night in value or $99/night in moderate (I do not visit during peak seasons)--so now I stay for 3-4 nights/trip instead of 5 like I used to. (Dec. 2013 I paid $132/night WITH AP discount for a room at the All Stars--that is absurd.)

The RIDICULOUS cost of OOP TS meals means 1-3 TS PER YEAR--not one per day or every other day like I used to

MVMCP is now so expensive and the crowds so thick, it is not even a consideration

Like PSUguy, I'm also very sour on the cutbacks and NO Disney adding yet another Princess something or another does not make up for the losses.

 

[broncobill]

The very first thing for me is deciding if we are going to go knowing it won't be cheap. Then I get on the Disney website and start looking at cost, length of stay, resorts and flight. Then just start working the details into what I am willing to pay. Lenght of stay is more important to me that the resort. In the past we have always stayed for 10 days at POP. That was more important than say, staying 5 days at a deluxe. Then I try and tweek the details to get a cost I'm comfortable with.

 

[Jennytoon]

The price range of a Disney vacation is huge.

We have done the trip where we stayed off-site, drove from Boston (we actually like that part), brought all our snacks into the park, ate out only once a day and never in Disney restaurants because they were too expensive. We had a blast.

Eight years later we are no longer paying $35K / year in daycare fees, and we are coming this year for 16 nights in a DVC villa and bringing one of my daughter's friends at our expense. We are flying and renting a car, because the vacation days that would normally be used for driving are eaten up by our 3-days longer than usual stay. We are eating in one TS and one CS every day, because I promised my DH that we could 'faux' DDP; we're not getting it because what it covers doesn't suit our style of eating, but he wants to see what it would be like to pretend. I expect that we will have a blast.

My parents are totally not theme park people, but when discussing with my mom last year why we keep going back I said: "Everyone always has a good time." It's as simple as that.

We know from experience that we can make a Disney vacation similar in cost to other vacations we would take as a family. If we need to, we'll cut back to this point for as long as it's still true that "everyone always has a good time." If we have cut as far as we can and still can't afford it, then we won't be able to afford vacationing most other places either which is a totally different question and not relevant to the one posed by the OP. And if we don't need to cut back but it's no longer a place where everyone in my family routinely has a blast -- then it's not really worth any amount of money, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

 

[PantherPete]

My family is probably at the breaking point. We had an eye opener last year. Due to some work commitments, I didn't book our usual November week at Disney. By the time it became clear that I would be able to take the time off, the resort we wanted was booked and most of the good ADRs were gone. So we booked a trip to the Moon Palace in Cancun. An ocean front room at an all inclusive 4 star resort (where my sons could eat steaks and grilled salmon for breakfast lunch and dinner if they wanted instead of chicken nuggets & grapes) was much cheaper than a comparably luxurious week at Disney (Yacht Club club level room, dining plan with 1 table service per day). So much cheaper that we had enough of our Disney budget left over that we were able to pay for 1/2 of our week at Universal for spring break (HRH club level). This years trip, which is the same exact trip that we have taken almost every November since 2009 (Yacht or Beach Club club level), costs almost twice as much as it cost us in 2009 and the only thing that changed is that my older son is now considered an adult for the dining plan (yay, he can now get a meal that actually will fill him up). I love Disney, but it is getting harder and harder to want to spend the money to go back again in the near future. After this next trip, we'll wait until Avatar in the AK is done and DHS has been redone until we go back again.

 

[mom2rtk]

I think a fair number of people have been evaluating this very question. Some of have been adjusting but still going (shortening length of stay, moving offsite, scheduling fewer ADRs). I think if the rumor about tiered pricing turns out to be true, it could be a breaking point for a number of us.

 

[nilla]

Is there an emoticon for "infinity"?

 

[Oneanne]

I'm just about there. I was looking at rooms in the spring and POP was coming up at $200 per night, and I won't pay $200 for POP. So I may be taking a break for awhile, and possibly go every other year, instead of continuing my annual spring trip.

 

[mom2rtk]

I'm just about there. I was looking at rooms in the spring and POP was coming up at $200 per night, and I won't pay $200 for POP. So I may be taking a break fo awhile, and possibly go every other year, instead of continuing my annual spring trip.

Ouch. I'd have to stop and marvel at that figure too.

 

[Fizban]

It's all relative in actual numbers for us, but here is our way of looking at it. For 1 week at a mod with just me and the missus it will cost about $2k including all transportation and food. If it's us and our 2 adult daughters we average $4.5k to $5k. It can be a little less if we want to go budget(value) or higher if we are feeling especially blessed (deluxe). We plan if we know that the $$ we will spend has not been earmarked for *anything* else and it also doesnt cut into our emergency-got-to-replace/fix the AC-Waterheater-car fund that we always keep set aside. One of the things that effected me personally almost 9 years ago was when i heard that when a person is old and dying they usually regret the things they didnt do instead of the things that they did.

 

[ArwenMarie]

We're sort of getting to that point.

The biggest problem for us is the school schedule and how that interacts with the costs, both hotel and airfare. Now that our kids are getting older, we are more reluctant to pull them out to go to WDW. Unfortunately, the way the prices are jacked up during the school break weeks, both for accommodations and airfare, we are probably up pushing our limit as to what we are willing to spend.

The only week we are left with that has lower crowds, lower prices and no school is the last week of August, but the weather is miserable.

Anyway, it's a perfect storm of school, crowds, weather and prices coming together to make it harder and harder for us to go.

 

[Mambo Junkie]

One is not so much cost but what they're eliminating, the lack of available ADRS and fps, and the wait times = less bang for the ever (rapidly) rising buck. There are a lot of Disney fans I have been speaking to who are of the same mind. I love it and miss it but no longer worth it to us. We absolutely hate fp+ And how it has affected our touring style.

 

[Ladyfish77]

Right now, I'd say moderate vs. deluxe hotel. I could afford a deluxe hotel, but I can't bring myself to pay $400+ a night for a hotel room that doesn't even include perks like CL, etc. Especially when I'm going to spend minimal time at said hotel. That doesn't mean that some time in the future I won't stay deluxe, but right now it's too much.