Will the Annual Pass price increase matter to you and your vacation plans?

[DVC Mike]

Will the Annual Pass price increase matter to you and your vacation plans?

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Do the recent changes in the types and pricing of Walt Disney World Annual Passes matter to you? Will it result in any changes to your vacation plans?

If you previously purchased the regular Annual Pass, in the future will you be purchasing the Gold (with blackout dates) or Platinum AP - or perhaps none at all?

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http://i235.************************************************************* DVC Mike - *******.com

 

[wdrl]

Will the Annual Pass price increase matter to you and your vacation plans?

No, not at this time.

 

[Harlemgirl720]

No. I will still go as planned. Going 12/24-1/2. Deciding whether to bite the bullet or buy regular park hopper passes.

 

[Harlemgirl720]

I just hope they don't decide to get rid of the regular day to day tickets altogether.

 

[AnnaS]

We do not normally travel during the summer months now and will most likely not be traveling during Christmas week any time soon. Gold should be fine but not happy about the black-out dates regardless. It might not matter to us much anyway. We are activating our two vouchers in less than two weeks. We had just recently decided that we want to spend more time at HH and Vero anyway. Even at Disney, we do not spend a lot of time at the parks - so who knows. The way we vacation might change. We have quiet a few years to go if we want to travel during the summer months with grandchildren when they start school. Have only one now (and very young).

 

[JimMIA]

Yes. We will no longer buy APs. We probably wouldn't have anyway, because we won't be going that much, but this clinches it for us. If we get anything, it will be FL resident Weekday Select passes.

 

[LoveBWVVBR]

Yes, we are selling our DVC. This was the last straw for us.

 

[n2mm]

Yes it will affect our future plans. We are not happy that the ticket we are use to increased $120 Plus tax. Yes you get photo pass, but we don't normally get it and feel like it's being forced on us. If dvc wanted to let us buy Florida resident tickets, I would've preferred the silver ticket with no photo pass. I keep reading facebook messages where people are "upgrading their current ap" to gold. I see that as a downgrade. Yes people are getting photo pass, but now have black out dates. It's crazy. In addition, the increase of the TIW card is ridiculous. I bought my first one in 2005 for $50. Now 10 years later it will cost $150! My daughter and family were planning to visit in March a week before Easter and planned to buy a dvc ap. Now they are looking at a multi day pass. I think in the future we will have to plan our trips around our APs. We will have to rethink the TIW card after our old one ends. Overall, I always expect reasonable increases in both these tickets, but am disgusted in these increases. I especially feel awful for those who have to travel during holidays and don't have the flexibility. Vent over....

 

[bwvBound]

Yes, I believe it will affect my vacation planning -- especially for WDW trips. For us, WDW visits were largely for business travel conferences (recently ended) and Disney visits, while 'fun' are not 'important.' To that end, I'm already rethinking our F&G plans next Spring as it wouldn't be a great hardship to skip that event. We've already axed the December visit due to changes to the Candlelight Procession.

We've been juggling "blackout dates" for SoCal visits for the past many years. Having to lookup blackout dates is, already, a "DING" against both the 'Spontaneity' and 'Fun' factors. Doing the same for WDW (either hunting around blackout or surge pricing on daily tickets) may overwhelm the Fun factor for WDW travel. Again, we don't consider Disney trips to be very 'important' and there are many other events, locations and activities vying for our time, attention and wallets.

For now, we'll likely keep our DVC points, maybe do more Aulani trips, ... but I am already considering selling off one contract and slimming down.

(Corrected: F&G not F&W)

 

[moethorne]

No. We've only bought the annual pass twice in 10 years. We rarely go every year nevermind more than once in a year. We may buy the Gold renewal as we did have AP's last year and plan to go again this year. We never go in over Christmas and our school/Easter breaks are never in March, so Gold would pretty much be good for us. I also usually buy the memory maker so that's a bonus for us.

 

[vinmar4]

Yes,
We are now seriously thinking of selling !
Instead of making things easier for DVC members it seems that they are doing everything they can to prevent DVC members from going to the parks during peak times and control when we should go not in a direct way. They have to know that the majority of families that bought DVC would be going when the kids are out of school and increasing the prices without warning was just a very low blow. Also, we used to buy TIW but not anymore. We are thinking more and more that we could use all that money and go to see other places. DVC makes less and less sense to us the more we see this kind of . And I know that they did not promise anything regarding the AP and TIW when we became members, like I know some people are going to respond, but as a family we took into consideration about how much we were going to spend in tickets and food and some increases but this is getting ridiculous .

 

[mickeymom629]

We have only gotten an annual pass one year, back when DS was in college in FL, so I don't think it will affect our plans at all. I have some MYW tickets from UT that haven't been used.

 

[DVC Mike]

The value of the DVC discount has been cheapened.

Look how the discount provided to DVC members keeps going down. Here is the new regular AP (w/taxes included):

Jun 2013 - 23.81%

Feb 2014 - 23.50%

Feb 2015 - 19.11%

Oct 2015 - 13.35%

Of course, the Oct AP includes PhotoPass...

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[lovin'fl]

YUP!!! As will the TIW price increase. For the past several years we have been getting AP/PAP and TIW. We will get as many trips on the AP/TIW as we can. Then we won't renew but wait until our next trip to buy a new AP or PAP and with the 2 special deals they offered that worked out well in our travel plans. After all these price increases, service degrading, park overcrowding...we decided to re-evaluate our DVC going style. We just sold 100/505 of our points. We decided we won't get AP/PAP or TIW anymore. Our last trip, in Aug, we did a day at US that DH and our 3 teens really really enjoyed. We will use our remaining 405 DVC points as a timeshare only (like our friends who own a week at Vistana each year...they go down and do 2 days at US and just hang around Orlando doing other things and eating at local places). We may get 2 day non-hopper park passes for a trip every now and then. We are also sticking with off season times (though there really isn't anymore off season at Disney, now is there?) like January and October. And we'll probably use our 125 HHI points for HHI trips only (other 280 points for the Jan/Oct trips). Kids will all be in college soon so we're past all the characters, parades, shows and all that and are looking for thrill rides (like US) and eating/drinking (which can be done cheaper off Disney property).

 

[cropman]

I'm sure it will change our plans. Our Disney budget is starting to be strained to the max now. We normally go three times a year. F&G in March, F&W in October, a Christmas trip, and even an occasional "We need to go to Disney!" trip. (OK, it's a lot and I'm lucky, but I do bust my rear and when I need a break Disney is where I can relax.) With that said, we do have a limit, and this is probably the straw that broke the back. There has been a lot of incrementalism going on with Disney and this might be the nudge we needed. We are probably going to sell some points and only go once or twice a year. If I only go once or twice, an Annual Pass won't save me any money. A smaller increase would have been ok. We don't need Photo Pass, how many pictures on main street do we need? I understand their business is booming, and they feel they can squeeze every dollar out of us, but after spending literally, tens of thousands of dollars with Disney, I'm tired of it. There is a big world out there, I think this is the nudge we need to see more of it. Just one man's opinion.

 

[disney junky]

This is only the third time we have bought annual passes. We just never took that many trips. The one year, I think the discount was huge, and I couldn't pass it up. I think we paid around $350 per. It wasn't that long ago, perhaps the late 2000's. We used to buy 10 day non-expiry for my son. So many of the things we did before when we bought into DVC have changed.
I know I'm rambling. We were never really well off, but we managed to have a nice 5-7 day vacation with length of stay passes staying at Dixie Landings. We rarely ate more than two sit down meals a week, the kids shared meals, the food court there was fabulous, but we managed to do it. I look at my kids now, both in similar situations to what we were then, and I have no idea how they could afford a week at WDW without us helping them with DVC points or buying their passes. Does anyone else feel this way?

 

[DVC Mike]

My previous Annual Pass expired in March 2015, and I wasn't planning on renewing it for my Oct (VGF) and Dec (BLT) 2015 trips, I'll plan on staying out of the parks during both trips (which will be a first for me). To help ease the pain, we purchased MNNSHP and MVMCP tickets, so we'll be in the MK one night each trip.

DW and I don't really spend all that much time in the parks any more, so it was getting difficult to justify the expense every year. We're going to switch to an AP every other year.

I am still planning on getting an AP for my Mar 2016 trip at BWV, as I don't think I can be so close to Epcot and not be able to go inside.

However, we are re-evaluating what we'll do in light of the AP and TiW card changes. It's likely that we'll pickup Gold AP's and renew our TiW card. Or, we may just keep the TiW card and do without AP's.

While we're not thrilled at the ongoing price hikes, we haven't reached a significant pain point that would cause us to seriously reevaluate our commitment to visiting WDW multiple times a year.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Got questions about DVC?
★ ☆ ★ THE DVC INFORMATION CENTER ★ ☆ ★
in the DVC Forums has the answers to your questions about the Disney Vacation Club.
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[com_op_2000]

Not really.
We purchased our renewal APs the week before this latest price increase, we were not planning on renewing them next year anyway, we are getting annual passes to US/IoA next year.

 

[Mrs.Milo]

Yes we feel that way too. How can a young family afford the kind of vacation we took when we bought into DVC over 20 years ago? Okay, when Walt Disney opened Disneyland a family could afford to go....a few dollars to get in and then pay as you go for rides. When Epcot was being built, we bought Epcot commemorative tickets that were 3 days for $30 I believe that included MK and Epcot. The price increases are way beyond inflation, so how much longer can an average family afford to go? So instead of encouraging visits during slower times of the year by decreasing pricing, it's no surprise they raise prices to help with "crowd control".

 

[WolfpackFan]

No. I like the new passes. Will be getting Gold from now on. We buy AP's every other year and always book our resorts so we get two full weeks for each pass.