Discount Tickets

[ckay87]

I know that maybe this belongs on the Budget Board. But it's not really about what tickets to buy and where.

I'm shopping for hopper tickets (all the options give me a headache by the way. I think I'm going to print out all the possibilities and throw a dart at them.) Anyway, undercovertourist has a too-good-to-be-true deal to buy a 3-day hopper, get 3 days free. So you get 6 days for the price of 3. Here's my question....How do they do that? I know I should grab it and not question it, but you have to ask yourself, really, don't you? When I can only manage to save a couple bucks purchasing through AAA, how is this one group managing this offer?

I have little business sense and no deep understanding of the travel industry, so any insight would be very interesting for me.

 

[Cheshire Figment]

There are several parts to consider.

One is that some of these companies buy millions of dollars worth of pre-encoded tickets from Disney per year and are sold them at deep discounts as Disney gets the money up front so the CMs don't have to spend time selling tickets.

Another is that base price of a 6 day is only $16 more than a three day.

Third is the discounters compete amongst themselves and are probably still making a profit even with the "free" days, so as long as they are making any profit on the sale of a particular type of ticket they are making a larger profit based on volume.

Don't forget that all tickets have a 6.5% sales tax on them; some discounters will include that in their quoted price, others, including Disney itself, quote prices without tax.

Also there may be additional fees for shipment.

The volume can be unbelievable. At one of the water parks on a busy summer day I can average almost $2,500 per hour in ticket sales and the water park tickets are much less than the theme park tickets.