Does anyone get one park per day tickets anymore?

[qa4ever]

Now with the train to go between parks where you need to have a park to park ticket, do people ever buy one park per day tickets anymore? And if not, why would crowd levels vary from one park to another on a specific day?

Also are standby lines really crazy and annoying if you don't have the on site fast lane passes?

 

[FrankDIS72]

I had to buy a one day, one park ticket for a Barenaked Ladies concert at Universal Studios Florida this year. There was no AA discount and it was rather painful to pay $100+ for it.

 

[LemonNeko]

We're "maybe" going in January with a group of 7 but I want to get the park to park and my sister wants the one park per day to save money. I imagine there are people who want to save money by getting the cheaper passes.

 

[VacaPlanner2012]

It is true that with HE, the park to park is becoming the norm. Also, keep in mind, the HE is a relatively quick way between parks that is A/C and easier on the feet. The novelty of the ride has worn on us, but it is still so convenient to buy a butterbeer and head over to the other park. It is a transportation service more than an attraction to us now that we have ridden both ways.

Honestly, we would have a tough time to stay all day at IofA, but could easily do it at UO. Just our style. If we were stuck at having only one day at Universal, I could easily see us buying a base ticket and only going to UO.

 

[JustCallMeMommy]

For us, we hop every day between the two parks. We want to do both HP areas every day - we usually start and end there. The big difference with park-to-park at Universal vs. park hoppers at Disney is the ease in hopping. Even before the Hogwarts Express, the parks are just minutes apart by foot. It is easy to treat the two like one big park.

Various the crowd calendars have different ways of calculating the crowd level, but the two parks rarely differ significantly. In some cases, you may be seeing the low end of a 3 and the high end of a 2. Also, special events affect the crowd disbursement. HHN, for instance, may drive people to Islands on a HHN day due to shorter park hours in the Studios.

 

[slbgnb]

My kids really want to do HE, so I'm thinking we'll have to do the park to park this trip. Is HE extremely cool - or just a train ride to the other park?

 

[HM]

My kids really want to do HE, so I'm thinking we'll have to do the park to park this trip. Is HE extremely cool - or just a train ride to the other park?

It is foremost a train ride on a train that looks very much like the one in the movies both inside and out. There are scenes animated on the exterior window and the interior windows during the ride--a different set depending on which way you are going. The outside scene is the train moving along from Hogwart to London or visa-versa with appearances by characters from the movies. Inside it's characters talking outside the windows and a few surprises. I can't tell you whether it's worth it to you or not.

 

[slbgnb]

It is foremost a train ride on a train that looks very much like the one in the movies both inside and out. There are scenes animated on the exterior window and the interior windows during the ride--a different set depending on which way you are going. The outside scene is the train moving along from Hogwart to London or visa-versa with appearances by characters from the movies. Inside it's characters talking outside the windows and a few surprises. I can't tell you whether it's worth it to you or not.

Thank you! Actually, that does sound pretty cool.

We won't have early entry. Is it better to get there right at opening....do HP at that park....take HE...then do HP at that park? Or by the time you get to the 2nd HP park is it too late? If it's too late, is this the best way...

Day 1 -
arrive at UO
do HP...take HE to IofA
do non HP for rest of day

Day 2 -
arrive at IofA
do HP...take HE to UO
do non HP rest of day

Thanks!

 

[bumbershoot]

We *never* got a one-park ticket.

 

[hdnwaters]

I had planned to do one day park tickets. IOA the first day and US the second day. I purchased my tickets at the hotel (same price as purchasing online) The lady I purchased them from said, "Darlin', you gonna want to ride that train". So I did the 2 day park to park. I was glad cause we breezed through IOA with time to spare and headed to US to do rides there. Stood in line way to long to ride the HE train! The experience was pretty cool but due to the lines, we never rode it from US back to IOA....we walked! The second day we only went back to IOA to do a second ride on Forbidden Journey.

 

[slbgnb]

I had planned to do one day park tickets. IOA the first day and US the second day. I purchased my tickets at the hotel (same price as purchasing online) The lady I purchased them from said, "Darlin', you gonna want to ride that train". So I did the 2 day park to park. I was glad cause we breezed through IOA with time to spare and headed to US to do rides there. Stood in line way to long to ride the HE train! The experience was pretty cool but due to the lines, we never rode it from US back to IOA....we walked! The second day we only went back to IOA to do a second ride on Forbidden Journey.

How long was the line for HE? You were just there in Sept?

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

I've seen many complain (especially on TripAdvisor) where people were furious at having spent the large money for a 1-day one single park ticket or the 1-day two park ticket..mainly because they felt that they could not have possibly gotten their monies worth with the long lines and were more resentful when they "had" to purchase Express Passes just to be able to ride a few rides.

First of all if you only have 1 day to do a park with so many activities you will likely be disappointed either with the amount of cost for a 1-day ticket or you didn't get to do all you could do because of time constraints (including long lines, earlier than expected closures like 6/7pm, etc).

What I also find interesting is Universal is unique to Disney in that if you buy online you save $20.00 right off the gate price for any multi-day ticket purchase plus you also get a $150 coupon booklet if you do a multi-day park-to-park purchase-for Disney you need to either use a promotion or authorized discount seller (BTW this was the same deal as it was 4 years ago).

For instance at the current rates ONLINE:
$147 gets you 1-day park-to-park or $102 gets you 1-day single park admission. If you feasible think you can enjoy both parks in only 1 day then it makes sense to do a 1-day park-to-park.

However consider the following:
$194.99 gets you 2-days park-to-park or $149.99 gets you 2-day single park admission. So for only $47.99 more (for both single park and park-to-park) you get an entire extra day. I guarantee you this is less than an Express Pass will ever be (yes the very very low crowd days could be this but then again you probably wouldn't need an Express Pass on those days).

It gets even better with the remaining 3 and 4-day tickets (both of which are only $10.00 more than the previous one: i.e. 3-day=$10 more than the 2-day and 4-day=$10 more than the 3 day).

In all of these scenarios you do have to consider parking costs (which just went up to $20 from $17) but still you get more bang for your buck when you do multiple days (regardless of park-to-park or not).

I tend to always purchase park hopper (for Disney) or park-to-park (for Universal). You could only stay in one park the whole day and be perfectly fine but I like the flexibility. What if one park is very crowded but the other is only moderately? What if I'm really craving a restaurant in the other park and not the one I'm in? For Universal what about the fact that one park closes earlier than the other-sometimes by a few hours?

 

[hdnwaters]

How long was the line for HE? You were just there in Sept?

We were there just last month. I think the wait time for HE was listed as 20 minutes but I know we stood in line at least 45 minutes! We were hit and miss the whole trip with our wait times! I do think that was our longest wait all week.

 

[epcotty]

We always get one park per day tickets, we do one park at a time. And in most cases standby lines are NOT really crazy

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

We always get one park per day tickets, we do one park at a time. And in most cases standby lines are NOT really crazy

Have you been back since Hogwarts Express opened? If so, is it just not your thing? Harry Potter in general seems to be either people go to Universal for it and the other stuff is icing on the cake (which would mean they would buy the park-to-park so they could ride the HE) or they don't really care about Harry Potter so it's the other stuff they went for.

 

[epcotty]

Have you been back since Hogwarts Express opened? If so, is it just not your thing? Harry Potter in general seems to be either people go to Universal for it and the other stuff is icing on the cake (which would mean they would buy the park-to-park so they could ride the HE) or they don't really care about Harry Potter so it's the other stuff they went for.

We've been back once since then, in our case we don't really care about Harry Potter so it's the other stuff we go for

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

We've been back once since then, in our case we don't really care about Harry Potter so it's the other stuff we go for

I see absolutely no problem with that and it probably helped the crowds in the rest of the parks too

 

[damo]

With the Hogwarts Express, you don't even realize that there are two parks. You get onto the ride and get off the ride and there are just more areas and more rides. I swear that our little 7 year old niece had no idea that there were two different parks.