Absolutely everyone has their own "way" to vacation. We do the AP version where we get 2 major vacations within the 365 days of the AP and then wait until the 3rd year to buy a new AP and do it again. Last year, our vacation was in late June and we bought the AP's. This year it will be early June. Things just worked out that last year was 13 days and this year will only be 8 days (stupid snow days off of school!) We also managed to do a mini-vacation of 5 days in January since we had the AP's. - Note that this is a "risk" of having APs, we almost always end up squeezing an extra trip in when we have them!
Our 26 park days end up costing $23/day for tickets.
The breakdown budget for our 8 night trip for 3 in June:
Hotel: $1060 - Pop with AP or VISA discounts
Food: $1000 - Will use $400 Disney Visa rewards toward this.
Park tickets: $552 (3 people, prorated AP's)
Airfare: $825 - but we are actually using frequent flyer points, so no cash spent
Food is based on past experience. We tend to mostly stick with CS. We have 4 TS planned over the 8 days and rarely eat appetizers/dessert and no alcohol. We have $400 in Disney Visa rewards, so that will actually be only $600 out of pocket. We rarely buy souvenirs - probably a result of regularly visiting the park for decades. We could probably cut food down more if we ate more out of our room, but our budget isn't that tight so we don't bother.
Sometimes we will spend more on hotel, but since we tend to spend far more time in the parks than at our resort we don't see much point paying for deluxe or even moderate.
Vacation cost: approximately $3500 - actual out-of-pocket cost around $2200 (per person, per day: $145 / $92)
Someone who only visits occasionally, buys 5 day tickets, stays at Deluxe resorts and eats TS meals every day will spend far more than we do. For some that is a "better' vacation, but for us it isn't at all what we would enjoy. I don't WANT a TS meal every day. We did free dining once and said never again! We felt like we HAD to eat all those meals to be getting our money's worth (had to pay full price for the hotel, so not really ~free dining) and by the end of the trip I was totally sick of eating so much and hated all the time taken up by TS restaurants. For other people, those meals are a big part of the trip and they love it.
if we spent that much. But, clearly everyone's vacation budget is different. I have friends who would faint at the amount my family spends. And we take multiple vacations per year, so we have to keep the price down. If this is your only vacation of the year, under $10,000 isn't terrible.
