Hi, bumpershoot!
I don't want to come across like I am disagreeing, because I know that you are someone I would always turn to with a question, you just seem to know!
However, this confuses me a little. I still see it as saving money if I pay less for my hoppers and then upgrade, because Disney has a set value for the tickets. Someone posted somewhere that each hopper has a price attatched to it so that when you upgrade the Disney folks can tell how much you paid; but when I called the info, they told me that a value is assigned for what the pass is, i.e., a 3-day hopper will be a certain value, and a 4-day, ect. I guess if it were true that Disney could tell how much you paid it would matter, but if each type of ticket just has a set value, then whatever you save on the hopper, you ultimately save on the AP when you upgrade, right?
Wow, that was a mouthful!
What you
paid for your ticket is encoded on the ticket. You will
always pay the full price of the AP you're upgrading to. They know what you paid, and they will base the upgrade cost on what you paid.
Right now online, the pre-purchase price of a 5 day hopper is 194. So if you held that hopper, to upgrade it would be 269 minus 194, so 75 per adult to upgrade. The initial discount is gone.
If someone walked up to the ticket booths and bought a 5 day hopper, then ended up deciding to upgrade, it would be different. They would have paid 244 for their 5 day hopper (the price that is "crossed out" on the
disneyland ticket purchase page), and would only be paying $25 more at that moment, per adult, to upgrade.
NOTE!! This is TOTALLY different at WDW. At WDW, you use your highly discounted ticket from maple leaf tix or some other place, and you use that ticket to enter a park. That "sets" your ticket cost to the *current* cost, and any upgrade you do is based off that current cost.
If someone walking behind you does not know that, and decides to upgrade at the ticket booth/guest services/relations, they will pay the difference between current cost of whatever upgrade they are doing, and what they paid. They will have the Disneyland experience, while you are having the WDW experience.
(then again, we can upgrade our APs to the next level any time during the year, while they only have 14 days from the first use of the AP (or ticket that was upgraded to AP) to do so!)
************
And just to boggle minds, I've read that military discount tickets can be coded with a price LESS than what the military personnel/family paid for them. So they go to the area on their base that sells the discounted Disneyland tickets. Say a ticket is normally 189, but the military purchase costs the serviceman/woman 159. Not only might they not have MM on the ticket (discount tickets like military and convention (like gay days) tickets don't generally have MM on them), but the ticket is encoded with what the military itself paid for the ticket, say 154 or 149. So since that is coded onto the ticket, if that ticketholder decides to upgrade, they are paying MORE than the cost of the AP, b/c the ticket was encoded with a price lower than what the person paid for the hopper.
(that came from a trusted (b/c she was a photopass share leader when I did photopass, and lived in my area until just recently) wife of a serviceman who had dealt with this)
