I absolutely love planning Walt Disney World Vacations. I so often have people asking me if I think the park hopper is worth the extra money. The answer is, Yes! To me a Disney Park Hopper is part of what a Disney vacation is all about. I love knowing that from the moment that I check in at my resort I can go to any park that I want at any time that I want (well not any time, but you catch my drift). For about $60.00 per pass added to any muti-day ticket that freedom can be yours!
Why wouldn’t I want to start my day with my hair blowing in the breeze on the carousel at Magic Kingdom, head over to the Biergarten in Epcot for lunch, and then to Hollywood Studios for Fantasmic to round out the night? Having a Park Hopper lets you make dining reservations at hard to get restaurants like Le Cellier, Cinderella’s Royal Table, & Be Our Guest and not have to worry about structuring your entire day around just one meal.
Extra Magic Hours become more of a perk with the pass, Letting you go to one park in the morning and spend the entire evening (sometimes until the early morning) at another. This option is especially appealing for those who don’t want to have a very structured day. So go ahead make the most of your vacation. Just say yes to the Park Hopper option. You won’t regret it!
My name is Megan and I am the Disney World Tips & Tricks writer for Chip & Company. I am also a Travel Agent with World of Magic Travel, the preferred agency used by Chip and the Disney Addicts. Email me today at Megan@worldofmagictravel.com to book your next adventure to your favorite destination.
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This year was the only time we bothered with it. We were there for Star Wars Weekends and didn’t want to spend two full days of our short trip at HS but wanted spend part of each day there.
Switching parks is exhausting and a big waste of time, IMO but I will say that going to multiple parks in one day made our short trip feel much longer, especially on MK had EMH until 2am and we left one park, took a nap in our room, and then headed back out to MK. It felt like an extra day of vacation!
I totally agree with you! I feel it’s a waste of time and money to leave a park, wait for a bus, take the ride somewhere else, walk to the entrance of the next park, go through the bag check line, and in. I could have seen 2-3 more attractions in that amount of time. Time much better spent for less money, then riding a bus.
We always get the park hoppers but I agree that it’s a tough decision when you do the $$ math. But we always bite the bullet and do it and are always glad that we did. A lot of the decision, I feel, can be affected by what resort you stay in and what time of year it is. For example, if you’re in an Epcot Resort, you can be in Hollywood Studios or Epcot in mere minutes and can easily bounce over there. If it’s off-season, parks close early and if you still have energy, you can head to the park that is open late. When it really comes in handy is when someone gets sick or extra-tired or it rains and you have to head back to your hotel when you didn’t expect to – if you have a park hopper, you know you can head back to that park at some other point in order to experience that attraction, ride that ride or see that parade or firework show that you missed because of _________ (insert one of a variety of potential reasons here….) That seemed to happen a lot more when the kids were little than it does now that they are getting older (they are age 8 and 13 now). Some trips we notice that we use the park hopper more and some trips we notice that we use it less – but we’ve never once been sorry because it has always come in handy to make our trip more magical by having that flexibility.
If we’re talking about Disneyland, I feel that the Park Hopper option is a no brainer. However, with Walt Disney World, I have to disagree. Unless you really want to spend hours a day getting between two or three different parks, I’d highly recommend not adding it on to a vacation. The extra time and money to me is simply not worth it.
We never get the park
hoppers anymore. Sure, if we had endless amounts of $ to spend we would just in
case but in reality, for a money-conscious family with a small child, it really
isn’t worth it. The fact is that if you
have planned ADRs (meals) and planned Fast Passes, you already will know where
you will be spending your day. Spending
extra precious time on the bus from 1 park to another with a small child is
only going to aggravate you and waste precious vacation time. Do a little pre-planning and save yourself
the $ and the aggravation. The only
people I would recommend a park hopper to are young adults without children who
are staying in the resort area for less than 3 days. They would need a park hopper to have a
chance to get to all 4 parks. Otherwise,
absolutely not.
We always get the park hopper for WDW, and will probably do the same when we head to DL later this year. I understand that the 2 parks have roughly the same number of rides, though DL is in a much smaller area. Still, having been to WDW so many times we feel that there are several rides in CA that we can probably skip as they are simply a duplicate of the ones we have already been on in FL.
I have to say that I’m the other end of the spectrum. We did have the Park Hopper on our first visit and found it to be a waste of money! That $200 could have bought us a great experience or a few meals somewhere. There is enough to do in each park that a day is hardly enough time. For first time visitors especially, I would say, not really worth it. Explore each park in depth in a day or two and enjoy it without feeling like you have to run from one park to another to justify having spent an extra $60 a person!