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What Price Magic? (continued)
As any vacation planner knows, the real costs of a trip don't restrict themselves just to the hotel and airfare. To create a meaningful comparison between All Star Movies and Motel 6, I'd have to look at what each reservation included. All Star Movies was clearly more expensive, but it included park admission and shuttle service to/from the airport, as well as bus service to the parks themselves. My theoretical stay at Motel 6 would need not only room reservations, but park tickets, a car rental, and money set aside for gasoline (no longer a piddling expense on a trip) and even daily parking fees at the theme parks.
The Motel 6 cost for a whole week was $228, much less than the All Star Movies "inclusive" quote and even the "room only" quote, by a wide margin. But there are immediate issues. There's no shuttle to Walt Disney World, so I'd need a car (quick digression: a good many hotels on US-192 *do* in fact have WDW shuttles, so it pays to call them and find out. If they have shuttles, you only need transportation from the airport). I checked Hertz and found $290/week for the Ford Focus, while Dollar had a similar price for a Dodge Caliber (and a slightly cheaper $280 for a Chevrolet Aveo). The other rental companies had similar prices.
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Mentally adding that to the total, we move on to park tickets. At
waltdisneyworld.com, seven day non-parkhopper tickets for my family totals
$620 (or $219 per adult), but you get the same ticket for $214 from
OrlandoFunTickets.com (full disclosure: OrlandoFunTickets advertises on
MiceAge and MiceChat). The OFT.com price for a child was $178, so my family
would need to shell out $606 for the seven day tickets.
Toss in a generous amount for gas and parking fees, say $200, and you've got $1,324 for the "do it yourself" cost versus $1,719 for Disney's inclusive cost. The comparisons are largely the same, though the "do it yourself" cost did not use parkhopper tickets. My belief is that parkhoppers add extra cost without enough payout. Sure, you get extra flexibility. But now that MK and DHS are not open very late, even in summer, there's little to be gained by parkhopping late at night. You're actually better off going to bed at a reasonable hour, and waking up very early for that all-important early start in the park's first few hours the next day.
So we've got almost $400 savings by staying off property. And this time, the comparison in theming is Motel 6 versus All Star Movies. I suppose the Disney hotel is nicer, but $400 nicer? There's not really THAT much theming is there?
Caribbean Beach is a mid-range hotel. Is it worth hundreds extra?
I began to wonder. What else could you use that $400 for? You could apply it toward the food budget, or perhaps bring home some extra souvenirs. But I imagined a few grumbles from the "on property" crowd (pray you do not get voices in your head as often as I do!) that the $400 premium is not only about theming. There are other advantages. You don't have to fight traffic on the roads, for instance. You can doze off in transit rather than having to drive. And most importantly, you can take advantage of Extra Magic Hours (EMH).
In general, EMH means that every day of the week, one park will open slightly early for the people with Disney hotel keycards, and a different park will stay open much later in the night. While this requires parkhopping (a good reason to pay the extra expense for the parkhopper ticket, if you are at a Disney hotel), it means in practical terms an extra four hours per day in Disney parks. You could literally be in the Disney parks for 14 or even 16 hours a day.
I have not seen EMH in the morning, but I've heard it's crowded. I have seen EMH in the evening, and I can attest to the fact that the park with the evening EMH does indeed get much more crowded. So I'm not sure of the value of this perk. If the park is more crowded than ever, have you really gained much? Can you still get FastPasses this late in the day? The crowding seems to come from the fact that only ONE park is open late at a time, so people from all sixteen Disney hotels swarm to the same place, each person thinking they are getting the deal of a lifetime.
I've always operated under the assumption that the key to getting on a lot of rides was to "zig" when the rest of the crowd "zagged." These days, that means actually AVOIDING the parks which have EMH that day. If extra thousands of people are flocking to DAK for a morning open, that means DAK will be busier than usual for a good part of the day (maybe even all day), making it a good day to begin in another park like MK. But beware: if MK is slated to have evening EMH that same day, then some savvy travelers will just start in MK and stay there all day. So that means such a hypothetical day is best spent at DHS or Epcot. It's a simple formula: just go wherever the crowds are not.
All Star Movies has a themed food court.
I haven't witnessed first-hand what happens very late in the EMH evening, so it's possible the lines for rides become trivial by that point, with no wait times. In such a case, I could see an argument for EMH. But even then, I'm not sure of the value of the perk. To harvest such tiny lines (assuming they are tiny; I haven't stayed that late), you'd need to be staying at the Disney parks from 8 am for morning EMH until midnight, for evening EMH. That's sixteen hours, a real punishing schedule. You'll be getting less than 8 hours of sleep per night for sure, since traveling to and from the hotel always takes significant amounts of time. I suppose you could leave the parks in the middle of day, as folks often advocate, and simply nap or horse around at the hotel's pool. True enough. But then you're splitting up your valuable sleep time into two chunks rather than just one.
Maybe it's me, but that kind of vacation is in some ways more work than it's worth. You can push the "commando" style vacation beyond the point of diminishing marginal returns. Sure, you may get on more rides, but at the cost of sleep-deprivation and a sense of rushing around. This is vacation? And here's the irony: if you're so busy at the parks, you aren't in that Disney hotel and thus not enjoying that vaunted theming you're paying so much extra for. Either you're paying through the nose for theming, or you're paying for EMH, but either way, I think you might be paying too much for Disney hotels.
That line of reasoning led me down a different path. What if those $400 savings from staying off-property could be funneled toward a LONGER vacation instead? How much would it cost to stretch our trip to November 8-17, a ten day trip rather than a seven day trip?
Motel 6: $342
Rental car: $421
Park tickets: $622 (10-day non-parkhoppers)
Gas and parking: $300
Grand total: $1,695
In other words, we could stay at Motel 6 for three extra days, enjoying WDW for all of those bonus days, and STILL save $24 compared to Disney's seven day vacation. That's a sobering comparison.
And it suggests some fruitful park strategies as a result. If you've got ten days in the parks, you can really afford to take your time, and go slow. No dashing about from ride to ride (though you'd still better use FASTPASS to minimize your wait times). Instead, you can enjoy the five-minute or even thirty-minute downtimes that might normally ensue between attractions. Best of all, you can proceed at the pace set by your children, rather than lugging them around against their will. |
