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What Price Magic? (continued)
Surely you've seen people grimly pulling screaming kids to the next ride? Those are "commandos" who didn't reckon on the needs and wants of the children. If you've got ten days in the parks, you have the time to spare, and you can let the kids explore and set the agenda, rather than you. In other words, you have the time to relax. This is, after all, what vacation is SUPPOSED to be about. Relaxation. Disney and its marketing have forgotten the relaxation element of vacation. Instead, they've given us ride reservations, restaurant reservations, and a set schedule of parks to visit via EMH. It's becoming more stressful and pre-planned all the time.
This is also why I advocate non-parkhopper tickets. Parkhopping as a concept made sense when all the parks were open late every night, but absent EMH privileges, it makes no sense. It makes better sense to save a couple of bucks, and more importantly, save your sanity and your calm, and just stay in one park for the day. Going slow and having fun is better than "seeing everything" in a hurried three-day visit.
And there's even a side benefit to not having parkhopper passes: you can use your evenings productively. Remember those folks who pay extra for the lush Disney theming of the hotels? Well, you can enjoy that for free. Just drive on over to the Polynesian or the DAK Lodge after your day at the park, and soak up the atmosphere at no cost. You may find that "resort-hopping" is more fun than parkhopping. Certainly you could eat at the fine restaurants scattered around the property this way, and trust me when I say that the food will be better than what awaits you inside the parks.
The calculations for a ten-day vacation apply, with only minimal extra cost, if you wanted to keep your seven days at Disney and use the remaining three days for Universal Studios Florida, Islands of Adventure, and SeaWorld. There would be some additional ticket costs, putting us over the cost of the Disney seven day vacation, but only by perhaps $200 for my family of four. For that extra $200, you could enjoy three days at three new parks. And don't fret about travel costs: we've already built in the car rental, gas, and parking fees. So if you're that kind of visitor, your choice looks like this: seven days at a minimally-themed Disney hotel, or ten days at Motel 6 with your Disney visits augmented by SeaWorld, Universal, and IOA days?
I haven't even touched on the convenience of having a car. Those of you who have witnessed the long, slow, and ugly decline of bus service at WDW in the past several years know exactly what kind of torture it is to wait in those long lines when the park closes, when there are insufficient busses to move the sweaty masses back to their hotels. Every bus has a line, and once on board, people have to cram together into the standing-room only aisles. In summer, when all people covered in a light sheen of perspiration on every visible centimeter of skin, that can't be pleasant.
DAK Lodge can be visited, and enjoyed, by non-hotel
guests also.
Those with cars, meanwhile, zip off merrily and crank up the air conditioning. They stop at a convenience store for a quick dessert. For that matter, they save money in the morning by doing the drive-thru at Burger King rather than the Disney food court. My family of four would save $10/day on just this one purchase, which is essentially enough to offset the parking fee at the theme park. And consider the freedom of supermarkets. With a car, you have easy access to the Publix Supermarket (there's one on East-192 and another on West-192, just a few miles from WDW), and you can stock up on all sorts of snacks, drinks, and even full meals. The cost savings from not having to buy that much food or water inside the parks is staggering. For a family of four, it could be easily $100 per day.
Putting it all together, it's extremely hard to argue for staying on property from just an economic standpoint. You'd have to look at other reasons, such as emotional, to find justification. If the presence of a non-themed room will positively ruin your vacation, even though you only see the room for 10 minutes before you fall asleep and 25 minutes in morning, then maybe you should shell out the extra hundreds to stay with Disney. That said, I wouldn't want to sell the experience short by too much. There is something to be said for waking up "inside" Disney World, stepping out to the boat dock, and taking a boat to a theme park, rather than climbing into a car, which seems so much more pedestrian and everyday. The question on my mind is always "how much is that moment of magic worth?"
If the moment of magic could instead translate into extra days on vacation, for me the choice was always clear. I'd take a longer vacation, take my time, not stress out my kids, and perhaps even see some non-Disney parks.
And here, at last, we arrive at the root of the question. Disney has taken enormous pains in recent years to make it easy, convenient, and if not downright cheap, then at least somewhat affordable to stay only with Disney, and not venture out elsewhere to its Orlando competitors. The overall concept has been internally dubbed "Destination Disney," and it boils down to doing what it takes to keep the customer on Disney property.
This effort has resulted in EMH, which provides incentive to choose Disney hotels over competitors. It's given us the Magic Your Way tickets, which is a euphemism for "marginal ticket price increases"; in other words, adding each extra day of Disney admission onto your ticket is extremely cheap, sometimes only a few dollars, making it hugely tempting to stay those ten days at Disney rather than venturing out to Universal or SeaWorld (which was Disney's hope in the first place). In the future, Destination Disney may lead to extra FastPass privileges for those at Disney hotels, a concept they've probed at least via patent filings thus far.
Disney's Magical Express made it very tempting to not rent a car.
In spite of Destination Disney, my answer has always been to stay off-site for most situations. I could imagine some scenarios where it makes sense to stay on property. If you've got a limited time frame (perhaps only a few vacation days from work), then the notion of staying longer but off-property has no relevance for you. In that case, it really does make sense to stay at a Disney hotel and go "commando" style to the parks, saving sleep a more mundane existence, like the weekend after you return home! Alternately, or perhaps in addition to the above, if "saving money" isn't your primary concern, you may well benefit from soaking up the lifestyle at such places as the Grand Floridian, the Polynesian, or Wilderness Lodge. And you may find great benefit to staying at the BoardWalk, Yacht Club, or Beach Club, where you are within easy walking distance of both Epcot and Disney's Hollywood Studios. That's a nice touch.
For me, though, money really is an issue. If you can afford the extra days off work, I think it makes sense to plan for a longer vacation and a more standard-issue motel room. You can take your time in the parks, you can save hundreds on food costs and thousands on hotel costs, and you can soak up that Disney resort theming in the evenings, for free.
Or am I alone in placing too much emphasis on the money angle here? I must be in the minority, since the viewpoint that "being surrounded by the magic makes all the difference" still constitutes such a common refrain on websites and message boards. Or perhaps I'm underestimating the "once in a lifetime" nature of the vacation for some families, who would more easily justify higher expenses. As noted at the start, I'm aware that just about everyone taking a WDW vacation runs through these calculations, yet a good majority choose to stay at Disney hotels. Therefore, I'm curious about your experiences, and why you made the choices you did. Are there other angles and considerations here that I haven't included? I'm interested in your stories for how the magic stacked up. Was it worth the extra expense? Have I been nickel and diming my vacations too much? Would you have wanted to trade extra days for a less themed hotel room?
Once Upon a Time: Disney Park Fanfic
As announced last week, I'm running a contest. You write and submit fan fiction stories to me by email, and the best one will win a prize (I'll cobble together a few books and collectibles). Best of all, I'll run the winning story in a future MiceAge column. Who knows? If we get several good ones, I may just make it a running feature every so often.
There are some ground rules:
· Word Count (Length): between 2,000 and 7,500 words is preferred (think of it as 5 pages to 15 pages, double-spaced), but as short as one page or as long as 25 might be acceptable if the fiction is good enough.
· Deadline: all submissions are due by September 1, 2008.
· Submissions: email your stories to [email protected] by September 1, 2008.
· Setting: all stories must involve Disneyland (Anaheim) or Walt Disney World (Orlando). Or, at least part of the action must be there.
· Genre: all genres are open. You can send in drama, superheroes, action-adventure, horror, ghost stories, mystery, romance, thrillers, crime drama, political drama, and even science-fiction, time travel, or anything else that occurs to you. Even plays can be submitted, though this is not the preferred format/genre.
· Time frame: open. It can be set in the past, present, or the future.
· Restrictions: no Disney characters can be mentioned at all, and do not use real Cast Members. Also, even the fictional CMs cannot be portrayed nefariously. If in doubt, do not include anything questionable, because it won't win.
· Names of Attractions: though you cannot invoke or feature Disney characters, it might be acceptable to name the attractions in question, even if the attraction makes use of a Disney licensed character (i.e., Pinocchio's Daring Journey). But be cautious as you do it; the idea is to use the Disney parks as a SETTING, nothing more, for your otherwise-interesting fiction. And if you can get away with describing the attraction without naming it, that might be better still.
· Tone: while it may sound fun to imagine doing the unthinkable with the Disney setting, remember that the idea is to stay on the good side. That probably means a G-rating (or at worst, a PG rating) for such things as adult content and language.
· Walt Disney: Yes, you can feature Walt Disney the man, but only very carefully. See the note about "tone" above.
· Maximum entries: you can submit up to three stories.
· Format: please submit a cover page with your name and the title of the story. All other pages in the story should be free of author's name or the story title. Please use page numbers. Microsoft Word or PDF documents are preferred.
· Required component: every story must mention a happy person, a happy coincidence, and a happy ending.
The final requirement above is to see how creative you can be in slipping in the references! I got this idea from The Plot Thickens, a collection of mystery short stories with the requirement that every story had to mention a thick fog, a thick book, and a thick steak. Everything else was up to the writers. The diversity of stories was great, and the reader experience included a kind of fun hunt for the required components (some of which were central, and some of which were mentioned only very briefly). Sure, it was a gimmick, but it was fun and it worked.
Your mention of a happy person, a happy coincidence, and a happy ending don't have to come in that order, and most authors will spread them out over the story rather than mention them all at once. Note that you don't have to actually *have* a happy ending, just that you must mention the words "happy ending." The rest of the sentence is up to you, and could in fact turn out to be a dark and pessimistic sentence if worded the right way! A few authors might be able to get away with paraphrasing or just leaving the required terms implied, but most will use the required phrases verbatim.
Good luck! Start sending in those submissions! |
