Disney in a Minute: What is Park Hopping?

Walt Disney World includes four major theme parks: Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom. If you want to visit more than one of them in a single day, that’s called Park Hopping. On the West Coast, Park Hopping allows you to switch between Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure.

There are a lot of reasons you may want to Park Hop. For instance, you want to:

• Eat your evening meal in a park other than the one you’ve been touring during the day
• See the evening entertainment in a different park than the one you’ve been touring during the day
• Visit all the parks, even though you only have a short vacation
• Switch parks when the weather turns sour because you prefer one park when it’s raining
• Revisit a favorite attraction in one park every day, but want to start or end your day in a different park

Disney World’s base admission ticket does not allow you to visit more than one park in a day. To switch parks, you need a ticket that includes Park Hopping privileges. The most common types are an Annual Pass, or a base ticket with the Park Hopper or Park Hopper Plus options. At Disneyland, the most common types are a Magic Key Pass, or a base ticket with the Park Hopper option.

Depending on your ticket, adding the Park Hopper option to a Disney World ticket of four days or more costs about $95 per ticket. Since it’s a one-time cost for the whole ticket, the longer you stay, the less it costs per day. Some special tickets, such as the Military Salute ticket or other special offer tickets, allow purchasing a Park Hopper add-on at a different price.

It’s worth noting that there is no way to add Park Hopping on just a day or two of your visit to save money. And you can’t use “two days’ worth” of a multi-day ticket to Park Hop either. There is a bunch of other fine print related to Park Hopping. For example, if your admission requires a park reservation, you have to visit your first park of the day before you can hop to a second park.

At Disney World, there’s no minimum time that you need to stay in one park before you can hop to another one. “Park Hopper Hours” run from park open to park close; you can tap in for Early Entry and head right back out to a different park if you like. At Disneyland, Park Hopping hours don’t begin until 11 am; you can’t switch parks before that.

Disney in a Minute is a series of short posts designed to help you better understand a Disney term or planning topic. Do you have a Disney term that you think needs a bit more explanation? Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to Erin Foster for an earlier version of this post.