New! 2024 Discounts for Kids at Walt Disney World and Disneyland
Disney has released details on a set of theme park discounts for families with children ages 3-9. Both of these offers are available to be booked now.
Walt Disney World’s “Kids Play & Dine for 50% Off” Discount
The highlights:
- It includes a 50% discount on child theme park tickets and dining plans
- You’ll need to purchase a non-discounted 4-night, 4-day vacation package that includes Disney hotel, theme park tickets, and a dining plan
- Valid for stays between March 3, 2024 and June 30, 2024
- The usual disclaimers apply: Some hotels and hotel room categories are excluded; the number of rooms available for this discount is limited; this offer can’t be combined with another offer; additional charges may apply if you’ve got more than 2 adults per room.
Theme park tickets vary in price by date, but the 2024 Dining Plan prices are as follows:
- Standard Dining Plan: $94 per adult, $30 per kid (that’s full price), not including tax and gratuities
- Quick Service Dining Plan: $57 per adult, $24 per kid (full price), not including tax and gratuities.
This discount comes on the heels of the Late Winter/Early Spring Offer and the Promo Dining Card Offer announced recently.
For what it’s worth, I suspect Disney’s using these offers to gauge how soft the Orlando market is for 2024. That Late Winter/Early Spring discount, for example, looks like it was announced about a month earlier than normal. And this new discount runs through the end of Disney’s 3rd quarter 2024 – almost 8 months from the day it was announced. Disney’s already said that Orlando attendance is down. I think they’re trying to see how bad it’s going to get with no new rides to open for the next 12 months or so.
Disneyland’s “Limited-Time Kids Ticket Offer”
The highlights:
- It includes a 50% discount on 1-, 2-, or 3-day child theme park tickets
- You’ll need to use the tickets between January 8, 2024 and March 10, 2024
- You’ll still need to make park reservations to use the tickets
Disney says more information on this discount is forthcoming.
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Curious as to Becky’s Gandillon’s take on the DDP discount and if the $12-15 savings per young child makes the DDP worth it financially now (especially since it is attached to half price tickets, too).
Hey TwoBits, I’ll ask Becky if she wants to check in on this, but here’s my take:
1 – kids always make DDP math more friendly because you can use the QS credits for adult meals
2 – the correct way to do the math on this is to ignore the half-price on the kid dining plan, since those are much closer to being a win than the adult prices anyway. Since this offer compels you to buy the DDP, it’s about the tickets.
The cheapest 4-day kids ticket is (I believe) $444; at half price that’s a savings of $55 per day. That brings the price of the adult TS plan down from $94 to $39 per day for one adult – even without the half-price kids plan that’s a clear win. Got two kids? Both adult plans are now $39 per day. And since the QS plan is $57, 2 grownups and 2 kids is basically Free Dining for the adults!
Now, of course your math will change some depending on your ratio of kids to adults, and you might have a 5 day trip but only 4-day tickets, or if your tickets are longer then the per-day savings on the ticket goes down. (But, I also picked the cheapest possible 4-day ticket, they get a lot more expensive than that.) Still, it’s not at all difficult to see that it’s not difficult to get the Dining Plan into clearly “worth it” territory based on savings on the tickets. But that reference to Free Dining was intentional. The question isn’t whether Free Dining saves on food costs, the question is whether it saves you more money than some other discount. Same thing with this offer.
Oh TwoBits, you know I’ve got the math.
As Jennie points out, the problem here is that by booking the 50% off kids offer, you have to “give up” any other potential deals. Let’s take my family (two adults, two kids) as an example and say we want to take a 5-night/4-day trip in early March during the qualifying period.
If I wasn’t a passholder, I could book a 25% off room deal at the Animal Kingdom Lodge, with 4-day non-hopper tickets for each member of my family for a grand total of $4809.84 – this wouldn’t be unusual for us. (The deal is even better for passholders, at 35% off)
If I choose the same room, same duration, same tickets, but the Kids Play and Dine package instead, my total comes to $5885.42 with the Quick Service dining plan (which is almost always the better “deal”). That means, essentially, I’m paying $1075.58 to use the dining plan (the difference in the two costs). Once I factor out the cost of 4 resort mugs and 20 snacks (lets say $208), that means to “break even” with the dining plan, I’d need to average redeeming every quick service credit for a meal worth at least $21.69 (including beverage). This might be possible for kids who aren’t ordering kids meals, and for folks who enjoy getting alcohol with every meal. For my family, we still would never even come close to breaking even.
So the summary is that it certainly changes the math, but it doesn’t make it an immediate or easy win in all situations.
And that’s what I was wondering. As a Disney cheapskate, I don’t stay onsite, so using this new deal wouldn’t work for me, but I do have some friends planning their first trip in 2024, and I’m pretty sure they want to stay onsite, so was curious if this would help them save money or not.