Projected 2017 Walt Disney World Tiered Pricing Calendar
Disney announced tiered pricing for Walt Disney World on February 27, 2016. Last summer Disney did surveys asking people about tiered pricing, so it was not a surprise to see it being implemented (to see the survey Len Testa received last year, take a look at his blog post). The “good” news is that tiered pricing currently only affects one-day tickets and, since most guests buy multi-day tickets, tiered pricing does not affect most visitors. Fred Hazelton’s blog post covered how tiered pricing may affect crowd levels, so in this blog post I’m going to look at how Disney’s value, regular, and peak seasons compare to TouringPlan.com’s Disney World Crowd Calendar.
Walt Disney World’s tiered pricing can be used as a low definition crowd calendar. Not just because it only has three levels, but also because the level only changes 10 times in 10 months (we don’t know yet what January and February will look like). We know there is more variation in the crowd levels than the tiered pricing calendar suggests; I can only assume that Disney decided having changes every week was just too confusing, but it may also be that they are still planning for the inevitable multi-day ticket tiered pricing.
Here’s what we know based on the dates the tiered pricing calendar shows: For the 308 days that the 10 months covers, 15% of the days are value season, 53% of the days are regular season, and 32% of the days are peak season.
Broadly speaking, value season lines up with the crowd levels 1-5, regular season lines up with crowd levels 4-8, and peak season lines up with crowd levels 7-10.
Based on the 2016 tiered pricing calendar, here is our unofficial projected 2017 tiered pricing calendar. If Disney does not change the methodology this should be close to what Disney will publish. What the prices will look like is anyone’s guess.
Steve, I think you have a small typo: Feb 27, 2016. Not 2015.
Thanks. It is fixed now.
More Disney greed. And I think I am at about my limit. Thanks to the disaster that is Shanghai, Disney is also planning on cutting hours and food at other parks.
Greed? Please. It’s a multi-billion dollar company. The hotels have been tiered since day one. If you don’t like it, more room for the rest of us.
Agreed. It is supply and demand. If attendance continues to increase, no reason to not try to earn a few extra (billion) dollars. They have the freedom to do so, and we consumers have the freedom to not attend a Disney park if we so wish.
There doesn’t seem to be very many days of the Value season. A lot of Peak season days though.
That pretty much falls in line with DVC point charts.
It will be interesting to see how the three tiers effect your crowd calendar. One might assume that the low prices might increase crowds in value season and decrease crowds during peak season, but I hypothesize that the different tiers will have little to no effect on daily park attendance.
Currently, tiered ticket pricing is only for just 1-day tickets. We don’t expect to see much effect on crowd levels until all tickets go to a tiering structure.