tiered pricing for attractions

How Disney Parks SHOULD Do Tiered Pricing

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts recently sent out a survey to find out how the world would feel about a new tiered pricing system. The survey, which was quickly leaked on Twitter, presented gold, silver, and bronze days, with pricing based on the size of the crowd on that particular day. Want to go to the Magic Kingdom on a weekend? Say goodbye to your $105 one-day price tag. That’ll be $115 now. Unless you want to go over the holiday break. Or any day during the entire month of July. Then it’s $125.

Of course, this is only hypothetical. They’re only testing the waters to see just how much people will bend to help even out the crowds. But evening out the crowds isn’t the only thing they should be taking into consideration. The Disney experience is already extremely overpriced (they JUST raised it in February to $105, breaking the $100 mark for the first time). Summer, weekends, and holidays are the days that most families are able to get to Disney World – it would be a shame to alienate families who can barely afford to get through the turnstile as it is.

Now I get it. I’ve worked with many attractions who are trying to boost weekday attendance. And let’s be honest, that is most likely what this is really about – attendance and revenue boosting, much more than crowd thinning. So why not make weekdays more accessible to the crowds instead of making weekends less accessible. Here’s my tiered plan:

  1. Keep the basic prices at $105.
  2. Drop the basic weekday price to an even $100 to encourage weekday visits during typically slow weeks.
  3. Offer a gold ticket every day for $130-$150. With the gold ticket you get extras that you might normally get with a FastPass, priority seating at restaurants, free desserts – perks that won’t eat into the park’s overhead.

It would require some heavy analysis on Disney’s part to determine what the gold ticket price point would be in order to make a profit. But it would accomplish two major things. It would give people who can afford it a reason to a) visit and b) pay more – an easier, elevated experience. And it would give people who have been saving up for this major family event an incentive to come on the weekdays, thus raising volume.

Benefit-based tiered pricing for attractions is not a new concept. It’s something that museums, luxury hotels, ski resorts, and even hospitals have been doing for years to generate revenue, become more accessible to the masses, and keep affluent consumers happy by giving them the advantages they want. Why not Disney?

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