As Disney World adds more rides, ticket prices are going up, CFO says

Milton forced WDW to close for two days, costing more than half a billion dollars.

As Disney World adds new rides in a multibillion-dollar expansion, fans can expect theme park prices to rise, one company official said.

“We’re delivering more value. Value is what you get as a consumer. Price is what you pay,” Disney Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston said during a Q&A session at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference. “People feel good about the value they’re getting, so we ought to be able to take more pricing. As a result, we will drive good financial results out of it.”

Johnston talked about a wide range of topics from Disney theme parks, Epic Universe, Disney movies and streaming services.

Johnston did not indicate how high prices could jump at Disney World in what’s evolved into a complex pricing system these days. The cost varies depending on how many days you go, which park you visit and what time of the year it is.

To go to Magic Kingdom on Christmas Day — one of the busiest days of the year — costs $189. Less popular times cost less. Disney also adds other charges to help guests skip the lines after the parks removed the free FastPass system in 2020.

But Johnston warned that Disney must be “smart about pricing” and “sensitive to the consumer” as the company also wants to build generations of families growing up as Disney fans and going to the parks.

Price jumps occur more at the premium end, Johnston said, adding that Disney has about 100 days a year that are considered value prices, on the cheaper side of the continuum.

“Those prices haven’t moved up much in recent years. It’s the premium end that’s moved up and then value-added services that we have, like Lightning Lane,” Johnston said. “We’re trying at the value end to keep people coming to the parks early in their family’s lives. Trying to keep those prices in a place where it’s accessible to them.”

Disney’s biggest Orlando competitor is opening a brand-new theme park on May 22. Epic Universe will have five lands themed around Harry Potter, Universal Monsters, Nintendo World and more.

Johnston acknowledged that Disney is projecting worst-case “conservative” estimates for how much Universal could impact Disney World’s attendance.

“Whether it will be as significant as we built into it remains to be seen, but we were pretty cautious and conservative on that,” Johnston said. “That said, the history is you tend to get higher attendance in Orlando when there’s something big and new in the market. … It sort of works out OK.”