Just before the arrival of Hurricane Milton in Florida, a new restaurant at the Walt Disney World resort posted its menu in advance of its grand opening.
You may have already had a sense that Disney is expensive, but chances are you didn’t realize just how insane the costs truly are now.
The prices announced by The Cake Bake Shop at Disney’s BoardWalk are indeed extreme. A Coca-Cola will cost you $8. An order of French toast is $26. On the kids’ menu a dish of buttered noodles is $18.
“Children’s bacon and eggs is $18!?!? An egg sandwich for $23?” one Reddit user wrote. “These prices are not connected to reality, even accounting for the Disney tax.”
How Disney prices have increased recently
The “Disney tax,” for the rare human being who may not be already acquainted, is the steep markup that Disney Parks have become infamous for over the past 20 years. That makes the cost of a Disney vacation dramatically higher than the price of a trip elsewhere—or even compared to the cost of a Disney trip a year ago.
The Cake Bake Shop, which previously built a following in Indiana for glitter-dusted food groomed for maximum Instagram flourish, sets its own prices as one of many vendors from outside the Walt Disney World resort that have been granted leases to cater to Disney guests. Those vendors go through a rigorous training process, administered by Disney, and are also required to submit a portion of their proceeds to the landlord corporation.
But even the prices at restaurants inside the theme parks, which Disney largely controls directly, have become onerous. The entire resort is now luxury-priced like room service at a hotel or an airport terminal in Sweden. For example, a Coke in the parks will cost you nearly $5 including tax. Four chicken strips with some French fries will set you back $11, and a bowl of spaghetti is nearly $30. Want a Mouse-ear headband? Most of those now cost $35–$45.
It gets much more outrageous. A few days after Cake Bake’s menu was released, Disneyland in California announced a slate of new price hikes for admission.
Last Wednesday, for the first time ever, a one-day ticket to a Disney park broke the $200 barrier when peak season, single-day tickets for either of Disneyland’s two parks increased from $194 to $206.
That insane markup is by no means dictated by inflation. Disney didn’t break the $100 barrier until 2015. Even back then, Frommer’s bemoaned “the one-percenting of Disney.” In the 9 years since, tickets have doubled in price—this year alone surging by 6%.
And those numbers are only the beginning of mounting expenses faced by families who choose to take their brood to Disney. I dipped into the 2014 Frommer’s guide to Walt Disney World, which I wrote, to show you just how bizarrely out-of-touch Disney prices have become in just a decade.
Parking is currently $35 a day at Disneyland and $30 at Disney World. In 2014, parking at Disney World cost $15.
The lowest possible price at Disney’s “Value” resorts that most people pay is in the mid-$200 range. In 2014, the lowest rate was $96.
Rates for rooms without a view at Disney’s Contemporary Resort now start in the mid-$600s per night. In 2014, nightly rates were $378.
At The Cake Bake Shop, chocolate milk is $9. At the restaurant it replaced, ESPN Club, kids could get an entire meal including milk for $9.
Disney even has people paying to wait in lines now, which is a cost guests never had to worry about before. Unless you want to be condemned to wait long periods in queues that have been intentionally slowed down, you have to pay as much as $29 more per person per day—on top of admission—for Lightning Lane access, excluding the most popular rides.
On top of all that, the most popular rides now cost as much as $21 extra per person for guaranteed admission in a line that hasn’t been artificially slowed down by the paid system.
People who took recent vacations to Disney report on social media that they paid between $7,000 and $12,000 for a single vacation.
It’s absolutely mental.
Disney’s value-for-money meltdown
Sure, Disney is putting out the occasional sale, but considering those discounts are off rates that have already been marked up to the heavens, the discounts don’t truly represent any savings for parents’ bank accounts.
This year, LendingTree issued a survey that found that 45% of parents went into debt after taking their families to Disney. We already knew that Disney has abandoned most efforts to welcome guests of limited income, but it’s shocking that so many parents are apparently willing to risk their families’ financial security for the bragging rights of a Disney trip. Even if you have the time of your life, going into the red for the experience is not fiscally wise on any level.
“Disney vacations became too expensive for many Americans,” CNBC declared in a lengthy segment that aired this summer.
Some other time, we can talk about the ethical dilemmas involved in what Disney is doing to families the company knows can’t afford to visit, especially compared to the original intentions of the company’s creator, who saw his Disneyland project in staunchly egalitarian terms.
As the company pulls in more than $2 billion a quarter from the division that controls the parks, it’s fair to say that despite the income barrier to a Disney trip, the resorts are still packed enough to generate obscene income for the corporation, which is the company’s right to make.
Disney knows that its infamous reputation for out-of-control prices portends a permanent tarnishing of the brand’s value—but there’s no easy way out for the company.
How did Disney prices get so bad so quickly?
When the Walt Disney Company acquired ABC in the 1990s, the era of relentless synergy and self-promotion began. Fueled by nonstop promotion on one of the major American TV networks, the parks began to swell with attendees and become unmanageable. And as Disney collected more major franchises, including Star Wars and Marvel, the power of all those brands began to outweigh the theme parks’ ability to absorb all the people who now wanted to go.
If Disney cuts prices and makes its parks more accessible, the company won’t be able to handle the crowds. It’s likely that high prices are now one of the only mechanisms that Disney has to stem the flood of shoulder-to-shoulder overcrowding inside the parks. Well, high prices along with alienating lifelong fans and annual pass holders, who spend less on their visits, with authenticity-staining demolitions and changes inside the parks.
The rise of costs has unfortunately been accompanied by a corporate policy that seems intent on milking the Disney resorts as a cash cow. Designers are gradually stripping the resort of perks and trademark theming to maximize profit instead. Where once high-spending guests could stay in Disney rooms with carpeting, fantasy details, and bathrobes, those visitors now pay through the nose for laminate flooring, Disney-themed decals, and Fairfield Inn–level room amenities. The diminishing and cheapened atmosphere at Disney’s resorts, particularly considering what’s being charged, is being widely noticed.
The higher the prices go, the less Disney is living up to the quality promised by those stratospherically luxury-level prices.
Make no mistake: Consumers who have the money to spend are able to perceive the difference between true quality and resting on past laurels. If Disney doesn’t make sure its resorts deliver the storied “magic,” or if another company manages to steal that emblem from Disney, then the Magic Kingdom will be doomed to limp along as a relic of a bygone era that our grandparents loved more.
Disney is sinking in a trap of its own success. It’s too successful to be affordable, but too expensive to deliver good value.
Jason Cochran has written Frommer’s guides to Walt Disney World, Universal, and Orlando since 2006.