Announced several months ago and eagerly awaited (or dreaded) by current members, the Disneyland Paris teams unveiled the plans for the new range on Tuesday 11 July.
Gone are the infinity car park and dedicated park entrances! Gone are the free hire of pushchairs and wheelchairs, and free access to the left-luggage office. Gone are privilege tickets, discounts on dry nights and full-price entry tickets.
The Annual Pass programme is disappearing and its replacement, the Disneyland Pass programme, is rather stingy on stardust (fairy dust, or atmosphere, as you prefer).
The Annual Pass programme management team talks about a “responsive” programme that meets the expectations of Annual Pass members …. If the initial reactions on social networks after the announcements at midday on Tuesday 11 July are anything to go by, the target has been totally missed!
In addition to the disappearance of the many advantages “offered free of charge”, Disneyland Paris is offering us a significant price increase and the disappearance of the 15% discount on renewals.
More for less!
| Pass Annuel | Price | Renewal price (15% discount) | Disneyland Pass | Price | Augmentation |
| Discovery | 229€ | 194,65€ | Bronze | 289€ | 48,47% |
| Magic Flex | 319€ | 271,15€ | Silver | 499€ | 84,03% |
| Infinity | 499€ | 424,15€ | Gold | 699€ | 64,80% |
To replace privilege tickets and discounts on dry nights, offers will be made available “throughout the year”, we are told. But how often? During which periods? We can already assume that it won’t be during peak periods such as Halloween or Christmas, or during the summer season, when the parks have no trouble filling up.
Will Disneyland Pass holders and their friends and family be called in to fill empty parks? It’s happened before…
Exclusive Annual Pass (AP) and Disneyland Pass (DP) evenings will be increased to 4 per year, at a rate of one per quarter. For the previous range of Passes, this was already more or less the plan, and we’ve had 10 evenings in 5 years… (even if covid hasn’t helped, let’s face it).
The next event has already been scheduled for Friday 29 September, with tickets going on sale at the end of August. What will the price of the evenings be? To be continued.
The only new feature on offer is a dedicated character meeting point for Annual Pass and Disneyland Pass members.
These characters will be available in the parks (so you’ll need to make a reservation), in an area reserved for AP/DP members. They will remain in place for several weeks (3 to 4 weeks). Members will be able to sign up for ONE character per period (this number may change if demand is not too high). We are announcing several meeting periods per year.
In short, more for less. Magic takes a hit.
I’ll end with a few quotes from Bob Iger last March:
“In our rush to increase profits, we may have been a little too aggressive with some of our pricing.”
“I think there is scope to continue to grow this business, while being smarter about how we price to maintain the value of the brand in terms of affordability.”