Get excited, Disneyland-lovers! The theme park is bringing back the Southern California Annual Passport, a flat-rate ticket for area residents who want to make going to the Happiest Place on Earth a regular activity. Sales of the Passports were discontinued back in 2014 to retool the program. The new version comes with some changes, though. There are now 12 more days in the year when the passes can be used—but the cost to buy a pass has gone up by 21 percent.
The revamped Passport program is part of an overhaul of the ticket pricing for Disneyland and California Adventure, the LA Times reports. In recent months, the parks have switched to a new, dynamic pricing model where entry is more expensive for busier days, and less-popular dates are discounted. Single-day entry tickets now average out to about $106.
Under the previous Passport program, a pass-holder would only need to go to the parks a few times a year to justify the $359 cost. That encouraged many locals to visit Mickey Mouse on a frequent basis. According to analysts, making it that affordable to drop in was contributing to a reputation for crowding and long wait-times, which, in turn, might make tourists less likely to visit. Since tourists are Disneyland’s real bread-and-butter—they spend more on food and retail items and often stay at company-owned hotels—that didn’t make financial sense for Disney in 2014.
Now, however, things have turned. September 5 marked the end of the park-wide 60th anniversary celebrations which brought special parades and displays and 10 attractions and eateries have been closed while construction starts on Star Wars Land. Apparently, the executives thought it might be a good time to invite the enthusiastic SoCal locals back.
The new Annual Passport will run $459 and offer access on 227 days of the year. That makes it a value if you were planning to go to the parks at least five times in a single year, and as long as you’re okay with the black-out periods around holidays and popular vacation days. Or, to put it another way, it works out to only $2.02 per day if you wanted to go every day you could use the pass—and, presumably, make some type of documentary about your weird project in the process.
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