Expect more as theme parks raise prices.
It was the kind of crisp and bright Sunday that demanded the pile of laundry, grocery shopping and other chores could wait. My daughter had just finished another Harry Potter book.
And I came down with a serious case of mom mirage. You know, that thing where moms can so clearly picture the perfect Christmas morning or how all the pieces of a birthday party will fall into place just so.
Our kids had never been to Universal and I told my husband we ought to just buy tickets and go. “Are you sure?” he asked, hesitantly. “You don’t really love the theme parks.”
“But it will be so fun,” I insisted.
The mom mirage is a temporary condition and easily cured when someone starts crying or throwing up or demanding you buy them a $110 Gryffindor robe. We’ll get to that in a moment.
My first bucket of cold water in the face came from a lesson in how Universal structures its ticket prices.
It’s not the prices themselves. This is 2016 and the fact that it’s possible for a theme park excursion to actually rival the cost of a trip to J.K. Rowling’s hometown in Scotland is old news.
Universal competitor Walt Disney World is introducing seasonal prices this week, meaning single-day tickets for the Magic Kingdom will shoot up to $124 from $105 on the park’s busiest days, such as Spring Break and the weeks closest to Christmas. And Disney raised the prices of its multi-day tickets by up to 10 percent.
Universal, which already raised prices this year, is sure to follow eventually. It always does. No matter what, the Universal spending spiral will be the same.
This is the vortex you fall into when you sit down at your computer to buy tickets like I did. It goes like this: You quickly decide that only complete fools would pay nearly $500 (including tax and parking) for a family of four’s single-day admission to a single park.
So you start talking yourself into the three-day passes.
For about $830 (including tax) we could see Universal Studios
and Islands of Adventure at a much more leisurely pace so long as we did so within the next 180 days and not on any of the blackout dates. Then, in a twist apparently concocted to look as if it was designed by Voldemort himself, we discovered that for less than $100 more we could get the whole shebang — annual passes for Florida residents. And voila. We are annual pass holders.
This is one area where the Universal price structure departs from Disney’s. A three-day Disney ticket for Florida residents is less than half the cost of the lowest level annual pass that doesn’t exclude all weekends.
If wizards really exist they are sitting right now in Universal’s ticket sales department. I was still plenty excited, though. Sure, it’s
expensive. But fun, remember? We hopped in the car and headed down there.
First stop was the parking garage where they wrung another $20 out of us even though we purchased the “free” parking with one of our passes. (Of course it’s “free” only after your first visit, as explained in the fine print.) Universal can bring Hogsmeade to life but can’t figure out how to make sure new pass holders don’t have to pay for parking?
Once inside we walked straight to the Potter stuff to try to beat the crowds. Hilarious, right? It’s always crowded. At least on the weekends, the most convenient time for many people to go. We waited about 60 minutes for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey.
It’s a great ride. Universal’s execution of Wizarding World is spot on. This is how, in large part, they get away with the price increases. They have a big problem, though, when it comes to line management. Next we hit Flight of the Hippogriff, a roller coaster for kids. The entire ride lasted approximately 70 seconds. For this, we waited 90 minutes. People were so tired of standing they were sprawled out on the pavement, which was possible because the line hardly moved.
My 5-year-old only wanted to be carried. The older one, our own little Hermione, declared that she simply could not live without one of those $110 robes that lots and lots of people were wearing around the park. (We didn’t buy one, but did take home two $10 Gryffindor pins. I consider that a small victory.) We were in line for only our second ride when I started lecturing the children about how lucky they were to be having this kind of fun. The kind where you walk through a queue like cattle as you watch other people take a whirl on the Hippogriff about 100 times before — finally — it’s your turn.
Disney wins on time management. Everyone who buys a ticket from the Mouse gets three Fast Passes, which are scheduled for specific times. At Universal, the Express Passes cost extra and aren’t scheduled for specific times. The result is large numbers of people in the express line and the regular line at once. And a longer wait for everyone. But no matter. With the annual passes, my family and I can go back again and again ... to wait in more lines until we see everything.
How fun.