The Disneyland Annual Passport: Throw the Bums Out?

The Annual Pass is a marvelous invention. It's actually an 'anti-ticket' because once you have one you don't have to think about tickets for the next year. You can visit the parks whenever you want, for however long as you want. And it comes with discounts on other stuff like meals and merchandise. Great, huh?

Spokker Jones (possibly a pseudonym for Zachary Gutierrez) of Red Sky Disney disagrees. He considers annual pass holders akin to cholesterol clogging up the parks and making it more difficult for regular folks to flow freely from ride to ride, bus to bus, store to store. An annual passholder has no reason to hurry. He can stroll. He can take up space. He can get in the way.

In his article, The Economics of Annual Passports, Jones argues that Disney charges too little for annual passes. By not charging enough for annual passes, and by selling too many of them, he writes, Disney degrades the day for occasional visitors.

Jones refers specifically to Disneyland, a smaller park, but you could argue the same about Disney World. To make the argument valid for either park, you'd have to assume that Disney doesn't give a crap about crowds and would sell annual passes to the Red Chinese, if it could, just to rake in the dough. But the limiting factor is clear: there are just so many people in the world who are financially able to visit Disney often enough to justify the high up-front cost of an annual pass.

I've read the careful calculations on Mousesavers about how many days you must spend at Disney to make the cost of an annual pass less than the cost of regular tickets. It's more days than most people are able to swing for a single vacation. And once those people have had that vacation, most of them don't rush back to Disney right away.

For me, it's more interesting to consider whether living close to Disney with an annual pass would gradually erode the joy of going there. I don't live near Disney. Even though I go there often, it's a big deal. If I lived near Disney, I'd go there more often, much more often, wielding my annual pass like Conan the Barbarian his sword, and I wonder how long it would take for the magical to become mundane.

Heck, I'm already tired of this silly Grumpy shirt I'm wearing, and I've only had it for a few weeks.

Even if I don't buy Jones' argument about the ill effect of annual passes, he makes some good observations about the behavior of annual passholders in the parks. I suppose we could even make a game of it: Spot the Passholder. I'm just not sure what happens then.

By the way, Red Sky Disney has lots of cool content, much cooler than the stuff about annual passports, and Jones writes really well though lately not very much.

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