You can find promotions for free Disney World tickets either online or just by driving up and down International Drive in Orlando. The problem is those free tickets come with strings attached. You have to go to a timeshare presentation. That’s a precious few hours away from your vacation.
Disney tickets aren’t cheap so you might decide that a few hours listening to a timeshare salesperson is worth the time spent. But if you crunch the numbers you will usually find that it isn’t. The most common types of Disney tickets that you can get from a timeshare promotion are called “Touch of Magic” tickets. These are special promotional tickets that include two single day admissions to any one of the Walt Disney World theme parks. So you can spend the day at Epcot or Magic Kingdom or one of the other two parks, but you cannot hop between parks.
Because Touch of Magic tickets are special promotional admissions media, they cannot be upgraded to multi-day tickets. Now if you are only looking to spend a day at one of the parks, this isn’t a problem. It only becomes a disadvantage if you are planning several days at the parks.
The reason why is that admission to Disney World gets cheaper as you add more days. Going to WDW for four days is only $8 more than going for three days. Want to spend five days in the parks? That costs $11 more than going for three days. So if you go to Disney World for three days that will cost you almost $75.00 per day. Go for five days and your price drops to less than $50 per day.
Now I’m assuming you don’t live in Orlando and so you just can’t run off to Disney World whenever you feel like it. So if you are in Orlando for a week long vacation, you will probably spend four to five days at the parks. Once you use up the free ticket the timeshare company gave you, you still need to buy passes for the rest of your trip.
Since you’ve already had one day at the park, you decide to buy a three day ticket. Your total savings from using that free ticket in this case is $8.00, or $11.00 if you go with a four day ticket. To save that $11 you probably need to spend two to three hours resisting being cajoled into buying a timeshare.
So ask yourself, what’s your time worth? Would you rather spend the extra few bucks and get to the park early to ride Space Mountain, or would you rather spend your entire morning with someone who is trying to get you to buy something you don’t actually want?