Introduction

Trips to Walt Disney World are expensive and becoming more so all the time. It seems that every few months we hear about another hike in ticket prices and March of 2019 was no exception. With the announcment that Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge is opening in August 2019 at Walt Disney World there was an associated hike in ticket prices. Add this to the news that variable pricing was introduced in October 2018. Ever-increasing ticket prices can make it feel like Disney is pricing out the middle-class.

With all the recent price increases, I wanted to take a look at the history of the cost of a single day admission to the Magic Kingdom and ask a few questions:

  1. Adjusted for inflation, does it cost more to visit Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom today than it did in 1971?
  2. What will the next price increase be?

TL;DR

  1. Yes. Yes. Yes. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of a one-day ticket to the Magic Kingdom in 1971 was $21.65 and today it is $139.
  2. I predict the next price increase will be

Data

To ask these questions I needed data. I needed data on: the historic price of admission to the Magic Kingdom; the dates those ticket prices were in effect; and the Disney CEO at the time. It wasn’t hard to find websites with the history of admission prices. Whenever possible, I selected the most expensive ticket available that was not a park-hopper. I used the data from this site and cross referenced it here. I got the dates for the Disney CEOs from the book Disney War by James B. Stewart and cross referenced them with this Wikipedia article. Please let me know if I inadvertently included the incorrect data in this post, and please point me to your source so I can update the post.

Because this is a data science blog post, I’ve posted the code to a repository so that anyone with a computer and the desire can recreate the analyses presented here.

Let’s take a look at the data set I created. There are three columns in the data set:

  1. Date - The date the admission price was in effect.
  2. Price - The cost of single-day admission to the Magic Kingdom
  3. CEO - The Disney CEO at the time of the price.
Date Price (USD) CEO
1971-10-01 3.50 Disney
1972-02-01 3.75 Tatum
1973-04-01 4.50 Tatum
1974-06-01 5.25 Tatum
1975-12-01 6.00 Tatum
1978-06-01 6.50 Walker
1979-04-01 7.00 Walker
1980-03-01 7.50 Walker
1980-11-01 8.00 Walker
1981-10-01 9.50 Walker
1982-06-01 13.25 Walker
1982-09-01 15.00 Walker
1983-10-01 17.00 Miller
1984-06-01 18.00 Miller
1985-06-01 19.50 Eisner
1985-11-01 21.50 Eisner
1986-03-01 23.00 Eisner
1986-06-01 24.50 Eisner
1986-12-01 26.00 Eisner
1987-12-01 28.00 Eisner
1989-05-01 29.00 Eisner
1990-02-01 31.00 Eisner
1991-02-01 33.00 Eisner
1992-06-01 34.00 Eisner
1993-05-01 35.00 Eisner
1994-03-01 36.00 Eisner
1995-02-01 37.00 Eisner
1996-02-01 38.50 Eisner
1997-03-01 39.75 Eisner
1998-04-01 42.00 Eisner
1999-05-01 44.00 Eisner
2000-01-01 46.00 Eisner
2001-01-01 48.00 Eisner
2002-09-01 50.00 Eisner
2003-06-01 52.00 Eisner
2004-03-01 54.75 Eisner
2005-01-01 59.75 Eisner
2006-01-01 63.00 Iger
2006-08-01 67.00 Iger
2007-08-01 71.00 Iger
2008-08-01 75.00 Iger
2009-08-01 79.00 Iger
2010-08-01 82.00 Iger
2011-06-01 85.00 Iger
2012-06-01 89.00 Iger
2013-06-01 95.00 Iger
2014-02-01 99.00 Iger
2015-02-01 105.00 Iger
2016-02-01 110.00 Iger
2018-02-01 122.00 Iger
2018-10-16 129.00 Iger
2019-03-13 139.00 Iger

Visuals

You always want to look at the data. Here’s a plot of admission price by date on the horizontal (x-axis) and the cost of admission to the Magic Kingdom on the vertical axis (y-axis) in US Dollars. Each point’s color represents the Disney CEO at the time the price increased.

Does it look like Mr. Iger has upped the rate of admission increases faster than the other CEOs? Maybe. But this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. We need to adjust the prices for inflation. We will adjust inflation using the “Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items” from the rock stars over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

We will pull out the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the dates the admission prices went into effect and normalize them based on a 1971 baseline (the year WDW opened). Then we convert the older prices to 2018 US Dollars.

We’ve added three new columns to out data set:

  1. Year - We used this column to calculate the CPI
  2. Adjustment - The adjusted CPI value
  3. Adjusted Price - The original Price of a ticket times the Adjustment.
Date Price (USD) CEO Year Adjustment Adjusted Price (USD)
1971-10-01 3.50 Disney 1971 6.279753 21.97914
1972-02-01 3.75 Tatum 1972 6.080734 22.80275
1973-04-01 4.50 Tatum 1973 5.722574 25.75158
1974-06-01 5.25 Tatum 1974 5.154958 27.06353
1975-12-01 6.00 Tatum 1975 4.723183 28.33910
1978-06-01 6.50 Walker 1978 3.896671 25.32836
1979-04-01 7.00 Walker 1979 3.502530 24.51771
1980-03-01 7.50 Walker 1980 3.085883 23.14412
1980-11-01 8.00 Walker 1980 3.085883 24.68706
1981-10-01 9.50 Walker 1981 2.795733 26.55946
1982-06-01 13.25 Walker 1982 2.633550 34.89453
1982-09-01 15.00 Walker 1982 2.633550 39.50325
1983-10-01 17.00 Miller 1983 2.552890 43.39914
1984-06-01 18.00 Miller 1984 2.446042 44.02876
1985-06-01 19.50 Eisner 1985 2.362689 46.07243
1985-11-01 21.50 Eisner 1985 2.362689 50.79781
1986-03-01 23.00 Eisner 1986 2.317636 53.30562
1986-06-01 24.50 Eisner 1986 2.317636 56.78208
1986-12-01 26.00 Eisner 1986 2.317636 60.25853
1987-12-01 28.00 Eisner 1987 2.237571 62.65198
1989-05-01 29.00 Eisner 1989 2.051169 59.48391
1990-02-01 31.00 Eisner 1990 1.945726 60.31751
1991-02-01 33.00 Eisner 1991 1.867016 61.61153
1992-06-01 34.00 Eisner 1992 1.811905 61.60476
1993-05-01 35.00 Eisner 1993 1.759649 61.58773
1994-03-01 36.00 Eisner 1994 1.715131 61.74473
1995-02-01 37.00 Eisner 1995 1.668328 61.72812
1996-02-01 38.50 Eisner 1996 1.620732 62.39819
1997-03-01 39.75 Eisner 1997 1.583712 62.95254
1998-04-01 42.00 Eisner 1998 1.559585 65.50257
1999-05-01 44.00 Eisner 1999 1.526115 67.14906
2000-01-01 46.00 Eisner 2000 1.476409 67.91482
2001-01-01 48.00 Eisner 2001 1.435963 68.92624
2002-09-01 50.00 Eisner 2002 1.413410 70.67050
2003-06-01 52.00 Eisner 2003 1.381659 71.84629
2004-03-01 54.75 Eisner 2004 1.345760 73.68038
2005-01-01 59.75 Eisner 2005 1.301939 77.79087
2006-01-01 63.00 Iger 2006 1.261299 79.46184
2006-08-01 67.00 Iger 2006 1.261299 84.50704
2007-08-01 71.00 Iger 2007 1.226103 87.05332
2008-08-01 75.00 Iger 2008 1.181047 88.57851
2009-08-01 79.00 Iger 2009 1.184843 93.60256
2010-08-01 82.00 Iger 2010 1.165764 95.59264
2011-06-01 85.00 Iger 2011 1.130277 96.07356
2012-06-01 89.00 Iger 2012 1.107320 98.55151
2013-06-01 95.00 Iger 2013 1.091322 103.67558
2014-02-01 99.00 Iger 2014 1.073972 106.32325
2015-02-01 105.00 Iger 2015 1.072690 112.63251
2016-02-01 110.00 Iger 2016 1.059238 116.51618
2018-02-01 122.00 Iger 2018 1.012430 123.51643
2018-10-16 129.00 Iger 2018 1.012430 130.60344
2019-03-13 139.00 Iger 2019 1.000000 139.00000

Now we have our admission prices adjusted for inflation. Let’s plot:

It’s helpful to see the adjusted prices side by side with the original prices.

What kind of blows my mind is that the Magic Kingdom’s prices have, on occasion, not kept up with inflation. When I saw this I manually checked the adjustments I calculated using the Bureau of Labor Statistics own calculator. My calculations were within $0.20 each time.

On to the questions.

Eisner vs. Iger

The first two questions are related. To refresh your recollection:

  1. Are ticket prices rising faster now?

Let’s look at the rate of increase for each CEO. We will fit a straight line through each CEOs prices and use that line to describe each pricing regime. We will use the same plot as before and overlay lines on to it. Roy O. Disney was CEO for only one price point and won’t get a line.

The shaded regions around the lines represent the confidence interval around the line. A confidence interval is how sure we are of our estimate of the line, and narrow intervals are better.

But we are interested in the steepness (slope) of the lines.Are the slopes between Michael Eisner and Bob Iger the same? They don’t appear to be the same but I want to check. I ran another analysis to ask this question.

Tracking inflation

Adjusted for inflation, does it cost more to visit Disney today than it did in 1971?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of admission to the Magic Kingdom in 1971 was $21.64. The cost of admission on October 13th, 2018 is $122.

If the cost of Magic Kingdom admission had simply tracked inflation, the cost today would be $21.64.

Let’s add to our previous plot.

## Saving 7 x 5 in image

The line of red dots along the bottom of the plot represents the cost of admission to the Magic Kingdom if the cost had just tracked inflation.

The next price increase

Len Testa and others have noted that the current pricing scheme does not contain information for December, 2019. This date corresponds to the approximate opening of Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge at Walt Disney World. Using our model to predict out to December, 2019 we estimate the cost of admission will be ~$130 for a one day ticket. This may be a low estimate because themed entertainment hasn’t seen anything like Galaxy’s Edge. Disney could pretty much set any price and fans will pay it. Let’s plot this out.

I think this prediction is low because it doesn’t take into account the opening of Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge.