Theme parks consider dynamic admission pricing

maXairMike said:

kevin38 said:If the floor is the current price and it just goes up

on busy days I would not go .Offer me 2 days for the price of 1 (mid week during slow season)and I will be there or a Tues-Thurs annual pass for 1/2 the price of current Disney pass.(currently 750.00 or so)

Are you talking the Premium AP or Premiere Passport, because a regular annual pass (no blockouts, just the 4 theme parks) is only a bit over $400 for a Florida resident, and I know they aren't giving residents a $300 discount. I would doubt they ever offer a seasonal AP to non-residents, though you can get a FL resident seasonal AP which is similar to what you described for even less than the "regular" AP.

premium non resident is 744.44 USD

the regular pass is  611.31

The thing is, the parks are kind of already doing this, I just don't get why they don't do it more or advertise it more or do it across the board. Coke cans around here have discounts that are more on weekdays than weekends. There was even an early season pass one year that was like, $40 and valid from opening day (late march) through memorial day or something.

Is it really that hard to just put ($5 discount Mon - Thursday, another $5 discount March - May) on all your pricing, whether on line or at the ticket booth?

That's a good point, Andy. One of my favorites is the Holiday World discount page:



• SAVE $5* off each General Admission ticket in May
• SAVE $2* off each Guests-under-54-inches and Seniors (60+) ticket every day
• SAVE $5* off each General Admission ticket in June
• SAVE $4* off each General Admission ticket Sundays through Fridays in July and August
• SAVE $2* off each General Admission ticket on Saturdays in July and August
• SAVE $4* off each General Admission ticket in September
• SAVE $11* off each General Admission ticketafter 3:00 pm CDTevery day*
• SAVE $7* off each Guests-under-54-inches and Seniors (60+) ticketafter 3:00 pm CDTevery day*
  

But yeah, lots of parks do some sort of discount and it's often seasonal or crowd-based.

That's why news stories like this lead me to believe that we're talking about something a little different.

Are they talking about not knowing what the discount is until you walk up to the ticket booth (kind of unheard of)? Or not being able to predict it until you go to buy your tickets (more like hotels and airlines)? I guess those to approaches are quite different from discounting midweek across the board (and again, I still don't understand why parks don't already do that. Or does the low demand create more value for a trip to the park and they figure it balances out that way?)