Disney VIP Tour

For her 50th birthday, my mom wanted to go to her favorite place on earth: Disney World. Take a look at my post on this entire trip here, but for now I’m going to focus on the private VIP tour that we did. Between jobs, college, and life, we only had a weekend that we could all be there together, so a VIP tour seemed like the best option to make sure we really got to see and do all that we wanted. Spoiler alert: Disney is big. Also, we wanted a day at Universal because Harry Potter World had just opened a few months earlier, so we were really limiting ourselves time-wise.

I was going to make a pro and con list of taking this tour, but in reality the only real con is the price, and if you look closely that may not even be a con at all, depending on your group. So I’ll just make a pro list instead.

Pros:

1. Biggest selling point: You get to fastpass (almost) all of the rides! Even some rides that don’t even have a fastpass line. After doing this travel agent thing for almost a year, I’ve discovered that fastpass seems to be the biggest discussion around planning a Disney trip. What rides you get, what time you get them, and what day you get them, can really make or break your whole park day or week, and the rest is often scheduled around it. With a regular ticket, you can make three advanced fastpass reservations and then one at a time as you go after the first three are finished. With a tour, they are unlimited and ongoing and there are no lines. 

We actually started our day on Winnie the Pooh in Magic Kingdom, because this was one of the only non fastpass options even for a cast member on a VIP tour, and Winnie the Pooh is VERY important to me (more on that after my trip to Disney and lunch at Crystal Palace in two weeks!). Good news for Pooh lovers everywhere: they are now fastpassable.

2. This is the best way to see ALL FOUR PARKS IN ONE DAY (and really five, since we did Magic Kingdom twice). We started at Magic Kingdom to do the few rides that VIP tours could not fastpass (Pooh) before the crowds started, then Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Epcot, and back to Magic Kingdom for the rest of the park, dinner, and fireworks. While the tour was expensive, the cost is hourly regardless of how many people you have (up to 10 people), so we saw all four parks but only needed tickets for one day. Here’s a cost analysis, because I’m a retired math teacher, and while I don’t miss the job I do miss the math. If you’re not into numbers, scroll to the photo proof that we hit four parks in one day, evident by our clothing. (Note: I do not know the prices from 9 years ago when we did this tour, nor does it matter because if you’re reading this you’re not thinking about going 9 years ago, so these are today’s prices.): 

We were 8 adults and we visited four parks, and one park twice. So we’ll call it five. Let’s look at the five day base ticket. If I were to do this TODAY (all days are priced differently so these are approximate), I would spend $456.47 per person, or $3889.20 for 8 people.

Maybe you don’t have five days there, and you want three park hoppers instead to try to hit five parks in three days. Because of the huge discount for a five day ticket vs anything less, and the extra cost for a park hopper, you’d actually spend almost the same for the three days vs five. TODAY, this would be $421.37 per person, or $3590.08 total.

Now let’s look at the tour prices. Tours start at $425 per hour, with a 7 hour minimum and go up to $625 per hour at peak times. When we were there, it was a low crowd time in October – after school started, before Halloween parties, so it was probably a lower priced tour. Just for an average, let’s price out the tour for $525/hour. If you do this for 7 hours this is $3675. This is LESS THAN 5 day base tickets and not that much more than 3 day hoppers for our group. However, we did not do 7 hours. We probably started at 9 am and went until dinner, around 8 pm, so let’s say 11 hours. This comes to $5775. So yes, significantly more than just the tickets right? Except one major thing – we had ONE night in a hotel instead of three or four. And with 8 adults, you need at least 2 hotel rooms, if not a villa or suite, both of which will cost you at least $2000 more (seriously, I just checked and that was around the cheapest I could find).

Final point: we were 8 adults. The tour can hold up to 10 adults, bringing the cost per person down even more! 

The moral of the story: If you have a large group, and your group is able to handle a FULL day of park hopping, this tour is SO WORTH IT and in the end not as expensive as the initial sticker shock. 

Here are some rides and attractions we hit on our whirlwind day, after Winnie the Pooh of course (sorry, out of order):

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3. The private van was key. They dropped off and picked up at back entrances. We saw a ton of signs that said “Cast Members Only”. At one point our guide sent us across the park for a ride then went to get the van to drive around and pick us up so we wouldn’t have to waste precious Disney time walking back. The amount you can accomplish with this is incredible. 

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4. OH! And they picked us up at our hotel in the morning giving us extra sleep time. Parking, shuttles, and monorails, are also all avoided with our private van so getting between the parks was way quicker than it would have been if we were using park hoppers and traveling on our own.
5. The tour comes with prime seating or placement for parades and other special events. By the way, this can also “save” money. If you were planning on buying prime seating or going to a viewing party, you don’t have to because it’s included in the tour price.
6. Possibly the coolest part: we got to see and learn about so much of the behind the scenes operations and the training the cast members receive (all while still having time to ride all the rides in all the parks!). There are tours that do this at Disney, but again, extra cost, and again, they take TIME (and lots of it) away from the parks.
7. We had help with hard to get dining reservations. This is critical in general, but especially if you book your trip less than 180 days before. This is when dining reservations open up and the good ones go FAST.
8. It definitely didn’t hurt to have our own personal family photographer. Especially since (as you can probably tell from the awful quality ride photos) this was before Memory Maker became a thing.

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We’ve talked about this tour a lot since we went almost 9 years ago, and we definitely felt like we missed some of the magic with all of this running around. We didn’t really have to walk through any of the parks and we hopped in and out of the van to save time. However, we wanted to do it all in one day and these tours are totally customizable, so in a way we chose this less magical Disney experience. We had all been there before and we all knew we’d be back. If you don’t want to miss the magic, go ahead and enter through the front gates of Magic Kingdom and walk to the castle for your photo, and take your time walking down Main Street, instead of entering the back gate, riding Winnie the Pooh, and running to another park – you can do it any way you choose!