Would you sacrifice having park hopper to stay in a better hotel?

[DisneyKidsMom]

We are trying to decide if we should give up the park hopper options and use that money towards upgrading to a moderate hotel?

[Dedivah]

I wouldn't, not for a moderate, maybe a deluxe. My family spends more time at the parks than at the hotel. So it wouldn't be worth it for us.

[tad_tad]

Park hopping is absolutely vital to me. I virtually always go to more than one park on any given day.

[KeriWDE]

We have always stayed at Pop simply so that we CAN have the extra money for our park tickets and DDP.

SOMEDAY, maybe, hopefully, when we win the lottery we might stay at the GF or AKL...

note to self: buy lottery tickets...

But for now, Pop Century and Park Hoppers and DxDP is our way to go.

A hotel room at WDW is merely a place to sleep and shower and put our feet up at the end of LONG days of walking and showing our kids a great time.

When we go on other trips to different parts of the country, we pay for nicer hotels. But at WDW, it's Pop!

[birdsell]

My only thought is if you have young kids that may not be able to handle the park hopping and need the rest instead. That might necessitate the want for a nicer hotel without the hopping.

[tad_tad]

I would think that to some extent it might depend on whether the kids still took naps or not. If you go back to the hotel, you may want to go to a different park in the afternoon. If you just do the marathon park visit all day...that may be different. Even as an adult, I like to take a little hotel break in the early afternoon. :-)

[MarkC]

As much as I love to park hop I would always vote for that. Besides, you are really not in your hotel that much and if you are you are usually sleeping. Keep the park hopper.

The exception would be if your kids like to swim a lot and you wanted a pool with more activities, slides, etc. Its always a tough decision since we're all on fixed incomes. Some are just fixed higher than others.

[Basket Mommy]

We gave up park hoppers 3 years ago and haven't missed it. We found that we weren't really hopping anyway. We tend to choose one park and stay there all day, or take a break in the middle of the day and go back to the same park. The only thing it has affected is where we eat our TS meals (we have to either eat at the park we've already been to or go to a restaurant at a resort since we can't go to a different park), but that has been easy to work around.

We're DVC members, so we go at least once a year. We tend to do a park day, then a rest/resort/pool day, then a park day, etc. We're not in the parks every day. We like to relax in between parks so we're not so exhausted. If it matters, our kids are 12, 10, 8 and 6.

[EeyoresBestFriend]

Love the park hoppers and spontaneity that comes with it.

Like some previous posters said, we aren't at the resort except pretty much to sleep . . . so nope ~ park hopping is always better for us!

[PopPhan]

I would think it would depend on 1) number of nights of your stay 2) how many are in your party 3) dining plans and 4) dates of travel.

$54 per person (the individual price on the Hopper option) during the Value season may be a good trade-off, but during a busier time might not. It might be better to have the opportunity to go from one crowded park to another (hopefully) less crowded one, or to allow dining in a different park than the one you want to spend your day visiting.

[1DisneyNut]

We do the same as Basket Mommy. We also quit buying park hoppers years ago. Well actually never paid for them at all. When they switched over to charging extra for park hoppers we never bought them because we never used it anyway. We plan ahead what park we will go to on each day and on the days we finish a park or leave a park early we do the other things such as visit downtown disney, the board walk or go off site to the beach to eat at a nice seafood restaurant. We just simply don't have any desire to waste a major portion of our vacation waiting on buses and going through entrance lines to park hop. One of the most frustrating things about WDW for us is waiting on buses and working through the security and entrance lines. We don't want to deal with that any more than necessary. I know a lot of people do it but it just doesn't make any sense in my mind.
Also, we can't stand the value resorts. We made the mistake of trying to take a low cost extra trip one year and stayed at the All Star Movies resort during the summer. The bus stop is in front of the building where the sun is baking the front wall. It was like standing in the oven every morning for 30 minutes while waiting on the bus. It was absolutely miserable and I dreaded having to go catch the bus every morning. We like the perks and amenities of the nicer resorts so if I were choosing between park hoppers and a nicer resort, it would be the nicer resort every time.

[Mousemates]

we are pretty committed hoppers I suppose in that we seldom spend an entire day at one park...and almost never at the studios or AKL...they (and this is even with the shorter hours of AKL in mind) just aren't all day affairs for us. Without the ability to hop we would end up feeling kind of stranded when we felt like we were done on the days we started at AKL.

To me, at least until they started doing queen beds in the rooms at the mods, the cost to upgrade from a value was negligible...but now I suppose the decision is a bit more complex. I would say do the hopper...but if you take some time off from the parks to nap and swim, the niceties of the mods might be worth a try.

[Basket Mommy]

When they switched over to charging extra for park hoppers we never bought them because we never used it anyway.

That's when we stopped getting hoppers, too. Maybe it's been more than 3 years?!?

We plan ahead what park we will go to on each day and on the days we finish a park or leave a park early we do the other things such as visit downtown disney, the board walk or go off site to the beach to eat at a nice seafood restaurant. We just simply don't have any desire to waste a major portion of our vacation waiting on buses and going through entrance lines to park hop.

Exactly.

Also, we can't stand the value resorts. We made the mistake of trying to take a low cost extra trip one year and stayed at the All Star Movies resort during the summer.

Our one and only stay in the values (Movies, too!) ended in us joining DVC. We're a family of 6, and when the youngest child outgrew the crib, we tried the values. Never again. Just not us. We found that the service, facilities, pools and accomodations@ Deluxes were far superior to what we experienced at the Values. You really get what you pay for ; )

We like the perks and amenities of the nicer resorts so if I were choosing between park hoppers and a nicer resort, it would be the nicer resort every time.

Definitely.

[The Hitchhiking Ghost]

It's kind of like asking the question - "Is the Disney Dining Plan worth it?" It is to some, and to others, not, all depends on your individual situation.

The park hopper is a great tool, but if you aren't going to make use of it, why pay for it. Only you can really decide if it's worth it. We were just down there and initially didn't buy the park hoppers, then added it when we were down there for 5 of us (which included 3 dd ages 3-5-8) and in hindsight, not sure if I still would have gone thru with it. There was probably one real night that made it worth while, as a family, then a couple nights I took advantage of it myself, but really it was the dining plans that drove our park hopping. With kids that young, not sure it was really worth it.

Again, it all depends on your individual situation. If you have a lot of little tykes, not sure a park hopper is the best way to go.

[Daisy'sMom]

Don't take this the wrong way. Please. But if you have to decide whether to buy a park hopper or stay at a moderate, then it would seem the best thing to do is to skip the moderate and the park hopping and pocket the money.
My DH is a divorce lawyer and so many times he needs a break from the awful things that he hears. We head over to WDW and stay a value. We could stay anywhere, but a value serves our purpose and Disney already gets alot of our money.
So, I guess, it is to each his own.

[TinkerBeth21]

are you planning to do parks everyday? or are you planning to skip some days? We were going to go to parks every other day and then when we looked at ticket prices a 3 day parkhopper was more than a 5 day base. we decided to save the money and get the 5 day base and go to parks everyday, even if we don't stay in that days park all day we are saving money!

[caryrae]

Since we aren't PH people we would get the Resort upgrade. We have stayed at a couple values (POP and ASMovies) and not to long ago we stayed at 2 moderates (CS and POFQ) and we liked the Mods better, POFQ was our favorite. We are also people who don't Parks every single day too, we like to have a day or 2 that are lazy days where we don't have anything planned except to relax.

[mook3y]

the only reason we have ever added PH was for using the DDP. Many of the places we wanted to eat were at Epcot so we would do one park in the morning and then make our way to Epcot for Dinner.

[forever a child]

We have stopped using PH tickets. I prefer to use the $ for other things. In Dec we used it for nicer resort and DDP. This year for our Sept trip we will use savings to buy tickets to MNSSHP and for Universal Tickets to visit WWoHP for the first time. We can schedule our TS dining with our park we are visiting or we will eat TS at a Deluxe resort and return back to same park. We tend to close parks and follow evening EMH's or go to DTD during early nights when park closes.

I USED to find PH valuable when Fantasmic was shown nightly because we used to see it twice during our visit and would return to DHS on a second night. Now we just have to plan carefully because it is usually only shown once, MAYBE twice during our week visit.

[Crow]

good question..
depends on how much time u will spend in parks & how much in resort
last trip i didnt get hopper. which is something i almost always did before. just because it was gf first time there.
id probly go w the hopper