Every child should visit Disneyland once in his or her lifetime. The only problem is that it can be SO expensive to take your kids to Disneyland. My husband and I knew that in order for us to take our 2-year old to the park for the weekend, we could easily spend over $1,000 before we went through the turnstile. With a little online research and planning, we were able to enjoy the full Disneyland and California Adventures experience without paying a small fortune.
As I searched for a hotel and tickets, my first stop was the Disneyland website. After entering my search terms for two nights in moderate hotel with two adult park hopper tickets, the least expensive package deal cost $674, before taxes. Ouch!
I had a hunch that I could get a better price on my own, so I decided to conduct my own search online. I searched for “Disneyland Hotel Package” to see what other travel agencies had to offer. Several Southern California based travel agencies had offers that had better package prices. The agency that we finally settled on (californiasunhotels.com) offered us a moderate priced hotel (Ramada Limited Suites) with two adult park hopper tickets for $394, before taxes. Since a two-year-old gets free admission into the Disney Resort, our total savings for hotel and Disneyland and California Adventures tickets was $280.
Transportation Savings
The tricky part about deciding whether or not to fly or drive is to determine whether the time saved is worth the extra cost. The best flight deal that I found was $163 per round trip ticket to Anaheim. Since we would have to purchase a seat for our two year old, the total cost would be $489. The flight lasted a little less than an hour. But after driving an hour to Sacramento, spending an hour in the airport, flying, picking up our luggage, waiting for the shuttle to our hotel, and taking the shuttle to the hotel, the total travel time would be around four hours.
Driving from our house to Anaheim takes 6 hours. The cost of two tanks of gas to get there and two tanks of gas back would cost us about $160. Add another $50 for meals and snacks on the road and the total is $210. We asked ourselves if $279 was worth an extra four hours of total driving time. Our answer was, of course!
We saved additional money by taking the Anaheim Resort Transit to Disneyland instead of driving and paying to park. ART picked us up near our hotel and only cost $3 per adult ticket (kids are free) instead of the $11 per car price of parking at Disneyland. Since parking at our hotel was free, the total savings for two days parking was $8.
In Park Savings
It doesn’t make much sense to leave Disneyland for meals, so we ate lunch and dinner there. But we saved quite a bit by eating breakfast at our hotel. The last time we visited Disneyland, we spent about $10 per person for breakfast eating at a Disney food court or restaurant. By having breakfast in the hotel, we saved $40 over two days.
Every kid loves having a special Disney shirt to wear in the park, but the last time we went, it cost us $27.99 to buy a child’s extra small t-shirt which was the size of a handkerchief. I stopped by our local Disney Store before we left, and bought two t-shirts on sale for 7.99. When we got to the park, I gave our son a surprise-a special Mickey Mouse shirt to wear in the park. The next day he got another surprise-a Tigger shirt to wear. I saved $10 and I got two t-shirts instead of one!
In the end my total savings for a hotel, Disneyland and California Adventures tickets, transportation, parking, meals, and souvenirs was $617. Not a bad deal at all.
