Should I get an AP

(LATER EDIT: My info in this post is off - see later replies for better info!)

To just have the sheet calculate for the one person, just enter 1 adult and 0 children at the top left.

You can enter the total food for everyone and other costs since your 1 AP could get the discount for all of that.

If you are not going to bridge tickets to get the AP and are just going to buy it outright, you can just enter the AP cost in the ticket override column in the main table.

Think that should get you where you want to be.

Just wanted to follow up quickly: I realized there is an error in my logic on that last advice I gave you for putting the straight from Disney AP cost in the override. I am working on fixing that right now… will post again when I have it done!

All righty, so long story not so short, I realized that if you used my previous advice from last night a couple of formulas would not take into account the amount paid vs savings correctly.

After trying to fix them, my formula logic got complicated and I ran out of coffee. So I decided to just simplify:

There is now a box at the top marked “Buying Full Price AP Straight From Disney?” that you can set to “YES” and it will ignore any ticket bridging savings.

I should have thought of that earlier methinks, but didn’t have anyone mention that scenario and my brain didn’t thunk it. (Probably similar to my weird awareness thing that if something isn’t sitting in the usual place in our refrigerator or cupboard, my brain doesn’t see it. :smiley:)

Also, when fixing all of that, I also noticed an issue in how the sheet used the amounts in the ticket override boxes. I added those override boxes a little while back so people could enter actual prices they paid rather than have the sheet find the current highest discounted tickets.

Until today, if one used those override boxes the sheet didn’t look up the bridging savings properly and just used the maximum savings listed at the top of the sheet.

However, the sheet WAS using the total price paid correctly, so the difference in accuracy was likely only a small amount : the difference between the maximum savings at top and the actual savings if you entered an override ticket price. (Probably in the neighborhood of $20-$40 at most I’d guess.)

Below is a summary screen shot of this info which may make it more clearer.
I’m also going to add this all to my Worth It? forum thread for posterity.

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I was going to toy around with it, but it is so complicated, I couldn’t figure out how to use it. I just wanted to do a comparison, for example, of buying tickets through UT versus buying an AP for a single trip. But the spreadsheet apparently forces you to pick a second trip. Also couldn’t tell where you put the price you’d pay for the tickets without the AP. Not sure what “Hotel” means, or why it factors into the AP.

I’m not saying it isn’t a good spreadsheet that I can see you put a LOT of time into, but it isn’t intuitive to me. That’s not a complaint, though. Just an observation. I have a budgeting spreadsheet I created, for example, that makes perfect sense to me, but if anyone else tried to use it, they would be completely lost! :slight_smile:

Ultimately, it probably doesn’t matter in my case. But I find it a cool tool (in theory) and think it is worth refining and making available as you have done. For that, I’m expressing extreme gratitude. I appreciate those who are willing to share something to help others with no direct benefit to themselves. Kudos!

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This is super helpful! I applaud your masterful use of excel. Thank you so much! For us, with ballparking food amounts and buying in advance, it is worth the upgrade with as little as a 10% hotel discount, but not worth it if there is no hotel discount. I wish I knew if there would be a discount, or if we could get a discount if we had the AP at check out as opposed to check in. The trip isn’t even for a year of half! I may be thinking about this a little too far in advance. :grin:

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I hear you - it is hard to create an interface that both covers all the bases and is easy.
When I keep it simple, people ask how they can do something more complicated.
When I add the extra feature to help those people, those who want it simple can get confused.
Just the way of tech.

The sheet doesn’t force you to pick a 2nd trip, just leave trip lines 2 through 4 blank.
Of course, it is much harder to make an AP worth it with a single trip. Even if you plan to buy 10 day PH+ tix, get MM and spend $1700 on food and merch, you still may not break even.

Hotel is there in case people wanted to include an AP discount price in their savings. You can see in my notes at right in the sheet I don’t think that one is very valuable, since often people can get similar hotel discounts without AP. But I keep it there for the odd time the AP hotel discount saves you more money. Normally, I’d just leave hotel costs blank unless there’s some crazy AP deal you are using.

As way of background: This sheet was originally designed using the core my other sheet that finds the tickets with the best discount at any given time if you know you intend to bridge to AP.

So, this one looks for those cheapest tix as well by default (the prices you see that pop up when you enter trip days and ticket type.) You can enter different ticket prices in the override column if you paid something different already and it will use those.

You may notice in my notes in the sheet that I don’t think the AP hotel discounts always have that much value - if you can get better prices through regular sales, or Magical Vacation Travel rates etc, then the AP hotel discount doesn’t really add value.

I just keep it in there in case at some point an AP discount on hotel beats all of the others for a particular trip. But I usually don’t enter anything in that column myself.

This is kind of like our AAA membership. Almost every hotel offers a AAA membership discount. But if you reserve a room on-line, there are other discounts offered to everyone that are generally the same, or even better, than the AAA membership discount…which of course makes the AAA membership discount rather pointless! :slight_smile:

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I wanted to screen shot a few things to help with this part of you post: See in this first image I have entered 1 adult, “No” to the new field “Buying straight from Disney”, selected MM and entered 8 day PH tickets, and sample expenses for food and merch.

Below what I captured here, the sheet tells you to buy 10 day PH+ from UT to get the biggest savings when bridging.
02

Estimated for this single trip with these settings: you would be down $22 if you upgrade to AP. Still, pretty darn close to being worth it.

If you use all of those same settings, but change the “Buying AP Straight From Disney?” to YES, you can see buying the AP vs using discounted UT tickets now has you down $99. (The change is the $77 you saved bridging the tickets to AP in the first screen shot.) Hope that scenario helps a little.

Okay. So what you’re saying is that IF you were going to upgrade to the AP, it makes better financial sense to first buy the tickets from UT and then upgrade them, versus just buying the AP outright and forego buying tickets through UT. (Although, it also shows that in this case, it really doesn’t make sense to buy AP tickets at all instead of UT tickets.)

It is amazing how different it is. For example, at Six Flags, if you plan to go to the park 2 days or more, it makes financial sense to buy their premium annual pass. At Disney, you have to go like 12 days before it pays off! :slight_smile:

Exactly!

As a government employee, I always look for those discounts as well and they almost always beat AAA. (Strangely enough I have NEVER been asked to show my ID when checking in on a government rate.)

The same is true with AAA. I’ve claimed the AAA discount rate, and I’m told I MUST show my AAA ID. But when I arrive for check-in, they never once even mention AAA. (Truthfully, the only reason I keep my AAA membership is for the roadside assistance.)

Yes - when you upgrade reseller tickets at GS, the Disney CM is supposed to bridge the value of your tickets to Disney’s gate price. (Note: the gate price is $21+ more than if you bought tickets directly from Disney online.)

However, CMs notoriously do not perform this transaction in any standard way, so sometimes it can take a few tries at different GS locations for them to bridge properly so you keep your savings.

So, one of the other things I added in my “Maximum Savings” sheet is a cheat-sheet table for you to have in hand when you get to GS so you know the amount it should be. It also has the math laid out in a simple formula so you can compare what the CM comes up with or even explain what you expect the upgrade to cost to the CM if necessary.

While I realize this process may take up some valuable time on site, saving around $77 per person ain’t too shabby and really adds up if upgrading multiple people.

One thing that plays into this is the memory maker. I always get that and I think it is $170 in advance now, that savings makes a big difference. By doing 6 days with park hopper and MM, then include the savings for dining and shopping, a second trip - just buying the memory maker pretty much makes the park tickets for that trip free

sooo… based on my calculations, I will basically have my tickets free for a second trip, because of the memory maker & the amount of stuff I buy LOL
I would love to go to the Christmas party and the first week in November doesn’t look too busy. I may need to cut back how much money I spend on food/drink at work. I am just lazy and don’t like to shop and then make lunch for myself. However I might be able to overcome that if my reward is an extra Disney trip :star_struck:

Question…

If I included Memory Maker in my package and have paid the package in full, If I upgrade to an AP on my first day will they take the cost of the MM into account when working out the price difference I will need to pay?

I am going to wait for someone who knows better to answer - but I believe that they either deduct it from what you need to pay to upgrade, or they refund you the MM money.

They should credit you the value of your MM, and more than several people on chat and in forum over years have said they have had that done with no issue.

However, as full disclosure there was one person that did report the CM would not (at least initially) give them credit for MM. I very much tend to think that last report was an outlier and not the expected outcome.

I think I know the answer to this question but I will ask it anyway: we are going to WDW in December and purchased two sets of tickets. One set is a 2 two (non PH) day single park tickets and the remaining tickets are 5 day PH. These PH tickets were purchased using the Military pricing (we are not military but traveling with SIL who is so we were able to buy 6 park tickets at the discounted price). I am assuming that if I upgraded to AP, I wouldn’t get to bridge using the discounted military tickets, right? I am guessing those would be excluded since the discount is so significant??

I’m not expert on military tickets, but over on my Maximum Savings thread I posted a related quote about military tickets shared by other Liners:

Regarding the military tickets: My only experience with those has been speaking with my sister about my nephew using them. But, I just learned this info over on the TP chat with help from trampslady63 and brerbeer:

“There are 2 different military discount tickets: the deeply discounted Salute tickets (can’t bridge these) & military discounted MYW tickets. I bridged the MYW type.”

Also, if I’m not mistaken - this info says you can’t bridge the Salute tix, but I believe they can be upgraded, but Disney just uses the price you paid for them, so no savings gets passed on.

Hopefully someone else with experience will chime in.