Howdy, I have a Google spreadsheet where you can enter your costs and trip info and it will give you an idea of whether it might be worth upgrading to AP.
See this post for the link and some screen shots: Cheat Sheet: Worth it to Upgrade to AP?
You can of course use your tickets to upgrade, but there are some things to know:
- There has to be at least 1 UNUSED park day on your tickets when you try to upgrade.
- If you got discounted tickets with an MVT package and they are convention tickets, they are still upgradeable but at full price (as if you just bought the tix from Disney.)
- If you purchased through a discount reseller, if you use the tickets to enter a park at least once they should bridge the ticket value to the Disney gate price - so you get to keep the reseller discount. (But, it is not consistently handled by CMs so might take a few tries at GS to get it done.)
If you do plan to upgrade you should probably do it at the beginning of your trip since you can then use AP discounts for merch and food etc.
If upgrading both of you doesn’t work out in savings, it still can be worth upgrading just one of you to AP - the food & merch savings (or parking if off site.)
If you are people that always buy MM, the value of that included in the AP really makes the AP worth it fairly quickly - e.g. just plugging in two (3) day base tickets and selecting MM in my sheet already makes 1 person getting an AP ahead by about $100 - and that doesn’t include food/merch discounts.
If you’d like to just jump to my spreadsheet, I left some sample numbers in it - hope it helps!