@PrincipalTinker thanks for the heads up. Out of curiosity - how do you lose all the savings?
You have to pay the full difference between what you paid and the AP. It is the reason why MVT agents have posted that if you think you will upgrade you should not buy their tickets. You should use the touring plans ticket calculator and purchase discounted tickets and then upgrade.
When you bridge your tickets what becomes your AP start date? The first day of the ticket you bridge? Or the day you upgrade to AP?
The first day you used your original ticket.
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Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately not the news I was hoping for!
I thought I’d park a quick note here to point out something that folks might find useful in my Maximum Savings spreadsheet, but may not be obvious:
In addition to the main intent of the sheet finding the tickets with the highest discount so you can use them for an AP upgrade, I’ve also included a set of tables at the bottom just to give you an idea of ALL of the cheapest reseller tickets by both days and ticket type.
I’ve also color-coded them by reseller so you can see it all at a glance.
For Example
If you are just curious to see who has the cheapest, say, 7-day Park Hoppers right now for 2 Adults and 1 Child, you’d enter your party info at the top…
and just look at the bottom tables.
In this case, Boardwalk’s tickets are the cheapest of all of the resellers (as of the last time I updated the tables, which should be within a week or so.)
Of course, other resellers might have prices within a few dollars as well, so these charts aren’t giving you the full detail. But, they can be a quick way to get the big picture.
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Is this still working with the new date-based pricing on tickets? Is that even possible to calculate?
Related question: When news of the coming date-based tickets came out, I jumped and purchased the biggest discount tickets at the time, non-dated 10 day PHP for $523 each. When (if) I use those tickets to bridge, how will Disney figure the gate price? Will it be the price on the date the tickets are first used? The price of an any date ticket?
(Yes, I know the AP prices just screamed up a whopping 25% today, hence the (if) above)
Hi! Great to see you here! I believe @JJT posted about this on chat this morning? Or was that just about APs?
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Hi @LissaKay!
That older sheet doesn’t work any more since the tiered tickets came into play.
I did create a new sheet that ran lookups for the tiered prices and included it in my AP bridging estimator and my Worth It to Upgrade? sheets, but some later changes in Disney’s pricing threw off the values from some tickets. (I think they changed how the higher day tix were calculated.)
I’ve been planning to do away with the automatic ticket price lookups and just let people enter the price they lookup themselves for their dates, but haven’t gotten to it yet.
Good news is, in the Worth It? sheet I already have a spot where you can override my Disney ticket price lookup with your own reseller tickets - if you use the override the sheet should work find - BUT I have not updated the new AP prices. Running around at office today. 
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I just joked that I updated the Worth it to Upgrade to AP? sheet - so that it is just a large, blinking, red NO now. 
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Thanks @JJT , I figured any updates will be a while off, since this price increase came as a surprise to nearly everyone. I’m more interested in knowing how much credit my non-date-based tickets will have when upgrading to APs. I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while, the price increase finally gave me the impetus to log in and do it. 
I recall early upgraders using tickets purchased before the tiers went into effect were getting the value of that ticket as of the day before tiering started.
I’ve assumed that is still the case, but haven’t seen reports.
My sheet wasn’t using any of that info though, since too many variables, it just used the current value (thus my including the override column so you could just enter your own.)
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Thanks. I have no idea what the price was before the date tiers went into effect. I think around $620, though I can’t be sure. In any case, I will prepare for the upgrade to cost at least $500 each.
Ouch. 
I can probably look in my old versions of sheets and pull that info!
I’ll see if I can find the old prices a little later.
I believe these are the Disney ticket GATE prices before the tiers kicked in…
So, a 10 day PH would be worth $575.10 per adult. Might be worth asking on chat is anyone has bridged pre-tier tix lately and see what credit they received. (I do recall some reports that people were offered various amounts, but that has always been the case.)
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For the record, here is how the AP price increases look in increased $ and %.
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I have updated my Worth it to Upgrade to AP? spreadsheet and ran some quick calculations to see what the minimum trip might be to cover the AP cost.
I had to make some changes to the sheet - I removed the automagic Disney ticket price lookup. It worked, but was too much work to keep up with new prices and dates being released.
Especially since they keep making price changes every time Bob Iger tweets.
Plus, I swapped where you enter your actual prices paid for your tickets and the place you enter the Disney full price for the tickets you hope to bridge to AP.
This was an end of the day fix, so needs another look to make sure my formulas are all working. But, if I’m correct, the news ain’t that good.
First, let’s start with a not-too-terrible scenario.
Assume ONE person in a family of 4 buys a ticket and bridges it to AP. Then that person uses all of the AP food and merch discounts. Ignoring the value of Memory Maker at first, the lowest number of days I could find where the cost of the single bridged AP gets close to the cost of the price of an AP was (2) 4-day PH ticket trips.
This also assumes a regular first-purchase Platinum pass and some conservative food and merch costs.
YOU GET AN AP! AND YOU GET AN AP!
If we do the same setup but want everyone in the family of 4 to have APs, the news gets worse: I’m seeing it taking (2) 10-day PH trips to get near break even.
BTW, I am using ticket prices from a randomly chosen 02-SEP-2019 date. These numbers will change in higher and lower cost dates. Also, I assume one buys their tickets at the best reseller price every trip. I used the TP ticket calculator to get fast prices for that, then looked up the Disney prices to put in the top box of my sheet.
Slightly better news: If you are normally a Memory Maker buying person and get it each trip, it brings the family of 4 break-even scenario down to (1) 8-day and (1) 6-day PH trip to get there.
I guess you have to take your wins where you can get them.
I’ll take another look at this in the morning when my head is clear and see if I made any fundamental blunders.
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For those that may be regretting not buying their AP earlier, I broke out an old thought experiment spreadsheet I wrote awhile back - since AP vouchers are good until the year 2030, I wondered how much one could save by buying a bunch of APs all at once, then doling them out over the years.
I figured it could be a hedge against future increases - and today’s painful 25% increase really proved that point.
The sheet is not ready for prime time to play with yet, but you can see in this screen capture that I figure if I bought just 5 APs before the previous 2 AP increases, I would save $1332 over buying them each year over time - even after taking into account the loss in interest if I simply left the money in a 1% interest earning account somewhere.
If I bought 10 AP vouchers, I’d have saved almost $4,300! Yeesh.
(You’ll notice I was estimating a 5% annual AP increase, but I hard coded the current actual price in year 3. Also, of course if I had that money in an investment account earning a better return, it would eat away at that savings. But: thought experiment.)
Howdy All,
I guess I should make it clear in it’s own post that my Maximum Savings isn’t active any longer. So…
June 2019 Update: For any archaeologists finding this thread in the distant future: The maximum savings spreadsheet went the way of the dodo in the year 2018.
Disney’s introduction of tiered ticket pricing that ultimately led to the Great Mouse Wars of 2020, as a by-product also made it too labor intensive to keep the spreadsheet up to date for resellers and Disney ticket prices. I’m sure I or someone else could cobble together a more elegant solution that would continue to work, but you know, this was for fun and just trying to help the community.
You can still do this manually of course: Find the Disney ticket prices for your trip dates, then note all of the reseller prices for the same dates. Often, the longer trip-day tickets have larger discounts, but not always. If you know you are going to upgrade to an AP, when it comes to the savings portion of the equation it doesn’t matter how many days you buy tickets for - just look for the tickets with the largest discount.
(Of course, if you find 4 day base tickets have the largest discount, but want to make FPPs for a 10 day trip, you’ll have to make a decision between largest discount and your FPPs. The good news is the discount difference between tickets isn’t usually that large, so choosing the exact tickets you need for your first trip might only save you a few less $.)
Anyhoo, a few minutes of pencil scribbling could save you $60 - $80 when upgrading on a good day.
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