I was looking at the cost difference last night for next year, and Premium Meadow is $9-13 more, give or take. So the difference between Premium and Premium Meadow is a few dollars more than the difference between Preferred and Premium. I'm sure some people will pay the difference for those Meadow Loops, I had already read that 1400 and 600 were favored spots for their proximity. But I agree that they will be the last to be fully booked. For a week long stay, they are squeezing about $100 more out of those spots. But it goes without saying that $100 could be put towards something else.
And I'm still kicking myself for not having my ear to the ground more and buying our annual passes before the price hike. I'm sure there were rumors out there and I just didn't pay enough attention. My plan was to buy discounted tix from
Undercover Tourist and then price bridge, to save a couple hundred dollars. Now it's $1000 more any way I do it. We were contemplating going 3 times in a year, but just going twice before the increase made the AP a no brainer. Now, if we go just twice, the AP is approx. $150 more than just outright buying tickets from Disney. And that difference would easily be made up with the PhotoPass being included in the AP.
Sorry to derail a little bit here. Tallis, we will still go to Disney. I called us a young family, but we are 40 with 3 kids 6 and under. Financially, we can swing it, we are fortunate. For us it starts to become more about the feeling of overpaying for an experience. We want to be able to do this for years, but honestly, dropping $10k a year just on a few trips to Disney will probably get old sooner rather than later. We've got about 2.5 years before our youngest needs a ticket, and that's probably when we'll start cutting back. And who knows what kind of increases will occur in that short time frame.
It seems like they are trying to reduce the number of guests like us: out of state, but can reasonably make the trip a few times a year. Is it for crowd control? Possibly. I don't know what the answer is to the crowd issue. My family of 4 had passes 30 years ago when we lived near Tampa. My mother had not been since then when we took her with us last September. She thought the crowds were awful. Meanwhile, my husband and I had been in December 2017 with our kids and thought September was easy and fun. We went to MK one day during the December trip when there was not a Christmas Party, and you literally could not walk in many places, it was insane. I know that the price tiering is supposed to steer people towards the lower crowd times, but here's the thing: people are never not going to go during peak times simply b/c of school schedules. Our oldest is going to K this fall, and he will miss 7 of the max 15 days just for one trip b/c we are trying to avoid crowds. We won't be able to do that as he gets older.