45% of American families go into debt to travel to Disney in Orlando

Alyssa Leach and her husband have visited Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, United States, every year since 2015. For them, the theme park is like an oasis where they can escape the stress of everyday life.

That’s why, when his son was born Lincoln in 2020, Leach wanted his first visit to the park to be special and spared no expense when planning it. He booked a two-week trip to visit Florida in December 2022, which included stays at Disney World and Universal Studios.

Expenses Racked Up Quickly. Leach and her family traveled from New Haven, Connecticut, and paid extra for admission to “Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party,” an after-hours event that cost about $200 per person. She also shelled out $100 for the park’s photography service so she could download family photos that photographers took during the visit.

The vacation cost about $6,000.which included accommodations, tickets and a car rental, and which Leach charged to his Disney-branded credit card.

Leach is one of many parents who went into debt to spend a family vacation at Disney.

Last June, the financial company LendingTree published the results of a survey of more than 2,000 people, according to which 45% of parents with children under 18 who went to Disney went into debt for the trip.

For a family of four, the cost of a week-long trip to Disney can range from $6,463 to $15,559, not including flights or souvenirs, according to an analysis by NerdWallet, a personal finance site.

Many families cannot afford the trip. A few weeks ago, Disney reported about a decrease in demand in its theme parksbecause families, after years of suffering from high inflation, have less money to spend on fun.

But Leach, 38, who works in sales, relies on quarterly bonuses to cover vacation expenses. She and her husband together earn about $250,000 annually, although that figure can fluctuate each year. Her family doesn’t always have money to pay for vacations in advance. Instead, she makes the reservations first and then pays off the balances as she receives the bonuses.

For the 2022 trip, Leach paid the minimum on his credit card for two months, accruing about $382 in interest before he could pay off the balance.

Disney stories, and the characters that populate them, are deeply rooted in the American pop cultureand many families consider a trip to Disney theme parks to be a rite of passage.

The theme park Magic Kingdom de Disney World It is the largest amusement park in the world by number of visitors, with more than 17.1 million in 2022according to a report by the infrastructure consultancy AECOM. The second largest is Disneyland in California, which attracted more than 16.8 million visitors in the same year.

Leach said she had no regrets about taking her 18-month-old son on his first trip to Disney.

“I’ll make more money,” he says. “But it will never be that small again.” Today, the family lives in Tampa, Florida, and Each member has an annual pass to Disney World.

“Disney carries a level of nostalgia for people,” says Rachel Cruze, who hosts a personal finance podcast and wrote a book on the same topic with her father, Dave Ramsey, aimed at parents.

“It’s a lot of people’s childhood. When you can go to a unique place and have so many of those memories and those characters come to life, it brings a level of joy.”

However, according to Cruze, the pressure to visit Disney theme parks and going all out on what can be a once-in-a-lifetime trip can take families to spend beyond your means. Visitors often face a price shock when they arrive at the park.

For Johnny Esfeller, from Helena, Alabama, Disney was a fundamental part of his childhood. When he became a father, he wanted his daughter to experience the same love for the theme park and the characters as his.

Esfeller, 41, who works in public relations and marketing, prides himself on sticking to his budgets. So when he took his wife and his then-4-year-old daughter to Disney World in February 2022, he was surprised to find himself in debt after the trip.

“Disney was never a cheap vacation,” he said. “That’s been true probably since Walt opened the park in the ’50s.” He had budgeted about $6,000 for the trip, but went over $2,500.

Esfeller and his wife work full time and describe themselves as upper middle class. Together they were able to pay off the travel debt in a few months. However, The trip lingers in his memory like a story with a moral.

Both he and his wife consider themselves seasoned Disney tourists, but the numerous price changes caught them off guard.

The most important was the queue avoidance system of the park. For years, Disney offered guests FastPass, a free service that allowed them to have a reserved time slot to ride an attraction without having to wait in long, winding lines. The park replaced it with a paid version in fall 2021. The cost of the FastPass may vary depending on the attraction, theme park, and time of year.

The service cost Esfeller’s family $15 per person per day. “At the end of the trip, it was several hundred dollars that he didn’t have,” she said.

But paying more for the new paid version of the skip-the-line service wasn’t a choice, according to Esfeller.

“You’re there, you don’t know when you’re going to come back, and you say, ‘Well, there’s no other way. We’ll worry about the cost later,'” he explains. “I didn’t want my daughter to miss anything.”

Another example of what Esfeller described as alms from his experience had to do with the transportation within the park.

Previously, Disney offered a transportation service called Minnie Van and operated by Lyft. Initially, the company charged a flat fee of $25 to transport families between two locations in the complex. By the time Esfeller and his family went on vacation in 2022, it was already operating on a surcharge model.

During your trip, too prepaid gastronomy plans disappearedwhich allowed families to budget a set payment for a set number of meals (Disney brought back its dining plans in 2024 due to demand).

A Disney spokesperson said the company offered vacation options at multiple price points, including hotels, park admissions, transportation and merchandise. The spokesman said that FastPass pricing model was industry standardand that one of the benefits of variable prices was the lower cost of attractions and parks that were less in demand.

Cruze advises families not to go into debt for the holidays. He states that More and more families should consider less expensive trips, such as going to national parks. Although a Disney vacation may seem like an escape from reality, families end up returning to everyday life.

“If you don’t have money and you carry it, that vacation follows you home for months to come,” says Cruze.

He urges people to wait until they have a good amount of savings before booking a holiday, even for emergencies.

But that doesn’t work for all families. Rebecca Mitchell used to go into a lot of credit card debt to pay for her and her son’s, who is now in college, trips to Disney. As a single mother living in Iowa, Mitchell, 48, did administrative work for a company that sold manufacturing materials, earning $15 an hour.

At the time, she didn’t think saving and budgeting could help her much. Every time she managed to save some money, a financial emergency took it away.

“If I had waited until I had the money, I don’t know if I would have done it,” Mitchell says of the Disney trips.

She first took her son to Disney World in 2008, and they returned to the theme park regularly. Her strategy always consisted of book the trip and then figure it out as you go.

He estimates that trips with his son usually cost $2,500.

When booking a Disney vacation, families are required to make a minimum deposit of $200 for tickets and accommodations.

Mitchell paid the minimum deposit and then made additional payments as and when he could in the weeks leading up to the trip. When it was time to leave, he would charge the remaining balance to his credit card and would usually pay off the debt within six months.

Mitchell says that does not regret having incurred the debt. “I was young, my son was young, we only had that much time,” she said. “Especially when kids get older, memories are everything.”

Jessica Fu/The New York Times. Special for Clarin

Translation: Patricia Sar