Theme Park Inflation Is Out Of Control. Here Are The Worst Offenders.

Everything feels more expensive than it used to be. Unfortunately, rising costs are not limited to the necessities. The cost of having fun has increased, too. A new study that looked at the most expensive theme parks in the U.S., for example, might have you rethinking your “budget” trip to Knott’s Berry Farm to just go ahead and splurge for Universal Studios. But what theme parks are the most expensive? And what’s going on with theme park prices?

FloridaPanhandle, a website that purports to be the “most authoritative source for restaurants, attractions, & vacation rentals in the Florida Panhandle,” found out which theme parks in the U.S. are the most expensive. They did so by analyzing and ranking 847 worldwide amusement and theme parks according to size, attendance, and the average adult admission — note that it’s the average cost, your mileage may vary — using data from TheParkDatabase. For their ranking purposes, they categorized different parks inside a resort complex as individual parks, which means a lot of the Disney properties were not lumped together.

According to their data, these are the most expensive theme parks in the U.S.

“The global market for theme parks hit $54.9 billion last year, and the industry is worth $15 billion in the U.S. alone,” FloridaPanhandle explains.

The “cost of fun increase”, or COFI (like a Cost of Living Adjustment, get it? Haha!) becomes very noticeable when we compare ForidaPanhandle’s 2023 data to a previous 2022 report from The Family Vacation Guide.

The data collected from The Family Vacation Guide isn’t precisely the same data set, especially since the Panhandle data is focused more globally than nationally. Still, among parks that are featured in both lists, this year’s average prices are way, way different between the two years, signaling the effect of price hikes beyond what a single ticket price could show.

For example, Magic Kingdom had an average ticket price of $105.99 per ticket according to The Family Vacation Guide, while this year, per FloridaPanhandle’s data, a ticket price is now $122, a jump of $16 from one year to the next.

However, Universal Studios in Florida didn’t see as drastic of a price jump, going from $100.75 per ticket last year to an average of $102 this year, and Universal Islands saw the same jump. Six Flags Magic Mountain jumped only by an average of $1.56, but a few actually went down in ticket prices when comparing the two reports. For example, Knotts Berry Farm dropped an average of $7.57 per ticket, and Busch Gardens went from an average of $112.76 in 2022 to $97 this year — a difference of $15.76.

To learn more about the most expensive amusement and theme parks, according to FloridaPanhandle, the full report can be viewed on their website.

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This article was originally published on Sep. 18, 2023

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