Disney theme park tickets can be bought in advance directly from Disney or through any number of authorised brokers.
Authorised brokers tend to be a little cheaper, and we’ve had no issues in buying from them previously. Their tickets can just as easily be added to My Disney Experience as tickets purchased directly from Disney.
Of course, tickets can be bought at the gate on the day at any of the theme parks, but they are extremely expensive, may not have availability, and do not enable you to plan your day or trip in advance. So, pre-purchasing a multi-day ticket in advance is the only sensible option.
The ticket most UK visitors will want is the 7 or 14-day Magic Ticket, only available to residents of the UK and Ireland.
This is a fantastic ticket that gets you unlimited access to the four theme parks and the two water parks, enables you to visit more than one park in a day, gives you all of the photos taken automatically when you’re on the rides (known as Memory Maker), and a round of mini golf on any of the four courses (before 4pm).
Everything that you need for Walt Disney World is included in this one ticket.
Please note, you cannot purchase this ticket at any of the theme parks! The Magic Ticket has to be purchased in advance.
The Magic Ticket can be purchased in both 7-day and 14-day versions. Often (from around mid-November), the 14-day Magic Ticket is sold at the 7-day ticket price. Any deal offered directly by Disney is available from their authorised ticket brokers too.
You can find any number of authorised ticket brokers offering these Magic Tickets on the web. We have used, and would recommend, the following providers:
Magic Tickets are supplied as e-ticket confirmations (via a PDF document), which you add to your My Disney Experience account.
So, now that you have purchased your Disney tickets (and received a unique confirmation number sent to you on a PDF), you can allocate these tickets to members of your family or group.
This is all accomplished online through Disney’s My Disney Experience website and/or mobile app.
The My Disney Experience website and app are easy to navigate, feature rich, and are THE resource that you’ll use to manage your day in the park.
In the parks you can choose your rides in advance (with the additional cost Genie+ and Lightning Lane ticket add-ons), order food, check on ride queues, view and manage any MemoryMaker photos, and view the interactive park maps.
The process for allocating your tickets to your family or group members is as follows:
This is a very straightforward process! Only one of your party needs to do this. You can group your party together, making future allocations of priority ride purchases through Genie+ and Lightning Lanes nice and easy.
So, you’ve bought your tickets and added them to your My Disney Experience account, but, at this point, you haven’t actually got something (i.e. a ticket) that you can use to physically get into a park!
Don’t worry, as there are a number of ways of converting your ticket purchase confirmation into actual tickets to gain park access:
If you’re only going to be in the Disney parks for a few days, then it can be better value to buy multi-day tickets for a reduced number of days, rather than the UK and Ireland’s 7 or 14-day Magic Ticket.
These tickets (which you can also buy at the gate in any of the parks) can still be purchased in advance and entered in to the My Disney Experience to set up and manage your park days.
You have a few more options with these tickets: you can buy base tickets and just visit one park per day, or you can buy a Park Hopper ticket that enables you to visit multiple parks in one day, or you can buy a ticket that gives you the water parks, too.
So, much more complicated than the UK and Ireland’s simple 7 or 14-day Magic Ticket. To compare prices with the Magic Ticket, take a look at Undercover Tourist, a highly reputable, Disney-authorised, US-based ticket broker who we have used previously when we were only in the Disney parks for a couple of days.
Undercover Tourist also provides a nice discount over the cost of buying these tickets directly at a Disney park.
If you’re planning on visiting Universal Orlando, then the ticket you want is the 14-day Universal Orlando Resort 3-Park Explorer Ticket. This ticket gets you in to Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure and Volcano Bay (Universal’s water park) as many times as you like over a 14-day period.
There is a wonderful Wizarding World of Harry Potter land in both Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure, connected by a ride on Hogwarts Express. To visit both of the lands (which are in different parks) you would need either a single day, multi-park ticket or a multi-day ticket, such as the 3-Park Explorer Ticket.
As with the Disney Magic Tickets, you can find any number of authorised brokers offering the 14-day Universal Orlando Resort 3-Park Explorer Ticket. We have bought Universal Orlando tickets from both of these providers:
Once purchased, you will be supplied with an electronic ticket confirmation that can be redeemed for gate-ready tickets from the Will Call Kiosks at the front of each of the Universal Orlando parks. You will need your ticket confirmation number, the original credit card you used to purchase the tickets (for verification only), and your given telephone number.
If you’re only going to be in the Universal Orlando parks for a few days, then it can be better value to buy multi-day tickets for a reduced number of days, rather than the full 14-day Universal Orlando Resort 3-Park Explorer Ticket.
Undercover Tourist has all of the 1 to 5-day single and multi-park tickets that are available at the gate available for pre-purchase, with a nice discount, too.
Once at Universal Orlando, you can also purchase an optional add-on to your daily ticket (known as Universal Express) that enables you to ride each of the attractions once without having to queue. We have never used this feature – though many do – we prefer to get to the park when it opens and ride the big attractions first. This approach doesn’t appeal to everyone!
If you’re planning on visiting Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando during your vacation and feel that the 14-day Disney Magic Ticket and the 14-day Universal Orlando Resort 3-Park Explorer Ticket are what you need, then you can save a little further money by purchasing a “combined” Disney and Universal ticket.
This “combined” or “combo” ticket isn’t a single ticket that gives you access to both worlds, rather it’s just a packaging together of a 14-day Disney Magic Ticket and a 14-day Universal Orlando Resort 3-Park Explorer Ticket, and giving you a small discount for buying both tickets from the same ticket source at the same time.
You’ll receive both Disney and Universal electronic ticket confirmations that are redeemed for actual gate-ready tickets in the respective parks, as described previously.
You can purchase these combo tickets from the following two authorised ticket brokers: