Whether you’re buying your tickets as part of a package or separately, there are several ticket options that can make it difficult to determine if you’re making the right choice. Let’s cover some of those options below and I’ll give you my take.

• Park Hopper – The Park Hopper option allows you to jump around to multiple parks in one day. If you plan on going for 4 days or more, you don’t really need the park hopper option. I’ve found that it’s better to focus on one park each day. When you try to jump from park to park, you end up spending more time getting from one place to another than you do actually enjoying the parks and attractions. If you’re only going to be there for 3 days or less, it might make sense if you just want to hit the major attractions at each park.
• Water Park Fun and More – This option gets you access to the water parks, the DisneyQuest arcade, ESPN Wild World of Sports, and the Oak Trail Golf Course. If you plan on getting this option, you will probably want to devote at least an entire day to these places and skip a theme park. However, depending on the time of year you go, do you really want to spend a day at the water parks? We usually go in February, when usually only one of the water parks is open. We might get great water park weather, and we might not. It hasn’t been worth the extra cost for us. Perhaps if we were planning on stay two weeks, we might want to have the extra options. However, we don’t golf either and my daughters wouldn’t be into the sports stuff very much.

That pretty much breaks down all the ticket options. If you want to get the best value for your money, I would stick with the base ticket without the options. All of the resorts have pools you can use and many of them have a small slide for kids and other theming for the resort. It’s hard to justify the extra cost for the options when you may or may not use them.

One last thing to mention – If you look at the price of a one-day ticket, the price seems astronomical. However, the price drops considerably as you add more days on to the tickets. When you add 5 days or more, the price to add a day is less than $10. The longer you the stay, the better the value per day.

How many days do you plan on staying at Disney World or how many have you stayed in the past? Let me know in the comments below.