This week subscriber joncw65 asks “Can you do a video on when and why Disney stopped
using ticket books”?
The short and sweet answer is that Disney
began to phase out ticket books for general admission passes in 1980 and by the middle
of 1982, ticket books were fully retired. They mostly did it because… well… that
was just the direction the industry was going in by then. There’s also an argument to
be made that it was ultimately beneficial for them even if that wasn’t the direction
it was going in. To those who might not be aware, when Disneyland opened in 1955, things
weren’t the way they are today. You couldn’t just buy a ticket, enter the park, and ride
whatever you want as much as you wanted. Your ticket at that time only got you into the
park. Nothing else. Rides cost extra, and that cost came in the form of tickets. While
you could have purchased individual tickets, the more popular option was to buy a book
of tickets to use throughout the day. Those tickets were given letter classifications
that corresponded to the experience of the ride. A tickets were the smaller and cheaper
experiences while E tickets were the bigger, exciting, and more expensive attractions.
It’s why today Disney still refers to major attractions as E-ticket experiences. This
business model was a staple of the carnivals that came before Disneyland, and more importantly
it was a business model that worked. With the success of Disneyland, it was no big surprise
that copycat amusement and theme parks would pop up elsewhere around the country. One of
those parks, which opened just a few years later in 1958, was the Pacific Ocean Park
in Santa Monica California. The Park, which came to be known as POP, wasn’t Disneyland's
first competitor, nor it’s last. What made the park notable: after a disappointing second
year of attendance, in an attempt to win over more guests and compete with Disneyland, switched
their attendance model. They went from ticketed attractions to one general admission ticket
that granted guests access to all the rides at the park.
POP would ultimately fail and close its gates in 1967.
However before that would happen, another park in the US would open and mimic the same
general admission business model, but with much more success.
In 1961 and at a cost of
three million dollars, Texas real estate developer Angus G Wynne opened a a theme park in Arlington,
Texas. Named after the six different nations that at one point or another governed the
land that made up the state, Six Flags Over Texas was a success from year one. By 1971
Walt Disney World would open to the public. Much in the same way the company as a whole
was clinging to the Walt era of doing things, the Florida park opened with the same A through
E tickets that Disneyland used. At that point Six Flags had just opened their third theme
park, and just ninety minutes north of Disneyland a new park, Magic Mountain, would open. It,
too, would sell general admission tickets. Disney stuck with ticket books, and they were
essentially safe to. Their place at the top of the ladder in the realm of theme parks
gave them the security to keep towing the line, but that wouldn’t last forever. By
1980 things were looking pretty differently. Disney wasn’t failing financially, but they
weren’t looking too great either. Their box office take was stagnating, two oil crises
caused issues with Disney World attendance, and most importantly, their competition was
picking up pace. While Disney was just starting to work on EPCOT, their third ever US theme
park, Six Flags had already opened or acquired six, and they weren’t showing any signs
of slowing down. So Disney began to test the waters, and in 1980 they introduced passport
tickets to their parks, which gave guests access to all rides at a flat rate. At this
point they also began to slowly phase out ticket books. The first step was to remove
the A through E classifications so that ticket books were just generalized tickets for attractions.
However by the summer of 1982 those too would be retired. Something else happened in Disney
in 1982: EPCOT Center opened. For the first time ever a Disney resort had
a second gate, and with that one change the dynamic of a Disney vacation changed with
it. Disney quickly found that, as many would expect, the average length of stay for a family
on vacation at Disney World doubled when the number of theme parks doubled. This meant
guests spent more money on food, more money on merch, and more money on hotel stays. With
that in mind, it became beneficial for guests to spend more time at the parks, and one way
to accomplish that was to remove the limitations on how many attractions a guest could ride.
Ticket books worked for day trips, but Disney vacations were quickly becomingly lengthier
commitments. While they both played a role, I’d say the outside influence of Six Flags
and other theme parks like Universal Studios was the bigger factor. The 1970s was a decade
in which Disney creatively slowed to a near-stop, while their competitors only gained more and
more speed. In fact that period of stagnation makes me wonder about whether or not ticket
books would have been retired even earlier had Walt still been alive to push the company
forward. Either way, ticket books are an essential piece of Disney park history. Beyond just
giving us a cool nickname for the newest big rides, they marked a shift in path these parks
went down, and they showed us that even the creators of an industry can be influenced
by the very industry they created.