It’s important to note that none of this is fully private. Each tour is sold as a group experience with up to 40 participants (ours was nearly sold-out) meaning you’re often roaming as a large entourage. While that does knock down the luxury-factor, these are experiences you can’t purchase in any other way.
Case in point: On a busy Saturday morning, Disneyland Park opened up early, exclusively for Adventures by Disney, allowing for unencumbered photo shoots, crowd-free walks down Main Street U.S.A., and picture-perfect memories in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle, all while ordinary day guests were corralled just outside the gates.
Luxury on Disney’s Horizon
This new, exclusive package is part of Disney’s broader push to court luxury travelers. Along with record-setting visitation numbers to Orlando and Anaheim, local tourism boards have showed a 6.2 percent year-over-year increase in per-passenger spending in 2017 proving that Disney and luxury can (and should) overlap.
Already, the company has seen success with Club 33, the members-only lounge and restaurant at Disneyland Park; it’s so much in demand that spinoffs will open at Walt Disney World’s four theme parks later this year. Disney's Polynesian Village Resort in Florida now offers waterfront bungalows with patios and plunge pools. Golden Oak, a private community of multimillion-dollar homes within Walt Disney World, is perfect for Disney fans who can’t get enough. And thanks to a new Anaheim tax incentive for luxury builds, Disneyland will soon shutter a third of its “downtown” district to make way for a new resort, one of five planned high-end hotels in the city, slated to open in 2021.
Still, Adventures by Disney’s package is the first experience of its kind within the parks themselves. The closest option, Disney Parks’ VIP Tours, offers private guides who can act like personal concierges, with skip-the-line service. Pricing starts at $425 an hour, with a minimum six-hour reservation—at least $2,550 per day, probably more. By comparison, the Adventures by Disney packages cost roughly $3,000 per full day for a family of four—including hotel, transportation, park admission, select meals, and (of course) all that glorious behind-the-scenes access.
The Bottom Line
For all its draws, Adventures by Disney still has some kinks to iron out. The Walt Disney Studios tour—in which guests walk through the original Animation building—was slow-paced. And despite being a heavily emphasized selling point, the Disney archives visit was more of a self-guided library perusal than a dive into the unknown. The itinerary would also benefit greatly from a surprise visit by Mickey Mouse, whom we did not meet.
Praise must be given, however, to the two exceptional and energetic guides who kept nearly three-dozen travelers engaged and on schedule throughout the trip. With days beginning as early as 7 a.m. and going until evening, that’s quite the feat.
Adventures by Disney promises a “Disney Difference” for every trip; here, that’s all about the execution. It’s the difference between holding a FastPass for Indiana Jones Adventure and remembering the time your family went backstage to operate the hydraulics of its Jeep-like vehicles. You may have visited these parks hundreds of times, but you’ll never again look at that light flickering on Main Street or board Radiator Springs Racers without thinking of this splendid trip.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.