The Benefits of Having a Disneyland Paris Annual Pass (and Why we Got Them)

Whether you’re a regular visitor to Disneyland Paris, or you’ve never been to the parks before, it could be that instead of buying short-term tickets for your trip, choosing a Disneyland Paris Annual Pass works out to be better value for money.

We have had Disneyland Paris Annual Passes for two different years (not consecutively) and in a year where we are planning a Disney trip, we will almost always opt for an annual pass over a four day park hopper ticket. To help you decide whether this is the right choice for you, here are the prices, the benefits, the way we make them work for us, and everything else you might want to know about the Annual Pass system!

Disneyland Paris Annual Pass Prices

Please note: As the Disneyland Paris Park is currently closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, 2021 annual pass prices are not currently available. This piece is based on the most recent prices we have, from 2020.

There are four different types of annual pass available: they each have different validity windows, benefits, and prices: Discovery (€179), Magic Flex (€259), Magic Plus (€299), and Infinity (€449).

We opted for Magic Plus passes: this is because they are valid for 350 days of the year (Magic Flex passes are valid for 300 days or the year and the cheapest discovery pass is only available for 150 days of the year, meaning they won’t work if you have to visit during peak periods or school holidays). The days when you can’t use your pass are known as the ‘black out days’

I’ll go into all the other benefits later, but Magic Plus passes also offer free parking, and as parking can cost 20 euros a day, and we like to travel to the Disneyland Paris resort with our car, this was important to us.

To give those annual pass prices some context:

• A 1 Day 1 Park ticket will cost between — €56 to €87 – depending on if you travel in peak or off peak season.
• A 1 Day 2 Park hopper ticket will cost between — €76 to €107 – depending on if you travel in peak or off peak season
• A 2 Day Park hopper ticket will cost — €169
• A 3 Day Park Hopper ticket will cost — €211
• A 4 Day Park Hopper ticket will cost — €249

IN SHORT: You could get a Magic Flex Annual Pass for only 10 euros more than a 4 day park hopper ticket. And a Magic Plus Annual Pass for only 50 euros more than a 4 day park hopper ticket. If you plan to make just one 5 day trip, or two 2 day trips in any given 12 month period, then, it makes more financial sense to choose an Annual Pass instead!

However, it is important to ensure the trips that you’re planning don’t fall into a black out period, as you cannot use your Annual Pass to enter the park on a black out day. You can find a full calendar of the black out periods here.

The Benefits of Buying a Disneyland Paris Annual Pass

Disneyland Paris Annual Passes aren’t just park tickets. They also come with a host of benefits that can either save you even more money on your trip, or just help to make your trip even more enjoyable.

• Car Parking: With the Magic Flex, Magic Plus and Infinity Passes, car parking is free. With the Discovery pass it can be added for an extra 60 euros. If you’re driving this is a big draw, as the Disneyland Paris car park costs 20 euros per day.
• Shopping. The Magic Flex and Magic Plus passes offer a 10% discount in the park shops. The discount is 20% if you opt for an infinity pass.
• Restaurants: With the Magic Flex and Magic Plus passes you will get a 10% discount in the restaurants and with the Infinity pass this increased to 15%.
• Park Entrance: With the Magic Plus and Infinity passes you have access to your own entrance in each park. This proved invaluable during busy days in the park!
• Extra Magic Hours: With the Magic Plus and Infinity passes you can take advantage of the extra magic hou and enter the park an hour before it opens (this is a perk usually reserved for Disney hotel guests).
• Extra Infinity Perks: Infinity pass holders also get a host of other perks, given that they have the most expensive level of pass.

Getting your passes is super easy: we got ours from the Disneyland Paris ‘Donald office’ at the park entrance. The whole process only took around 30 minutes: we needed ID for each member of our party who was getting a pass, proof of our address and our bank card. You can get your passes online before you travel, but we have never done this, and I believe the process can be time-consuming and confusing.

How We Got the Most Out of Our Annual Passes

(Note: Our kids love Disney, and the love travelling in the car: my parents live in the Outer Hebrides (we are in the East of England) so they have been travelling long distances in the car from an early age. So this tip works for us, but it might not work for you!)

Once you have your Annual Pass, you can visit Disneyland Paris as often as you like, and for free! Your only expenses are your travel and your hotel. In a year we have our pass, we tend to take two big Disney trips (of 4/5 days) and then several smaller weekend trips.

The trips can be much more affordable than you might think: Eurotunnel’s price vary not only by when you want to travel, but also how long you are out of the country. Their cheapest fare is the ‘Day trip/Overnight’ ticket, and this allows you to spend the weekend in France for from just £31 each way (per car, not per person!). We would travel on an early train over on the Saturday morning (usually around 4am) so that we arrived at Disneyland in time for the park opening: sometimes we even managed to make the Extra Magic Hours, which we were eligible to with our Annual Pass. We would then travel home on the Sunday evening, just in time for the boys to go back to school on Monday! They happily slept most of the way, both ways.

Another perk of your Annual Pass is that you get a discount on the Disneyland Hotels: they advertise annual pass holder rates as starting from £98 per room per night. It’s worth noting that the Disney partner hotels (which are just a stones throw away) can often be secured even cheaper than this with the Disney B&B hotel often costing no more than £60 a night. That means that with food and petrol, we could enjoy the whole weekend in Disneyland Paris without spending more than £300!

This, for us, was the main perk of having a Disneyland Paris annual pass: a couple of times we would call to book a hotel on a whim on the Friday, tell the boys to pack their backpacks, and then jump in the car! The whole thing always felt like a wonderful adventure. We did this for special occasions (such as Star Wars day: May the 4th), when we knew rare characters would be in the park (such as when Toy story 4 premiered), or just because we’d had a bad week!

Every family’s circumstances are different, but this definitely worked for ours. But even if we’d only made one 5 day trip, the Annual pass would still have made more financial sense that purchasing a 4 day hopper ticket and a one day pass. When the world is normal again, we will have Disneyland Paris Annual Passes again in the future, and inject a little more magic into our lives.