There’s no doubt about it – for fans of Walt Disney Imagineering, Tokyo Disney Resort is a bucket list destination; home to what many call “the best theme park on Earth.” There’s an aura of mystery around the far-flung resort set down on the waters of Tokyo Bay, right in the middle of the world’s largest city. Of course, fans want to get there… but it’s so far away! So foreign! So expensive! … Or is it? Today, we’ll run some (very, very basic) numbers to prove that if you can afford a trip to Walt Disney World, you can and should move Tokyo Disney from “dream destination” to “our next great adventure.”
To be sure we’re isolating our variables as much as possible, we’ll make like comparisons anywhere we can – for example, we’ll price both trips as departing from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (which just seemed like a good non-coastal city), have both trips last the same amount of time (7 days – which is arguably too little time in Tokyo, but enough to visit Tokyo Disney Resort and the city for multiple days each), plan both trips for the end of May, for two people, and with “Moderate” level accomodations once we arrive. Orlando and Tokyo aren’t apples and apples, but we’ll do our best!
And yes, you can argue in the comments about the particulars, telling me I’ve set aside too much money for food or transportation or that I’m not booking the wrong season or that you know a great discount hotel. But stick with me here. There’s a simple lesson to learn at the end of this! So absolutely feel free to swap out what you’d set aside for food or souvenirs and make the adjustments, but even if my calculations are rough and far from all-inclusive for either trip, the basic numbers should get the point across. Ready to start planning?
Walt Disney World
For most Theme Park Tourist readers, a trip to Walt Disney World is old hat. You probably know the ins and outs of a trip to Orlando and have tried-and-true resorts, parks, and experiences you count on a trip that takes place every year, two, three, or four. You may even be a local with a coveted Annual Pass. Our goal here is to create a reasonably nice, once-every-few years trip to the resort for two. Neither bare-bones nor extravagant, this trip is merely a model against which to compare a similar trip to Tokyo Disney Resort.
Flight
Orlando is one of the most accessible destinations in the United States, with lots of carriers offering lots of direct, nonstop flights from lots of cities. In the last two weeks of May (the time I’m pricing both trips for), the flight from Pittsburgh to Orlando comes in at a respectable $330 on American Airlines. You could pay $30 less for a flight on Spirit either leaving at 7:15 AM, but I wouldn’t. So for two, our roundtrip flights to and from Orlando total $660.
Transportation
This is another area where your mileage will literally vary. Especially if Disney World is your only destination in Central Florida, this cost can be very, very minimal. Though Disney’s Magical Express airport transit service is one of many perks that have disappeared, Mears’ unbranded continuation of the service offers round-trip transit for $32 per person. Uber and Lyft are options too, of course. For that reason, we’d say the minimum cost of transportation is $100.
The maximum isn’t hard to figure out. Right now, an economy car rental from Enterprise for the week would come in $610 without insurance. In another slashed perk, Disney’s “Moderate” resorts now charge $20 per night for parking, adding an additional $120. In exchange, though, you’d have to freedom to drive yourself to Disney’s theme parks with “free” parking (because, y’know, you already paid it) as well as off-property. So depending on how much control you want over the trip, let’s say transportation would range from $100 to $800.
Park Tickets
There’s a certain amount of stress when it comes to picking tickets for Walt Disney World, isn’t there? Do you go with a classic 4-Day, One-Park-Per-Day setup that’ll leave you rushing? Do you add a day, and if so, which park do you repeat? Is Park Hopper worth it? For obvious reasons, Disney’s “the longer you play, the less you pay per day” policy doesn’t really kick in till your 6th day anyway. For the sake of consistency and a little flexibility, I’ll plan for a 5-Day Ticket with Park Hopper – a surprisingly astronomical price of $612 per person.
Since I want the trips to be as equivalent as possible and Tokyo Disneyland still offers free FastPass, I’ll also need to partake in one of Disney’s delightful new upcharges – Disney Genie+ grants me access to the “Lightning Lanes” of (most) major attractions. At $15 per person per day, that’ll add $150 to my tickets, for an all-in, two-person, park tickets total that might surprise you: $1,374.
Accommodations
The good news is, as you well know, you’ve got plenty of flexibility in this area. With over 30,000 hotel rooms divided into “Value,” “Moderate,” and “Deluxe” levels, accommodations at Walt Disney World run the gamut. You can stay at the All-Star Movies Resort for $150 a night or the Grand Floridian starting at $800 per night. You can even stay off-site at a Comfort Inn down the road for just over $100 (but your transportation costs would increase as a result).
Again, in the interest of building pretty equivalent, middle-of-the-road stays, we’ll price our May trip at one of Disney World’s “Moderate” on-site hotels (which, despite their name, are still, y’know, well-dressed motels). Disney’s Port Orleans – Riverside is generally considered one of the resort’s nicest “Moderates” and, price-wise, comes in at the middle of the pack. There, a standard, 2-Queen room with uninspiring views averages $304 per night for the week, giving us a 7-night accommodations cost of $2,128.
Food
Another number that varies wildly, but again for the sake of pricing out a reasonable, realistic, and comparable trip, let’s give each person $100 per day. Some may balk at that number but consider a day at the Magic Kingdom where $100 might get you a $10 Starbucks to start your morning, a $20 quick service lunch, and a $70 Be Our Guest prix fixe dinner.
Some will find that number way too small for a per-person per-day food budget, while others will think that’s way too much. Please don’t nitpick this number – just swap it out for whatever you feel is an appropriate per-person, per-day food amount. It won’t really affect our comparison, because we’ll use the same number when we price out a trip to Tokyo. So knowing we’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it, I’ll budget $100 per person for 7 days, setting aside $1400.
Other attractions
Assuming that out of your seven-day trip you’ll be actively involved at Disney Parks for five days, we’ll budget $100 per person per free day to do “other” things. Essentially with $200 per person (which honestly is pretty conservative number), you could either do lots of little things or one or two big things. That could include Jellyrolls, mini-golf, Cirque du Soleil, and/or other ticketed activities onsite, or a day trip to Universal Orlando, Gatorland, LEGOLAND or Weeki Wachee Springs. With just two unplanned days, we’ll set aside a total of $400.
Incidentals & souvenirs
In the spirit of making this budget realistic, let’s be sure we incorporate something for souvenirs, gifts, taxis, and other “cherry on top” expenses. $50 per person per day sounds right because it sets aside $350 over the course of the week – enough to either spend very little and have a lot left to put back in your account, or enough to buy a Lightsaber one day and tchotchkes the rest. Again, you could set this number at $500 per person per day or $10. It doesn’t really matter, because it can stay the same for Tokyo if you want it to. So $50 per person per day means that for a duo’s week-long trip, we’ll set aside $700.
TOTAL
Some will think that our Orlando trip is priced with ridiculously absurd extravagence; others will think this trip is way, way underrepresenting the cost of a Walt Disney World vacation. Absolutely feel free to insert your own numbers and crunch them – that’s the point of this article! But for what we’re considering a middle of the road trip with a healthy amount of money set aside for living the vacation life, our total, two-person, seven-day trip to Walt Disney World in May 2022 comes in at $6,702 (and that’s the option with rideshare rather than a rental car).
Tokyo Disney Resort
Comprised of two theme parks (Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea), the Tokyo Disney Resort is located on the edge of Tokyo Bay in the heart of Tokyo.
Flight
Let’s face it: a flight to Tokyo from anywhere in the United States is definitely going to cost more than a trip to Orlando. That said, flights between Pittsburgh and Tokyo are surprisingly plentiful for our apples-to-apples week at the end of May. Air Canada and United both offer round trips for less than $1,000. Both have a single stop, but just as importantly, both have total travel times under 17 hours, which is pretty amazing. (Trust us – the flight is long, but doable especially if you’re able to sleep on planes!)
Compared to the $330 per-person, 3-hour flight to Orlando, the trip to Tokyo’s airport is obviously going to cost more. But no less than 3 Air Canada routes with travel time under 20 hours cost only $800 per person round trip – a total two-person travel cost of $1,600.
Transportation
It’s understandable that transportation would be one aspect of a Tokyo Disney trip that would leave you nervous. However, Japan’s transportation infrastructure is ridiculously accessible across the entire country, with signage and announcements in both Japanese and English throughout.
Many of the country’s crisscrossing railways (including the Shinkasen bullet trains) are part of the Japan Rail (JR) network (above). Almost unbelievably, foreign travelers visiting for sightseeing purposes can purchase a 7-day unlimited JR Pass for ¥33,610 – about $293. That means that less than $300 grants you access to many high speed rails throughout the country, making even far-flung destinations totally accessible. You could even take the 310-mile, 3-hour bullet train ride to Osaka to visit Universal Studios!
While JR lines do lead into and through parts of Tokyo (including the Keiyo Line that connects to the Disney Resort Line monorail at the Maihama Station), the intra-city Tokyo Metro System is a separate transit network. The good news is, a 72-hour unlimited Tokyo Metro Pass costs just ¥1,500 – only about $13. (You’d need to activate three to cover cross-city transportation for the entire trip – $40 per person.) Though it may look intimidating, if you can navigate any American city’s subway system, you can tackle the Tokyo Metro system, where all signage and announcements are in both Japanese and English. The Tokyo Metro and JR together can get you to just about any landmark of the city.
With just the JR Pass and Tokyo Metro Pass, you’ve got most of Japan covered. There are only a few small incidental costs otherwise. JR and Metro lines connect both Haneda and Narita Airport with the Tokyo Disney Resort, but many arriving foreigners would rather pay $20 for the direct shuttle. Once you’re on Disney property, you’ll need a ticket to the Disney Resort Line monorail (since Japanese regulation requires any multi-stop transit system to be ticketed and post a timetable). A four-day monorail pass is the equivalent of $15 per person ($30 total). That means that pretty much any transportation need you’d have in, around, and out of the Tokyo Disney Resort area, Tokyo itself, and to the rest of the country will come in at around $736 for two – less than the cost of a weeklong Orlando car rental!
Park Tickets
Given that Tokyo Disney Resort’s two theme parks – Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea – are both celebrated by U.S. fans for their no-holds-barred, no-budgets-cut rides, you might expect these parks to be among the most expensive theme parks on Earth. If so, surprise! A 4-Day Passport to Tokyo Disney (while temporarily suspended due to COVID) carries a cost of ¥24,800 – just $216 per person, with a grand total of $432 for two people to explore Disneyland and DisneySea for four days!
Accommodations
Tokyo Disney Resort has more in common with Disneyland than Disney World, including its two parks, its compact layout, and the availability of many hotel rooms just off property. There are four “Disney” hotels for guests who want to be in the “bubble” of familiarity (and relative assurance of English signage and services): the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel and the Hotel MiraCosta (famously inside Tokyo DisneySea) would be equivalent of Disney World’s “Deluxe” hotels, with nightly rates starting between $400 and $500. The Ambassador Hotel and the off-site Celebration Hotel (with a 15-minute shuttle ride to the resort) are more “Moderate” – $200 to $300 nightly.
But Tokyo Disney Resort also offers a hotel district populated by “Official” hotels set on the perimeter of the resort’s peninsula and served by the Tokyo Disney Resort Monorail’s Bayside Station. (You can see them in the upper right on the map above, labeled green.)
A frequently-cited favorite of the “Official” set is the Hilton Tokyo Bay, which offers “Celebrio Rooms” with mod furniture, bay or park views, and mini-fridges restocked each day with Japanese sodas. For our May trip, the Hilton Tokyo Bay’s upgraded Celebrio Rooms would cost (ready for this?) $130 a night for a total weeklong, all-in price around $1146. Once travel returns to its pre-pandemic levels, that price could be closer to $180 (still less than Disney’s Pop Century in Florida, mind you) but the Hilton Tokyo Bay is nothing if not a steal.
Food
Feel free to drop your own number in here, but for the sake of coming up with a reasonably realistic price, we’ll stick to our Orlando estimate of setting aside $100 per person per day for a two-person, week-long food budget of $1400.
Other attractions
If we stay with our Orlando rule of thumb, we’d be setting aside $100 per person per free day (that is, a day not set in the parks). This would be the place to object to visiting Tokyo for such a short amount of time, and – worse – for spending more time at Disneyland than in one of the world’s most exciting cities and countries. You definitely shouldn’t go to Japan without at least using your JR Pass to venture to Shibuya and the Meiji Shrine, Mount Fuji, or even far-flung destinations like Osaka (hi, Universal Studios!) and Kyoto… But for the sake of keeping our trips “apples to apples” and proving that you can get to Japan, let’s say you only have three non-park days. That would be $300 per person set aside for “other attractions,” or $600.
Incidentals & souvenirs
We set aside $50 per person per day in Orlando, creating a slush fund to purchase big or small souvenirs. Realistically, Tokyo isn’t that kind of place. Even at Disneyland, resort-specific gifts are few and far between, and given that urban living in Japan often means very little storage space, “gifts” or “souvenirs” are often candy, chocolates, or other snacks. You probably won’t have a Lightsaber or Droid equivalent to bring home with you. But in the spirit of giving ourselves breathing room financially, let’s still allot $50 per person per day for incidentals, reaching that same two-person budget of $700.
TOTAL
$6,614. That’s how much our (roughly assembled!) weeklong trip to Tokyo and the Tokyo Disney Resort would cost. If you’re counting (which we are), that’s just about $100 less than an equivalent trip for two to Orlando. While the variables are always in flux, here’s the takeaway: a trip to Tokyo and a trip to Orlando are roughly comparable in price.
The numbers we’ve used here might not match your personal finances or priorities, and that’s okay! You can say you can’t stomach paying the price of an international flight; you can say you’d allot your money differently; you can even say you just prefer the familiarity, comfort, and offerings of Walt Disney World, and that’s absolutely fine! But if you take a once-every-couple-years trip to Walt Disney World, then what you can’t say is that a trip to Tokyo Disney Resort is impossible. Whether you start saving now or not, that’s something you should be excited about!
