At certain Disney destinations like Epcot, park planners have categorized the various attractions in tiers. The best rides are in the top tier, while the older and less popular ones are in a lower tier. This type of hierarchical system is hardly new at Disney. Its roots trace back to the early years of the Happiest Place on Earth. Disney once sold ticket books, limiting the number of rides that theme park tourists could take during a given visit. And these tickets ranked from A to D until the year that everything changed. Let’s learn about the history of the E ticket Attraction.
The Value Book and the plussing problem
Image: DisneyIn the earliest days of Disneyland, Uncle Walt recognized a potential sticking point with his passion project. His park would receive more guests than some of the rides could handle. These attractions lacked the throughput to satisfy heavy demand. Disney was trying something that had never been done before, and they worried about traffic was that impossible to anticipate. The company needed sustained cash flow to pay for the park’s operation, too.
Their solution was the Value Book. This coupon book contained a series of tickets that would allow guests to take a trip on some of their favorite rides. They could ride anything so long as they had a ticket for it. Should these customers run out of tickets, they could always buy more, the brilliant part of the premise. Of course, not all Disney attractions are created equal. Some are better than others, and some have greater demand.
Image: DisneyUncle Walt and his team ranked these rides according to set factors. They ranked their original attractions from A (think King Arthur Carrousel) to C (think Peter Pan’s Flight and Snow White’s Scary Adventures). The following year, park planners introduced the D level of attractions. It’s not that they added anything new. It’s that they had enough to data to know which rides had the strongest demand. By default, those became the D ticket rides. They were the people’s choice and maintained that perception for several years.
The system had a catch, though. Walt Disney committed himself to the philosophy that his park should always aspire to improve. He wanted to plus all phases of the Disneyland experience. And that leads us to that old Spinal Tap discussion about how you top something that’s already at 10. What’s better than a D ticket ride? In 1959, Disney would reveal the answer…
The monorail and the Matterhorn changed everything
Image: DisneyOne of the most famous stories about the early days of Disneyland involved a cynical conversation that Uncle Walt overheard. One guest asked whether they should ride something, and the other replied that there was no point since they’d already ridden it before. That philosophy is hard to imagine today, as the best theme park attractions possess tremendous repeat value. In the earliest days of the industry, however, freshness required innovation.
In 1959, the Happiest Place on Earth completed its first major expansion, a blatant attempt to reinvigorate the park in the eyes of guests who had “ridden it (all) before.” This update included three attractions that would all become primary parts of Disneyland folklore.
Disney built a mountain, a submarine, and a monorail. As far as expansions go, Star Wars Land just can’t compete with that. The mountain is the legendary Matterhorn Bobsleds, the original theme park steel roller coaster. Disney constructed a full artificial mountain to complete the illusion that a person is sledding down the Matterhorn.
Image: DisneyThe submarine is a more complicated discussion. Initially entitled Submarine Voyage, it operated for almost four decades before closing in 1998. It later re-opened as Finding Nemo before its current designation as Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage. Disney spent a fortune on this ride, paying the modern equivalent of $5.6 million on the hulls of the eight-vessel fleet alone.
You already know about the monorail, arguably the most famous landmark at Disneyland. What you may not realize is that it wasn’t a form of transportation in 1959. Instead, it was an attraction that required a ticket. The Disneyland ALWEG Monorail served the primary purpose of taking guests on a sightseeing tour. It wouldn’t start transporting people from place to place until 1961.
Any of these rides would be a park addition on a par with Avatar Flight of Passage. In combination, the three attractions represented an unprecedented upgrade at Disneyland. And they necessitated an entirely new designation. With all due respect to Peter Pan’s Flight, it wasn’t on a par with a man-made mountain, a (mostly) authentic submarine, and a (soon to be) fully functioning monorail system.
The arrival of the E ticket
Image: DisneyPark planners rolled out the E ticket in combination with the new attractions. At the same time, they upgraded several previous D ticket attractions to the top tier. Those eight were Jungle Cruise, Mark Twain Riverboat, Rafts to Tom Sawyer Island, Rainbow Mountain Stage Coaches, Rainbow Ridge Pack Mules, Rocket to the Moon, Sailing Ship Columbia, and Santa Fe & Disneyland Railroad. Guests in June of 1959 arrived at Disneyland to discover a grand total of 11 attractions that required a kind of ticket that previous Value Books didn’t have.
Think of the situation in modern terms. When Disney adds a new park expansion, prices naturally rise. The corporation must pay for this new area. Today, merchandise and food revenue goes a long way, but that business model was immature in the late 1950s. Disney needed guests to pay for their rides. They charged more for their revolutionary new attractions.
This price rise was dramatic, too. When E ticket debuted in 1959, A ticket attractions had a value of 10 cents each, the equivalent of 87 cents today. For B tickets, their cash value was 15 cents ($1.30 today), while C tickets were 25 cents ($2.17).
Image: DisneyD tickets are the most important discussion. Disney effectively added an entirely new tier in 1959. The previous tier, D tickets, had been the most expensive at 50 cents ($4.33 today). E tickets were 85 cents on day one ($7.36 now). That’s a 70 percent increase in prices, which seems stiff but understandable for the three new attractions. It was hefty inflation for the other eight rides, though. They’d cost 35 cents less the previous month.
Let’s think about that in simplest terms. In a single month, Disney raised the rates on those eight rides by the same cost as an A and B ticket combined. In that way, the company set the standard for all of its future expansions. They trained customers that all new additions (i.e. standard Disney plussing) would come at a cost. And Disney would pass that cost along to theme park tourists. In a way, that’s the main legacy of the E ticket.
The end of the E ticket
Image: DisneyYou still hear the term E ticket referenced today. Whenever Disney announces a new ride, they’ll trumpet its greatness by describing it as an E ticket attraction. They do this despite the fact that the term is no longer applicable. The company wants to distinguish its highest quality attractions from the rest.
A recent example occurred at Pandora – The World of Avatar, where Avatar Flight of Passage received the E ticket designation while Na’vi River Journey did not. As the themed land’s opening day approached, Disney had to perform a bit of PR spin to assure fans that Na’vi River Journey was good, too. Their conditioning of guests to perceive anything less than an E ticket attraction worked against them in hyping an expensive new ride.
The stunning aspect of the E ticket is how pervasive the term is in our culture even today. It’s remained a part of the pop culture zeitgeist despite the fact that Disneyland last used ticket books in 1982. During that year, the Happiest Place on Earth transitioned to single-price park admission.
Image: DisneyRather than pay per attraction, guests purchased an admission ticket that entitled them to usage of everything at Disneyland. It’s the system that’s still in place more than 35 years later, but the idea of the E ticket still exists.
Amusingly, the reason why it’s no longer a practical business practice has little to do with Disney. Instead, a competing park in the area, Six Flags: Magic Mountain, offered a single-admission, ride-everything ticket. Starting in 1981, Disney tested their own version as they felt compelled to follow suit. Within a year, park planners accepted the streamlined business model as superior to the messy one of ticket books.
Image: DisneyThe change felt dramatic at the time. After all, Value Books were so established that Magic Kingdom adopted this strategy during its 1971 opening. They wouldn’t ditch it until the opening of Epcot in 1982. In the interim, Magic Kingdom listed eight E Ticket attractions. Strangely, these tickets were interchangeable at Disneyland, meaning that you could purchase an E Ticket book in Orlando but ride Jungle Cruise in Anaheim instead.
Oddities such as these in combination with the heightened competition from theme park imitators explains why Disney eventually eschewed E tickets despite the powerful name recognition of that concept, one that remains to this day.
