So I renewed the APs (annual passes). Brian said to me, “For Mother’s Day, why don’t you renew your passes (and I had already done it! Oops!).  I just think it’s silly to think that I won’t be going enough this year to make it worth my while. It’s a clear money saver; isn’t it?  

Let’s do the math.

We went to WDW a total of 4 times and 18 days in our last AP year (for us, May 2007 - May 2008). If we had bought regular passes (for one of us, with the hopper option) for those 4 visits it would have cost a total of $1124.00, and an annual pass, good for unlimited days in a one year period is $448.00. We’ve saved $676.00 just in park passes! And that’s not even considering the other savings.

Unfortunately I haven’t saved all the numbers for the resort stays in the past year (what the rack rates were or even the rates I ended up getting), but let’s look at the ones from our recent stay at the Boardwalk Villas.

Rack Rate (room only - no package) for a one bedroom studio in May at the Villas is $370.00 a night, but with our AP we got the same studio for 250.00, and so for our 2 night stay we saved a total of $240.00. Assuming that we saved at least that much for all of our AP resort savings (and I’m sure we did) we would have saved a grand total of $1560.00 on our resort stays using our AP rate savings.

Our running total - $2236.00 of savings!

Having saved a little money here and there on things like Pirates and Princess Party tickets, I’ll round that up to 2275.00 and just say that I’m happy with the savings that my AP afforded me.

Of course to my husband all of this is like saying, “Look at all the money I saved you, honey!” when we really didn’t need to spend a dime in the first place, but that, my dears, is beside the point. Really. Beside the point.