One of Castle Dreams Travel Planners, Crystal, and her family were visiting Walt Disney World last week and were gifted tickets to the Magic Kingdom After Hours Event for April 21 through one of those wonderful magical moments that can only happen at Disney.
This new, limited engagement event, requires a separate entrance ticket (limited number is only available) between April 14 and May 19, 2016. You can even check in as early as 7:00 PM and the event ends at 2:00 AM. Ice cream novelties and select bottled beverages are included with the cost of your ticket ($149) and can be found at carts stationed throughout the park (available during event hours only). Casey’s Corner will also be open with select menu items as well as the Starbucks on Main Street.
Let us begin with, when the reports say there are a very LIMITED number of tickets for the event it is SO true! At 7pm they had an entrance just for the party participants. It was ONE entrance, just 4 of the readers, not a whole side of entrances like when it’s the Halloween or Christmas Party. Once 11pm rolled around they only saw maybe a dozen people at any given time until 2am when there were maybe 100 people on Main Street for the Kiss Goodnight. It was amazing! She can’t tell you how many times she just stopped where ever she was in the park and threw out her arms and twirled in place. Nobody to hit or knock into except her own family. In fact by about midnight they were sending everyone through the open Fast Pass queues instead of the regular queues. At the Haunted Mansion there were 8 people, total, in the stretching room. They asked to go through the normal queue at the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train because they never have yet (She always get a Fast Pass for it during normal hours), same for the new Peter Pan interactive queue, so they had plenty of playtime there too.
The free ice cream and drink carts weren’t well marked or lit, it was more like just look for one that had a person standing behind it and ask. But really, the price isn’t about the free ice cream and bottled drinks, it’s about NO CROWD.
In essence, she would not have paid $150 per person for those few hours, but if she lived in the area and really wanted a night to enjoy the park without ANYONE around she’d seriously consider it. (By the way, there were exactly 5 guests on their bus back to their resort, and that was with the bus waiting until 2:30 to pull out of MK.) This might also be great for someone making a quick trip to the Magic Kingdom and can utilize these later hours- keep in mind, a 1 day ticket to the Magic Kingdom is $100.
These special tickets AND a short presentation in the lobby at Old Key West Resort were all about Crystal’s Husband, Steve, and his military service. Disney loves the military and they let the members and veterans know it when they can.