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We live about an hour from Tokyo Disney Resort. We could go for the day. We have now booked a Vacation Package twice anyway — once in April and once in December — and spent a genuinely uncomfortable amount of money doing it.
If you’re reading this from abroad, you’ve probably found the official booking site confusing and the price startling. Both reactions are correct. What follows is what we actually paid, what we actually got, and the things nobody told us before we booked.
What we paid
| April | December | |
|---|---|---|
| Hotel | Toy Story Hotel | Hotel MiraCosta |
| Length | 2 nights, 3 days | 1 night, 2 days |
| Package | Full (reserved show seating both days) | Lighter (chosen attractions, no shows) |
| Party | 2 adults, ages 5 and 2 | 2 adults, ages 5 and 3 |
| Package price | ¥350,000 | ¥256,300 |
At around ¥150 to the US dollar, that’s roughly $2,300 and $1,700. For one night, in December, at a park we could have driven home from.
And that is only the package. In December we spent a further ¥10,500 on Disney Premier Access and ¥21,800 on one lunch. More on both below.
The breakfast we cancelled, and what it taught us
Our December package originally came to ¥268,800 with hotel breakfast included. The only breakfast slot left was 7:50am — and Happy Entry, the early park access that comes with staying at an official hotel, started at 8:00am that day. We would have been choosing between eggs and an empty park.
So we cancelled the breakfast. The refund was ¥12,500, with no cancellation fee at all.
Here’s the part worth knowing: by the published menu prices, two adults and two children should have come to about ¥10,300. We were refunded ¥12,500. Whatever the package charges for a pre-booked restaurant slot, it is more than the food costs on its own.
I’ve found this is the real lesson of the Vacation Package: elements can be removed after booking, and the refund is sometimes larger than you’d expect. Package contents other than your first day can generally be changed up to nine days before you visit. If something in your package doesn’t suit your children, change it.
The paper tickets
Your package arrives as a physical kit, posted to you, containing paper tickets. Park tickets, attraction tickets, free drink vouchers — all paper.
Nothing loads into the app. If you lose the envelope, whoever finds it can use everything in it. Coming from parks where everything lives on your phone, this surprised us both times.
One useful thing we learned in April: you can phone and change your attraction times, even after the paper kit has arrived — we did it three days before. The catch is that changes made after the kit is printed mean every paper ticket gets checked and exchanged at the gate, which takes time on a morning when you want to be moving. If you want to adjust your plan, do it before the kit ships.
December: what we booked versus what happened
I had built a timed plan for both days. Here is how much of it survived.
We arrived 20 minutes late. Roads in December are busy. We reached Tokyo Disneyland at about 10:10 instead of 9:35. Bag check and entry themselves were clear — no queue at all, about the same as April.
The entry lottery gave us nothing. In April we had no trouble. In December every show we entered for came back empty, and the Premier Access for the Electrical Parade — the thing I most wanted — had already sold out by the time we were through the gate. That was 10:10am on a Friday.
So we paid again. Splash Mountain at ¥1,500 × 2 and a parade at ¥2,500 × 3: ¥10,500 on top of a ¥256,300 package.
Waits were short, because we’d paid for them to be. The carousel at 11:00 was 15 minutes. Jungle Cruise, 20. Baymax, 15. Star Tours in the evening was 5. With a pre-booked attraction we still waited over 20 minutes inside the queue after entering — which, when you have paid for priority, is worth knowing.
Food is where it fell apart. Our dinner mobile order was for 18:40. The show before it finished at 18:10, so we arrived early — to find nowhere to sit. A mobile order does not reserve a table, and the collection button only appears five minutes before your slot. We got lucky with a table after about five minutes of standing.
Can one adult ride Splash Mountain with two preschoolers?
This is the question I could not find an answer to anywhere, so I asked a restaurant host, fully expecting a no.
She checked, and came back with: yes. One adult can ride with two preschoolers, provided both children meet the 90cm height requirement, with the two children seated in front and the adult behind them.
We didn’t use it. Our three-year-old is easily frightened, and I’d rather lose the ride than scare her. I went with our five-year-old instead — who cried on the final drop. It is steeper than I remembered.
If you have one adult and two children who both like fast rides, though, that answer is useful. Ask at guest relations on the day; staff checked it for us without any fuss.
The free drink vouchers: ¥13,720
Every Vacation Package includes unlimited soft drinks at participating locations for the length of your stay. I decided to find out what that was actually worth, and photographed every single drink.
| Day 1 (Tokyo Disneyland, full day) | ¥7,470 |
| Day 2 (Tokyo DisneySea, half day, raining) | ¥5,980 |
| Total | ¥13,720 |
Roughly $90. Individual drinks ranged from ¥190 for a milk to ¥800 for a hot chocolate, so what you order matters: seasonal specials at ¥700–800 are worth roughly twice a cola.
I’d seen people online clear ¥10,000 in a single day, so ours was a modest result. Two reasons. It was cold, so we simply didn’t want that many cold drinks. And in peak season, the only places we could reach without a long queue were the ones with mobile ordering — which rules out a lot of the counters with the most interesting seasonal drinks.
Three practical notes:
- The official app lets you filter the map to show only locations that accept the drink vouchers. This is the single most useful thing we found.
- Milk counts, and keeps. We collected milk in the evening for the children’s breakfast the next morning.
- Bring a cardboard drinks carrier. A pushchair has one cup holder and you will be collecting three or four drinks at a time. I brought one I’d saved from a coffee shop abroad and it was the best thing in my bag.
One expensive lunch, honestly assessed
We booked the restaurant beside the Pirates of the Caribbean ride — the one you float past, which I’d wanted to eat in since I was young. Two adult courses at ¥9,000 and two children’s meals at ¥1,900: ¥21,800 for one lunch.
The food was good. The reveal was that you can barely see the boats from inside the restaurant — it’s from the ride that the diners look magical. I’d wanted it for thirty years based on the view from the wrong direction.
Worth it once, for the room itself. Not something I’d repeat with small children who ate about a third of it.
Would we book it again?
With preschoolers, yes — but the April version, not the December one.
What the package buys you that genuinely matters with small children is a guaranteed seat at shows. Standing for forty minutes holding a three-year-old to watch a parade is the part of a theme park day that breaks people. A reserved seat removes it. Our December seats were at the edge of their sections both times and the children still saw everything, because nobody was standing in front of them.
Our April package included reserved show seating on both days and the entry lottery still worked. Our December package didn’t include shows — and then the lottery gave us nothing and the parade Premier Access had sold out before we were through the gate. We ended up paying twice and still missed the parade we wanted.
So: if you book a package and you’re visiting in a busy season, book the version with the shows included. The lighter package assumes you’ll be able to buy or win access on the day, and in December that assumption failed.
And a word about Christmas
The decorations are genuinely beautiful. The shops are transformed. We’d done Christmas at Hong Kong Disneyland in 2023 and Shanghai in 2024, and Tokyo’s is the prettiest of the three.
It is also the worst time to go with small children. Popcorn took ten minutes on our first day and had an hour-long queue the next. Seasonal merchandise was already sold out. The whole resort runs at a level of pressure that a three-year-old has no interest in absorbing.
If you want the Christmas version, go in late November, as soon as the season starts. The decorations are up, the merchandise is in stock, and the crowds have not yet arrived. If you don’t specifically want Christmas, pick another month entirely.
In short
- Expect ¥250,000–350,000 for a family of four, before extras.
- Budget another ¥10,000 or so for same-day Premier Access, because you will probably want it.
- Choose a package that includes reserved show seating. That’s the part that is hard to buy later.
- The drink vouchers returned about ¥13,700 over two days for us. Treat it as a bonus, not a saving.
- Everything arrives on paper. Don’t lose the envelope.
- Avoid the fortnight before Christmas.
Is it good value? No. Did it make two days easier with a three-year-old and a five-year-old than they would otherwise have been? Yes — and on the April trip, clearly so.