Every Tokyo Disney Vacation Package includes unlimited soft drinks at participating locations for the length of your stay. Nobody tells you what that is actually worth.
So I photographed every single drink we collected over two days in December, with a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old, and added it all up.
The answer was ¥13,720 — roughly $90. Here is exactly where it came from, and the three things I would do differently.
How the drink vouchers work
The vouchers arrive as paper tickets in your Vacation Package kit, posted to you before your trip. You hand one over at a participating counter and take a soft drink. There is no limit on how many times you do this.
Not every outlet participates. The official app lets you filter the park map to show only locations that accept them, which is the single most useful thing we found and I wish we had known on the first morning rather than the second.
Day one: Tokyo Disneyland — ¥7,470
A full day in the park, from about 10:10am to 8:30pm.
| Drink | Value |
|---|---|
| Seasonal strawberry milk | ¥700 |
| Cola | ¥360 |
| Hot apple ginger × 2 | ¥1,400 |
| Cola | ¥360 |
| Hot coffee | ¥360 |
| Milk | ¥190 |
| Golden cider | ¥360 |
| Melon soda | ¥360 |
| Cola | ¥360 |
| Sparkling jelly drink | ¥700 |
| Golden cider | ¥360 |
| Hot coffee | ¥360 |
| Cola | ¥360 |
| Oolong tea | ¥360 |
| Black tea | ¥360 |
| Subtotal pictured | ¥6,920 |
Those are the ones I photographed. We also collected two more on the way out, which takes day one to ¥7,470.
Two things stand out from that list. The hot apple ginger was not good, and we ordered two of them at ¥700 each. And the seasonal specials at ¥700–800 are worth roughly twice a cola, which is the whole game.
Day two: Tokyo DisneySea — ¥5,980
A half day, from 8:15am to about 4pm, with rain.
| Drink | Value |
|---|---|
| Strawberry lassi | ¥700 |
| Jasmine tea | ¥360 |
| Apple tea soda | ¥360 |
| Hot chocolate | ¥800 |
| Cola | ¥360 |
| Spiced milk tea × 2 | ¥1,600 |
| Seasonal special drink | ¥700 |
| Milk × 2 | ¥380 |
| Hot coffee | ¥360 |
| Golden cider | ¥360 |
| Total | ¥5,980 |
Half the time, but not far off the same value — because almost everything we took on day two was an ¥700–800 speciality drink rather than a ¥360 soft drink. The strawberry lassi and the seasonal special were both genuinely excellent.
Why we only got ¥13,720
I had read accounts of people clearing ¥10,000 in a single day. We managed ¥13,720 across two. Two reasons, and both are worth planning around.
1. In peak season, you can only reach the mobile-order counters
We went on the last weekend before Christmas. Queues at counters without mobile ordering ran to half an hour or more, just for a drink.
That rules out a lot of the most interesting seasonal menus, because the small kiosks with the best drinks are exactly the ones without mobile ordering. In April, on the same package, this was not a problem at all.
2. It was cold
Obvious in hindsight. In December you simply do not want eight cold drinks a day. If maximising the vouchers matters to you, a warm month will do it for you without any effort.
What I would do differently
Use the app filter from the first morning
Filter the map to voucher locations and plan your walking route around them, rather than noticing a participating counter as you pass it.
Bring a cardboard drinks carrier
This was the best thing in my bag and it cost nothing.
A pushchair has one cup holder. You will routinely be collecting three or four drinks at once. I had kept a rigid cardboard carrier from a coffee shop on a trip to Busan, brought it along on a hunch, and used it constantly — three drinks in the carrier, wedged safely on the pushchair, instead of two adults carrying cups in both hands through a crowd.
Take milk at the end of the day
Milk counts as a drink and it keeps. We collected cartons in the evening and the children had them with breakfast in the hotel room the next morning. At ¥190 each it is not where the value is, but it is free breakfast.
Order the expensive ones
A cola is ¥360. A seasonal speciality is ¥700–800. Same voucher. If you are indifferent, take the expensive one — and if you are not indifferent, take it anyway and let someone else drink it.
One thing that did not work
There is a well-known tactic of combining a drink voucher with a souvenir cup, so you get the keepsake cup effectively free.
We never managed it. The souvenir designs we wanted had already sold out, and the counters that had them had queues we were not going to stand in with small children. In a quieter month I think this works; in the week before Christmas it did not.
So is it worth anything?
¥13,720 against a package that cost ¥256,300 is about 5%. It is not the reason to book a Vacation Package and you should not treat it as a saving.
What it does change is behaviour. With two small children, being able to hand over a ticket for a hot drink whenever anyone is cold, tired or melting down — without doing the mental arithmetic of another ¥700 — took a surprising amount of friction out of two long days. That turned out to be worth more to me than the number.
We have written up what the Vacation Package itself cost us, across two separate bookings, in this post — and what a night at Hotel MiraCosta was actually like with a 3- and 5-year-old.