Understanding Black Friday Deals For Orlando

Ahead of Black Friday this year, I am going to tackle one of the most common questions about Orlando trips on social media platforms. When is the best time to buy tickets?

It’s been nearly 3 years since I started researching my first ticketing article, and much of what I say then still holds true today. My first article was written much more with first-time visitors in mind. This time I wanted to tackle the myths surrounding Black Friday. The results you will see below are the culmination of 10 months of weekly price tracking by myself, not handed off to an AI agent. Yes, it’s very mundane, but it’s also the only true way I can use to make sure the pricing trends I have been noticing are accurately recorded.

Running theme parks is a costly business, so naturally park entrance prices are going to rise. In fact, both Disney and Universal increased US ticket prices, among many other items, in the last few weeks.

A one-day single-park peak-priced ticket for Magic Kingdom now costs $229, plus tax. If you want the park hopper option, you could be paying $301, plus tax, for one person for one day.

If you want to visit either Disney or Universal for more than 3 or 4 days, a UK ticket still works out far better value over shorter duration US ticket packages. Don’t think of the price of the ticket in days, as so many people do. Unused days in that mindset will look like hundreds of pounds wasted if you only want to visit for 4 out of 14 days. If you want to visit for a shorter duration, you can’t base the per-day ticket cost on our UK ticket prices because you will be chasing a figure that doesn’t exist.

A small number of visitors may find US ticket prices better value, but only if they want to visit for one or two days. Offers for these types of tickets don’t tend to get released until much nearer the time. Disney’s Summer 2026 promotion wasn’t announced until April 30th and released the very next day, likewise with Universal’s 2026 5 days for the price of 3 promotion, which also included Epic Universe.

If you are thinking of purchasing US tickets, buying early is not recommended. Wait until you see a price you are happy with because ticket sales are non-refundable in the US, unlike the majority of firms in the UK, and buying too early may mean you miss out on an offer that is later released.

I can’t promise that offers this year will return next year, but the market has been soft and has affected both Universal and Disney according to the latest visitation report published annually by the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA), and also addressed by Comcast’s CFO Jason Armstrong during an earnings call to investors earlier this month.

Capacity challenges in Epic Universe and construction in Disney World could mean park operators may price tickets more aggressively next year, but there is no way to know for sure until they announce their summer promotion in the Spring.

Back to UK ticket and Black Friday offers. Beyond 7 days for 14 or adult tickets at child prices for Disney World (both nominal £20-£50 savings), neither Disney nor Universal run Black Friday promotions. Any other monetary or discount-led promotions you see on tickets are entirely manufactured by the ticket company.

Two companies in particular hike up prices and reduce advertised discount codes in an effort to make their Black Friday promotions appear more attractive than they actually are.

The most prolific user of this is Attraction Tickets, the market leader in the UK regarding Orlando Tickets and the official ticketing partner of Universal in the UK. When you purchase UK tickets or packages priced in sterling from the Universal Orlando website, Attraction Tickets in the UK will actually be your point of contact, not Universal directly.

Only by tracking prices throughout the year and displaying them visually can you see that Black Friday is just marketing controlled by the two market leaders in the UK. No other ticket company in the UK places as much emphasis on discounts as these two, yet they work out to be the two most expensive ticket agencies and thousands of people are blinded by big, bold 15%-25% “savings” headlines. It’s a classic marketing tactic that adds hundreds, if not thousands, of bookings annually because people fear they are missing out on the best deal of the year. Looking at the figures, the reality is so much different.

The fact that I take issue with how some companies market their tickets is not indicative of their reputation as a whole. All the companies I have been tracking are reputable ticket agencies. Offering discount deals while manipulating the base cost is not illegal as long as they have had those tickets for sale in the past at that cost. That’s partly why you see discount percentages evaporate the closer we get to a big sale period. It’s definitely a morally grey area, at best, but it’s not illegal.

Disney World UK tickets continue to offer excellent value for money, despite small increases in price, depending on your visit date, as Disney and other park operators try to even out the crowds throughout the year. To save money, look at going during quieter times of the year, as there is a £200+ difference in prices between the quieter August and September months compared to late December and Easter.

Black Friday prices for August ranged from £399 up to £525 for my chosen date of August 10th, but was Black Friday the right time to buy?

Before I get to that, how did each of the companies stack up against each other? The chart below shows the average price of a Disney World Ticket starting on August 10th. As the market leader, I have highlighted Attraction Tickets in red. To get the average price, all weekly prices were added up and divided by the number of weeks they were tracked. For this article, that was a total of 42 weeks. The chart shows that even doing a little shopping around can usually save you a few pounds, as on average Attraction Tickets were 6th overall in terms of value out of the 7 companies I have been tracking. Only Theme Park Tickets Direct were more expensive. It’s clear that the owners of Theme Park Tickets Direct (and Orlando Attraction Tickets owners, US Rent A Car Group) place far more emphasis on their main brand over their purchase and subsequent rebranding of Keith Prowse (remember them?!) despite making some big promises after purchasing the remains of Keith Prowse empire in 2014.

Florida Tix employs the same discount-led sales tactics as Attraction Tickets for large parts of the year, with largely the same results, tracking as the second most expensive ticket agent for Disney tickets over the course of this period.

If you want the best value, you’re better off looking at lesser-known agents that are gaining traction by offering consistently value-based pricing and great customer service.

In terms of Disney Tickets, the pricing is close, very close! Attraction Ticket Shop averages just over £400, with Orlando Attractions hot on their heels at just over £401 and Your Ticket Genie coming in on average just over £403. Who was cheaper each week changed, but the difference between these 3 companies was minimal.

Another well-known long-standing agent, Orlando Attraction Tickets, slid a little with an average Disney World ticket price of just over £415, still comfortably under both Attraction Tickets and Florida Tix, but no longer always the cheapest, which had been the case prior to newer ticket agencies opening up.

Back to the main question. Was Black Friday the best time to buy?

In short, no. As in my previous article, Black Friday remains a marketing machine, and a very effective one at that, but it’s certainly not the cheapest time to buy despite offering the “highest discounts of the year”, if you believe the marketing spiel.

The worst time to buy remains the 6 weeks leading up to Black Friday and 2 weeks post-Black Friday, as companies then immediately concentrate on Christmas and New Year sales, when prices are raised, only to fall back to usual levels that can be found almost every other week of the year.

I’ll visualise that point with another chart. This time, tracking Attraction Tickets Black Friday Disney price as a baseline and plotting all other weeks’ prices against that baseline.

The dotted line on the chart above is the baseline Attraction Tickets Black Friday offer price for my chosen date of August 10th, 2026.

You’ll notice that almost every week in 2026, the ticket price was below that of the advertised Black Friday “offer”.

Let’s quickly turn our attention to Florida Tix, another perpetual user of the discount marketing technique.

Florida Tix actually did show a genuine saving during Black Friday compared to their usually slightly inflated prices. You could still have scored slightly cheaper tickets by shopping around.

You can see quite clearly that Black Friday prices have been trumped most weeks this year by either waiting or shopping around. Prices remain fairly static, only rising significantly before Black Friday and Christmas. That pattern happens to some degree across all ticket agents.

Both Attraction Tickets and Florida Tix have a noticeable uplift in base prices before reducing them back to standard pricing for the 2 most popular sales of the year: Black Friday and New Year, but the rest of the year the price is fairly stable. Other companies like Your Ticket Genie and Orlando Attractions charge roughly the same year-round.

The lowest prices were seen in Spring, between late February and April, beating the Black Friday prices by over £20 per ticket on occasion. It’s not earth-shattering discounts, but it could add up to the cost of a nice meal out for a family if you hold off booking.

Combo packages generally offer better overall value, but the actual cost savings depend on the ticket vendor and the week. Always make note of the base price, as the bigger savings on combo tickets generally start off more expensive in the first place, with savings not making up enough to save money overall by shopping around. The average savings of combo deals versus buying separate tickets with the same company are:

• Attraction Tickets 1.5% (£13)
• Florida Tix 0.86% (£8)
• Your Ticket Genie 0.6% (£4.87)
• Orlando Attraction Tickets 0.48% (£3.99)
• Orlando Attractions 0.46% (£3.70)
• Attraction Ticket Shop 0%

Attraction Ticket Shop does not focus on the standard combo deals like most other companies, instead focusing on always low pricing where it can. When pricing up, always compare separate tickets and bundles because there are odd occasions when separate tickets have been cheaper, but not by much, as you can see from the comparison charts for 4 companies below.

Now that we know the pricing patterns, it’s important to understand how companies have adapted their approaches over the last year to 18 months in an effort to influence others and boost sales.

There has been an active uplift in companies turning to places like social media outside of traditional advertising avenues in an effort to boost sales. Instead of passive advertising campaigns popping up on your social feeds, which still happens a lot, employees have been taking to various popular groups to try to push their firm over others.

A lot of the time it is low-key, “I checked prices and definitely saved during Black Friday” type quotes, but one person was actively bad-mouthing competition with completely false statements about their product in an effort to push his own agenda.

He didn’t use a nickname, so a little digging into Companies House records shows he was, in fact, an ex-director of the firm he was pushing. I don’t know what his current role is in the firm, but he clearly still has very close ties to it.

I reached out to the owner of the firm he was slandering, offering them an opportunity to address his comments in the group. They confirmed he has been doing it for months, in a number of groups, and has been banned from many of them because of his misleading information. He has also blocked the owners of the rival from seeing his profile, hence his comments, so they could not defend their position.

This case is a little extreme, but I wanted to highlight the fact that you don’t know who is replying on social media when you ask for recommendations.

Many times it will be casual visitors who do not know the nature of ticketing and use who they trust, but equally, it could be a bad actor from a firm pushing their own agenda at the expense of cheaper firms.

You never truly know who is replying to your comment, so always do your own homework.

Many groups are affiliated with either ticketing firms or holiday companies, and administrators can delete comments made about who is not their preferred partner if they so choose.

I’m not saying don’t turn to social media. There are a lot of people who want to help share their own experiences, but always make your buying decisions based on facts you can verify, not the opinion of a stranger, especially if they are using a nickname.

These are still very evident but often seen in a more subtle form, when you know what to look for.

Bold, primary colours make a website appear more visually appealing and playful, like Florida Tix. Their recent website redesign has stripped out a lot of the colour to make prominent call-to-action elements like buy buttons more prominent. Sometimes colours are used more subtly, like buttons to purchase something.

If you have an option to purchase two types of tickets, the button for the more expensive ticket will be more prominent. This is most noticeable on the Attraction Tickets website, where you have the option to purchase tickets with or without their protection cover. This costs £30 extra per ticket, and you’ll notice the button is a bold, contrasting green colour, while the button to continue without protection is the same colour as the background to help it blend in a little.

Also look out for the wording and visuals used on websites. Firms will use pictures of families smiling on attractions or enjoying a snack or drink under bright blue cloudless skies with wording geared to generating your own feelings of warmth, fun and family.

To go with the wording and the visuals, in the last few months, you may have noticed firms that heavily “discount” tickets have changed their pricing strategy slightly by breaking down prices to a daily average cost over the ticket duration.

Only when you get to your cart is the final total displayed. This simple strategy is easy to explain. Smaller numbers on screen don’t equate to the actual cost of the tickets until buyers are more emotionally invested in the product and are more likely to purchase.

Orlando theme park tickets are still expensive. They have outstripped inflation; yet, despite prices remaining at an all-time high, people are flocking to the theme parks for all manner of reasons, be it to spend time with friends and family, or a little escapism from the mundanity of normal everyday life. You’re not buying physical, tactile tickets any longer. You’re buying the promise of some escapism for a few hours by scanning a code on your phone that could cost more than your flight.

Companies like to tie you into a contract before you have time to think, or, more importantly, compare. Limited time offers are still rife with the top two players in the market. It’s a classic marketing trick that never stops giving for them. Playing on people’s natural fear of missing out (FOMO) by listing “exclusive” savings but only until midnight, or promoting a flash 24-hour, 48-hour, or 72-hour sale. People naturally don’t want to pay more than they have to, but most buyers don’t realise that the base price of the ticket is controlled by the ticket company itself to account for a substantial portion of the total savings being advertised. I’ll illustrate it using Attraction Tickets Disney World prices from the end of October through to the first week of August this year.

As Orlando holidays become ever more expensive, UK visitors need to save up, and this has extended the FOMO to years in advance, with a significant uptick in people enquiring about booking trips 2, 3 or even 4 years away so they have time to pay it off. Some companies obviously love to oblige and get people tied into sales contracts, usually at quite a premium. Check the two images below for a comparison of Disney World December 10th ticket prices. Notice the current colossal markup on prices precisely because we are so far in advance.

Hopefully, by now I’ve illustrated that Black Friday is just marketing, nothing more. Monitoring prices for a few weeks before and after you purchase is pointless when ticket companies play a far longer game.

To save money, you need to challenge your mindset when it comes to how companies market tickets. You need to ignore the trigger warnings thrown at you by rising ticket prices and a natural fear of missing out.

Discount percentages are absolutely pointless when companies are free to change the base price for every sale. Discounts only work when the base price is static for every date across every ticket vendor.

Only ever take notice of the final price, not the bold, splashy percentage on the homepage. Don’t let the companies dictate your buying choices or pressure you into purchasing when you don’t want to. Take control back and buy when you are ready and able; you’ll find that the price differs very little throughout the year outside of late September through the New Year.

If you would like to see my list of prices, including visual chart representations for each company and ticket type, you can view my full workbook using this link.