You’ve probably seen recent articles claiming that it is cheaper to fly to Japan and visit the Tokyo Disney Resort than it is to plan a vacation to Disneyland or Disney World…

Well, the answer all around is actually YES! This goes beyond just Tokyo Disney too!

In 2025, we traveled to both Japan and France for only a little more than one trip would be to Disneyland (we live in Orlando, so we really don’t have to travel more than 20 minutes to get to Disney World). Our typical itinerary for a theme park trip is a 4-night stay. To stay on Disneyland property for that amount of time is astronomically expensive. For that type of stay, the cheapest room with park tickets was going to run us $4,000+ USD just for the two of us. Airfare will only run us $75-$200 per person from MCO to LAX if we take Frontier or Spirit (and pack within their limits). All said and done, we would need to budget around $5,000 USD to comfortably do a trip like this.

For Tokyo, airfare was $900 USD round trip for per person, but staying on property at a higher end Disney resort (Ambassador Hotel) was only $1,300 USD for 4 nights. If we are doing the math, we’re at $3,100 USD total. Next up are the park tickets. Park tickets can vary a bit, however, are pretty cheap no matter when you go. When we went, full day tickets were $55 USD and after 17:00 (5pm) tickets were $30 USD. With that combination, we spent about $450 USD on the park tickets both of us. To be safe, we budget an extra $500 for food/souvenirs/public transportation. Now we’re up to $3,850.

Right there, it’s already cheaper than traveling domestically to a Disney park. We can lower the price more and do more on the trip!

6 months before we booked our plane tickets, we opened a new travel credit card. If we spent a certain amount of money within the first 3 months, we would receive $750 USD in travel credit! Just putting our standard bills on that card easily got us to that amount plus we earned 1-3% on all those purchases. Oh look, one of our plane tickets was now free. With that about $900 USD saved, we added a morning at Fuji-Q Highland. Adding this only costed about $150 USD for both of us combined. We also had more spending money to get DPAs (Disney Premier Access) while in the parks which is super needed at the Tokyo parks. Add another $150 USD for those.

We also went to Disneyland Paris this year for even cheaper than our Tokyo Disney trip. Plane tickets after our credit card points was about $1,000 USD ($500 per person). We didn’t have as many travel rewards points so this time we only saved $120 USD. The 4 nights on property only costed $1,250 USD and included the park tickets for both of us for 5 days! This resort was the budget property as it was the Santa Fe Hotel however we found this hotel to still be of great quality! Of course, we got to add that safety net of $500 USD on top. This trip just for Disney and to get there was $2,750 USD. We added some days out in the city of Paris which was really cheap thanks to the RER and Metro. Most trips were only a couple Euros per person.

Where does that lead us? We’re going to take out the credit card points and non-Disney things on the trip to get an accurate price. This also excludes the $500 additional for food and such. All flights are from Orlando (MCO) during their cheapest prices.

Disneyland Resort – $4,150 Total / $2,075 Per Person

Tokyo Disney Resort – $3,550 Total / $1,775 Per Person

Disneyland Paris Resort – $2,370 Total / $1,185 Per Person

The numbers don’t lie. These are the rounded numbers we spent on Disney & airfare to both Tokyo and Paris. For Disneyland in California, we never booked the trip but planned for months to get it to work…it never did within our budget. However, we did end up visiting California, we just went to Six Flags Magic Mountain and Knott’s Berry Farm since those were more budget friendly.