Walt Disney World has released an aggressive new ticket deal for Canadians that’s valid for over a full year from now! This covers 2025-2026 dates & details of the discount and what this signals for special offers on admission aimed at Americans.
Since our United States readership is the dominant audience, that last point is the most significant for our purposes. There have been several signs that Walt Disney World might be gearing up to release a new special offer on admission for the final three months of the year. This new special offer further reinforces that.
For those keeping score at home, Walt Disney World started emphasizing that it’s your last chance to take advantage of Fall 2025 special offers on admission, with four different deals coming to an end in the coming days and weeks. As covered in Four Ticket Deals Ending at Disney World, Signs of New Discount Wave for Christmas 2025?, we strongly suspect this is clearing the slate and laying the groundwork for a new ticket deal in the weeks to come.
On top of that, the New Disney PIN Code Discount on Disneyland Tickets for Halloween & Christmas 2025 just launched last week–right around the same time as this Canada resident ticket deal for Walt Disney World. From what we understand, that DLR deal was a widely-targeted PIN code, meaning a lot of emails went out.
October through December is the three-month stretch of the year that’s typically the busiest of the year at Disneyland without discounts. Virtually every other month has seen fairly aggressive deals in the last year-plus, but not those three months. Even a targeted deal on tickets for the heart of Halloween through Christmas strongly suggests softening demand.
This bodes well for the future of discounts at both Walt Disney World and DLR, as it indicates that the parks need to incentivize attendance even during the busiest three months of the year. Three months, I might add, that are consistently busier in the California parks than they are at Walt Disney World. Meaning that if Disneyland is offering a discount, it stands to reason that Walt Disney World will follow suit soon.
This new special offer for Canada residents is probably the first, but not the last, such offer. Here are the official details via Walt Disney World:
- November 9 to December 12, 2025
- January 4 to September 26, 2026
So you can even save on tickets for Canadian March Breaks and Summer 2026! The ticket is valid for admission beginning on the selected start date and must be used within a limited number of days, depending on ticket length and type.
Savings are based on the non-discounted price a non-Canada resident pays for the same ticket. Savings vary between 25% and 32% depending on the selected start date. All tickets and options are non-transferable and non-refundable, and exclude activities/events that are separately priced (such as Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party or Disney After Hours) or not open to the general public (private events).
You can read more about the details, exclusions, and terms of the offer on official Walt Disney World site for Canada.
We normally offer special offer analysis to assess whether newly-released discounts are good or bad by Walt Disney World’s historical standards. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible here.
The only international special offer that we’ve closely tracked over the years is Free Dining for United Kingdom residents. There’s been value in doing that because it’s the “big” deal of the year for UK guests and usually a precursor to Free Dining for U.S. residents. But otherwise, I only have vague awareness of deals for international markets.
I could tell you whether this CA ticket deal is good or bad by U.S. standards (it’s very good!), but that kind of misses the point. Disney typically offers superior savings to international markets, so this may be okay by Canadian standards. So hopefully some of our Canadian readers can help in this regard, offering quick thoughts based on the percentage savings, as opposed to the total price (since exchange rates are such a big variable there).
There are a few reasons why Walt Disney World could be targeting Canadians with this ticket deal. During a summer earnings call, Disney CFO Hugh Johnston was asked if the domestic parks have seen a hit to international visitation (reasons discussed in Canadians Are Canceling Walt Disney World Vacations).
In terms of the attendance, Johnston indicated that international attendance at the domestic parks still has not gotten back to pre-COVID levels (this is not a new development), but remains in the double-digits. As for recent international visitation, Walt Disney World and Disneyland have “seen a bit of an impact” of roughly 1% to 1.5% declines.
What Disney expects going forward is something similar to that, but that was also a few months ago and things could’ve changed since. After all, vacations are often booked a year in advance, so it could take a while before the drop-off is evident in current attendance. More broadly speaking, data shows that demand from Canada to the United States has dropped. What isn’t clear is whether the Orlando market, and Walt Disney World, specifically, has felt or will feel as great of an impact. There could be reasons it’s an outlier.
It’s also unclear whether the worst of this is already in the rearview mirror. The Greater Orlando Aviation Authority just released stats for July 2025, and the data is interesting. Overall passenger traffic increased by 1.5% for the month, with domestic passenger traffic up 0.7%, and international passenger traffic up 5.9%. The rolling 12-month total stands at an impressive 56.5 million annual passengers.
There’s more to these numbers than meets the eye. For one thing, the domestic increase is very significant, as it’s up for the first time since June 2024! Keep in mind that these are year-over-year numbers, and MCO was facing some tough comps coming down from pent-up domestic demand. MCO also opened a new terminal, which contributed to the record-setting run. Things are now normalizing for domestic travel as all of that has been fully lapped.
Conversely, pent-up demand has lagged for international travel, which has been a big driver of the increases. That new terminal also disproportionately serves international carriers, so this is largely a story of adding capacity. Even so, it’s worth pointing out that the international increases are decelerating–the percentage gains were in the double digits fairly recently. But this is also to be expected, as international travel is also starting to lap tougher comparisons.
What does this all mean? It’s hard to say. What I do know is that MCO was slower than I’ve seen in in three years when I left after Labor Day. (Slower is a relative term–it was still busy as compared to most other airports, just not by recent MCO standards!) Anecdotes aren’t necessarily indicative of anything; maybe I just got lucky.
With regard to international travel, there are also currency considerations at play. The U.S. dollar is still historically strong, even as it shows signs of weakening. I’m not sure this is a relevant consideration for Canadians; exchange rates aren’t that much different than pre-closure unless you really zoom out. But I won’t pretend to be a forex expert.
One thing I do know is that Walt Disney World has historically employed price discrimination (or differential pricing if you don’t like the technical use of “discrimination”) to bridge the gap and help attract international tourists, and one of the reasons for this was the exchange rate. Another reason is that the United States has considerably higher average wages than almost everywhere in the world. Again, this bridges that gap.
Despite this wage disparity, there’s the reality that international visitors are generally some of Disney’s biggest whales (non-derogatory). There are two factors at play here. One is that Canadians have more vacation days per year, on average, than Americans. The other is the practical reality that the flight is longer (albeit nothing like Europe or Asia), so it stands to reason that Orlando vacation duration is longer (I’ve got no data on this; it’s just a hunch). International visitors are simply more lucrative for Disney, even accounting for more aggressive discounting.
So maybe those factors are at play here and Disney wants to do more to attract a favorable guest profile. Or perhaps they’re seeing weakening demand among Canadians, and want to reverse that. It’s also entirely possible this is just a normal discount and my blind spot for Canadian deals is the real issue.
One thing I do know is that if I were in charge of strategic planning for Walt Disney World, I’d want to lock-in as many international ‘whales’ as soon possible. Get out ahead of whatever else is on the horizon, and convince fence-sitters to book 2026 trips before the planning cycle would typically start. It’s smart and what they should always be doing, even if Canadians do travel on shorter notice than Europeans.
Beyond the macro environment, there’s the competition up the street that should be a consideration. Epic Universe at Universal Orlando will be in its second year in 2026 and hopefully be operating smoothly. Right now might be a window of opportunity for Walt Disney World to capture ticket sales as Epic Universe reviews have been, ahem, mixed. That won’t last forever; Epic Universe will find its operational footing. Once that happens, Disney might lose more business to Universal.
As for what this ticket deal means for potential future special offers aimed at Americans, I wouldn’t read too much into the dates or details. Again, Canadians are a totally different demographic than U.S. residents.
Releasing ticket deals now through September 2026 is likely because there’s more lead-time between booking and traveling for Canadians. This also explains why the valid dates don’t begin until November 9, 2025. Disney has to balance the tradeoff between capturing new last-minute travelers and “giving away” a discount to those who already have upcoming trips planned and needed no such enticing. The goal of special offers is incentivizing new bookings, not cutting a break to existing travelers.
For these reasons and others, we would not expect dates for any upcoming domestic Disney ticket deal to mirror the Canadian one. Meaning that October 2025 eligibility is on the table, whereas 2026 is not (at least in the near-term; there absolutely will be deals for 2026, they’ll just be released next year).
About the only thing this tells us is that November is in play, and that any domestic discount would probably end around mid-December 2025. No surprise there, as the PIN code deal for Disneyland also ends on December 12, 2025!
Ultimately, that’s our best effort at analysis of this discount offering savings of 25% to 32% off Walt Disney World tickets at Christmas 2025 and throughout 2026 for Canadian residents. There are several plausible explanations for this as a standalone special offer, and it’s savvy of Walt Disney World to lock-in Canadian spending now.
Then there’s the precedent for future ticket deals aimed at Americans. Given this and everything else we’ve seen, my strong suspicion is that Walt Disney World is gearing up to release a discount. What it’ll be or who it’ll target is unclear, but my bet is that it’s valid for visits between October 14, 2025 and December 12, 2025. (More dates could be included with blockouts or reservation requirements.)
The safest play would be releasing this to Florida residents, but my hope is that there’s an offer for Disney+ subscribers, Disney Visa Cardholders, or a targeted PIN code (a la Disneyland). I would be surprised if no other special offer is released, but I’d be even more surprised if there’s a general public ticket deal for October through December. It’s too popular of a time of year for something that’s not targeted. For updates on discounts and everything else, sign up for our FREE Walt Disney World newsletter.
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Your Thoughts
What do you think about this discount offering savings of 25% to 32% off Walt Disney World tickets at Christmas 2025 and throughout 2026 for Canadian residents? Wish we got offers like this in the United States, or do you understand why WDW utilizes strategic price discrimination? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
