What a show costs you

Watching a show is not free in time, even though it does not queue in the classic sense. A good night-time show asks you to arrive with margin — sometimes 30-45 minutes, depending which one and the season, as the first article in this list explained — and that margin is time you are not spending in a queue that is moving or on a ride. In practice, when we build your Route, including a show of that kind usually comes at the price of one or two attractions you could otherwise have done in the same stretch.

That does not mean it is not worth it: it means it has to be decided with the information in front of you, and that decision depends above all on one thing — how much time you have against how much there is to do. If your days are long for what you are asking to see, with many park hours and few must-dos marked, shows cost you practically nothing, because there is margin to spare. If your days are tight, with little time and a lot on the must-do list, every show competes directly with a particular attraction, and that is where our Route has to choose.

That is why we do not treat all shows alike. The night-time shows —one per park per night, with no repeat— go in almost whenever there is an evening to plan, because there is no second chance that day. The parade is included whenever it fits, and you decide how much weight we give it when it does not fit easily (we explain that in the parade article in this same list). Street shows and short musicals, by contrast, cost almost nothing: they have several showings a day and fit into gaps that would otherwise be empty, so we add them without their competing with anything.

If you have a Priority Card, the sum shifts further in favour of shows: with queues effectively solved, the time that used to go on waiting to get on a ride is freed up, and that makes seeing more than one show, or repeating a showing, cheaper in time than it would be without one. Without a Priority Card the real choice is between must-dos and shows, and there we would rather you made the decision: if there is a particular show that matters to you more than an attraction on your list, tell us and we will prioritise it on that basis — better that you say so than that we guess.