Alyssa Leach and her husband have visited Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, every year since 2015. To them, the theme park feels like an oasis where they can escape the stress of everyday life.

So when their son, Lincoln, was born in 2020, Leach wanted his first visit to the park to be special and spared no expense in planning it. She booked a two-week trip to visit Florida in December 2022, which included stays at Disney World and Universal Studios.

The costs quickly accumulated. Leach and her family traveled from New Haven, Connecticut, and paid extra for admission to “Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party,” an after-hours event that cost about $200 per person. She also shelled out $100 for the theme park’s photo service so she could download photos of the family that photographers took during the visit.

The vacation cost around $6,000, which included accommodations, tickets and a car rental, and which Leach charged to her Disney-branded credit card.

Leach is one of many parents who have taken on debt for a Disney family vacation. In June, LendingTree, a financial firm, published the results of a survey of more than 2,000 people that found that 45% of parents with children under 18 who have gone to Disney went into debt for the trip.

For a family of four, the cost of a one-week trip to Disney can range from $6,463 to $15,559, not including flights or souvenirs, according to an analysis by NerdWallet, a personal finance site. Many families can’t afford the trip at all. Last week, Disney reported softening demand for its theme parks because families, after years of dealing with high inflation, have less money to spend on amusement.

But Leach, 38, who works in sales, relies on quarterly bonuses to cover vacation costs. She and her husband earn about $250,000 annually, combined, though that figure can fluctuate each year. Her family doesn’t always have the money to pay for vacations upfront. Instead, she books first, then pays off her balances as the bonuses come in.

For the trip in 2022, Leach paid the minimum on her credit card for two months, accruing around $382 in interest before she was able to pay off the balance.

Disney stories, and the characters who populate them, are deeply embedded in American pop culture, and many families consider a trip to Disney-themed parks to be a rite of passage. The Magic Kingdom theme park at Disney World is the biggest amusement park in the world by attendance, drawing more than 17.1 million visitors in 2022, according to a report by AECOM, an infrastructure consulting firm. The second biggest is Disneyland in California, which drew more than 16.8 million visitors in the same year.

Leach said she had no regrets about taking her 18-month-old son on his first Disney trip.

“I’ll make more money,” she said. “But he’ll never be that young again.” Today, the family lives in Tampa, Florida, and each member has a Disney World annual pass.

“Disney does carry a level of nostalgia for people,” said Rachel Cruze, who hosts a personal finance podcast and wrote a personal finance book with her father, Dave Ramsey, geared toward parents. “It’s a lot of people’s childhoods. When you can go to one singular place and have so many of those memories and those characters come to life, it does bring a level of joy.”

However, Cruze said, the pressure to visit Disney theme parks and to go all out for what may be a once-in-a-lifetime trip can lead families to spend beyond their means. Often, visitors contend with sticker shock when they arrive at the park.

For Johnny Esfeller of Helena, Alabama, Disney was a central part of his childhood. When he became a parent, he wanted his daughter to experience the same love for the theme park and its characters.

Esfeller, 41, who works in public relations and marketing, prides himself on nailing his budgets. So when he took his wife and their daughter, then 4, to Disney World in February 2022, he was shocked to find himself in debt after the trip.

“Disney’s never been a cheap vacation,” he said. “That’s been true since probably when Walt opened the park in the 1950s.” He had budgeted about $6,000 for the trip, but overspent by $2,500.

Esfeller and his wife are both employed full-time and describe themselves as upper middle class. Together, they were able to pay off the debt from the trip in a few months. Still, it lingers in his memory like a cautionary tale.

He and his wife consider themselves seasoned Disney vacationers, but they were caught off guard by numerous pricing changes. The biggest one involved the park’s line-skipping system. For years, Disney offered visitors FastPass, a free service that allowed them to effectively hold a reserved time slot to ride an attraction without having to wait in long, winding lines. The park replaced it with a paid version in the fall of 2021. The cost of FastPass can vary depending on the ride, theme park and time of year.

The service cost Esfeller’s family $15 per person per day. “By the end of the trip, it was several hundred dollars that I didn’t bank on,” he said.

But shelling out extra for the new paid version of the line-skipping service, Esfeller said, didn’t feel like a choice.

“You’re there, you’re not sure when you’re coming back, and it’s like: ‘Fine, I’ll just bite the bullet. We’ll worry about the cost later,’” he said. “I just didn’t want my daughter to miss out on anything.”

Another example of what Esfeller described as the “nickel-and-diming” of his experience involved transportation within the park. Previously, Disney offered a shuttle service, branded as the Minnie Van and operated by Lyft. The company initially charged a $25 flat rate to transport families between any two locations on the resort premises. By the time Esfeller and his family were vacationing in 2022, it was operating on a surge-pricing model instead.

Also gone during their trip were prepaid dining plans that let families budget a flat payment for a set number of meals. (Disney brought back its dining plans in 2024 because of demand.)

A spokesperson for Disney said the company offered vacation options at multiple price points, including for hotels, park tickets, transportation and merchandise. The spokesperson said that the FastPass pricing model was standard in the industry, and that one benefit of variable pricing was lower costs for rides and parks that saw less demand.

Cruze advises families against going into debt for vacations. She said more families should consider less expensive travel, such as going to national parks. Though a Disney vacation can feel like an escape from reality, families eventually return to everyday life.

“If you don’t have the money, and you charge it, then that vacation follows you home for the next few months,” Cruze said.

She urges people to hold off on traveling until they have a solid amount of savings socked away, including for emergencies, before booking a vacation.

But that doesn’t work for all families. Rebecca Mitchell used to take on significant credit card debt to pay for Disney trips for herself and her child, who is now in college. As a single mother living in Iowa, Mitchell, 46, did administrative work for a company that sold manufacturing material, earning $15 an hour.

At the time, she didn’t think that saving and budgeting could do much for her. Whenever she managed to put some money away, a financial emergency would wipe it out.

“Had I waited for the money, I don’t know if I would have ever done it,” Mitchell said of the Disney trips.

Mitchell first took her child to Disney World in 2008, and they have returned to the theme park regularly. Her strategy has always been to just book the trip and then figure it out along the way.

She estimated that the trips with her child typically cost $2,500. When booking a vacation with Disney, families are required to make a minimum deposit of $200 to reserve their tickets and accommodations. Mitchell would pay the minimum deposit and then make additional payments whenever and however she could in the weeks before the trip. When it was time to take off, she charged the remaining balance to her credit card and typically paid off the debt within six months.

Mitchell said she had no regrets about taking on the debt. “I was young, my child was young, we only had that time,” she said. “Especially once your kids get older, memories are everything.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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