Skip-the-line offers, VIP tours now popular attractions in travel world

This fall, both Disneyland and Disney World launched a new “premier pass” — which, for several hundred dollars on top of the price of a regular park ticket — allows parkgoers to skip the lines at many popular rides. While theme parks like those owned by Disney and Universal Studios have become known for their skip-the-line offerings, the trend itself has become common in the travel industry.

Melissa Holguin saw that firsthand when she was buying tickets to visit the Vatican and Sistine Chapel in Rome for a family trip. “The regular ones were sold out,” said Holguin. “And one of the options was breakfast and skip-the-line, which added significantly to the cost.”

For $70 a person, Holguin and her family would be able to enter the chapel and Vatican grounds an hour before most visitors. That’s a significant upcharge from the normal ticket price of approximately $20 a person. But while Holguin hadn’t intended to buy skip-the-line tickets when she set out, that extra hour came without buyer’s regret.

“It was really nice to be able to see all the artwork and all of the sculptures without a lot of congestion,” Holguin said. “We just kept saying, ‘Thank goodness we did this.’”

According to the travel research firm Arival, skip-the-line and VIP tours have grown significantly since 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Arival conducted a survey this year of 668 ticketed attractions around the world, including theme parks, museums and monuments. It found that 51% offered some sort of skip-the-line or VIP tour option.

Part of what’s driving the trend is inflation. In November, airline prices were up almost 4.7% and hotel prices were up 3.7% annually, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those high costs are prohibitive to some, but others are less affected. Douglas Quinby, CEO of Arival, calls the latter group the “affluent traveler.”

“We define them as [having] a household income of at least $150,000,” Quinby said. “This is just a subset of travelers that have been less impacted by inflation, so they’re continuing to travel, they’re continuing to spend.”

This interest in skip-the-line offers has changed the way some vendors in the travel industry do business, like travel agent Alyssa Geeter.

“It is definitely one of the first things — if not the first thing — that clients ask when they reach out to me to start quoting and booking their trips,” said Geeter, who specializes in vacations that involve Disney and Universal Studios. Her agency, Magical World Vacations, holds Earmarked Disney Vacation Planning Agency status and is commissioned by Disney.

“There are so many different tiers and levels,” Geeter said. “It’s definitely gone from just, ‘Oh cool! Look! We get to go through the fast lane’ to now this is a deciding factor in our plans just as it is with budget, dining, hotel cost.”

And by all accounts, it looks like skip-the-line is set to get even bigger. According to the same Arival survey that found over half of ticketed attractions already offered skip-the-line, another 18% said they planned to add a line-skipping offer next year.