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How Much Spending Money Do You Need for Disneyland Paris?
There is no single right number. The useful question is what kind of trip you want to have.
How much should you save?
Tell us what your trip looks like. We’ll give you a realistic range in pounds and euros, with the shopping and food assumptions shown separately.
Not included: Premier Access, PhotoPass, reserved viewing, character dining booked as an experience or other paid Disney extras. Budget for those separately.
What a normal day costs us before shopping
This assumes you do not have a meal plan.
For breakfast, a coffee or orange juice and something like a croissant, crêpe or snack is usually around €6–€7 each for us. Lunch with a drink is often around €15–€16 per person. A snack such as an ice cream, cake or doughnut with a drink can easily be another €6–€7 each. Then we would allow roughly €80–€100 for an evening meal for a family of four.
We carry refillable water bottles, so we are not repeatedly buying bottled drinks throughout the day. Put those numbers together and a fairly normal food-and-snacks day for four can land around €190–€220 before you have bought a single souvenir.
Why it helpsFood gives you the baseline. Merchandise is the bit that can change the total dramatically.
You can spend far less than we do
For a family of four with no meal plan, we think of the budget in three broad ways.
KEEPING COSTS DOWN — around €150–€200 for a full day. Use supermarket breakfasts and snacks, refillable water, cheaper meal choices and keep merchandise to a minimum.
COMFORTABLE — around €250–€300. Eat in the parks, have coffees and snacks, an evening meal and leave room for some souvenirs without watching every euro.
OUR HOLIDAY BUDGET — around €400–€500. This is deliberately generous and includes a decent amount of merchandise. It is the money we have saved specifically so that, within reason, we can say yes a little more often.
These are examples, not rules. A shorter break for us is often much more restrained than our main holiday.
Why it helpsDo not read our €400–€500 figure as what Disneyland Paris costs. It describes the kind of holiday we have deliberately saved for.
Shopping is where the budget can disappear
Ears are commonly around €25–€35. Shoulder pals are around €25. T-shirts and hoodies can range from roughly €30 into the €70–€80 range. Pins can be around €7–€16, lanyards around €7–€8 and the larger plush toys our children like are around €35. Then there are bags, mugs, bowls, glasses and everything else you convince yourself will look lovely at home.
One set of ears, a plush and a hoodie can already take one person well past €100. That is why we would always separate a souvenir allowance from the basic cost of eating and drinking.
Why it helpsDecide whether you want the odd thing, a few souvenirs, one bigger item or a proper Disney shopping budget.
Use Auchan for the things you do not care about buying at Disney
One of the easiest ways we have found to pull the budget back is a supermarket trip before Disney. Auchan at Val d’Europe is particularly useful if you are staying nearby.
A hotel-shop bag of sweets can cost what several bags cost in a supermarket. The same applies to crisps and simple breakfast food. We have bought multipacks of pains au chocolat for a few euros and had breakfast before leaving the hotel instead of automatically spending €6–€7 each in the parks.
The point is not to remove every treat from the holiday. Decide what you actually want to pay Disney prices for. If coffee and a crêpe on Main Street is part of your morning, have it. If nobody cares where the pain au chocolat came from, that is an easy place to save.
Why it helpsSave on the things nobody cares about so you have more room for the things that actually feel like part of the holiday.
A meal plan does not automatically mean zero food spending
Meal plans can work really well if the way your family eats matches the plan. Ours does not particularly. Our children do not eat huge amounts, we do not either, and we value being able to decide how much, when and where we want to eat.
Even with a meal plan, realistically you may still want coffees, snacks, speciality drinks or something outside the plan. So reduce the core food allowance, but do not assume every food and drink purchase has disappeared.
Why it helpsValue depends on your family, not on whether somebody else says a meal plan is essential.
We save the spending money separately
Through the year we put money aside specifically for the holiday. When we travel, we move the spending money into a separate bank space or pot and use a virtual card linked to it where our bank supports that.
For us that makes the holiday budget visible and keeps it separate from normal household spending. We use Apple Pay or card for virtually everything. Cash is usually only the euros that family members have given the children as spending money, and we simply throw that into the overall family pot.
Why it helpsThe budget feels much easier to enjoy when it has already been saved rather than coming out of normal spending as you go.
Do not forget the days around Disney
Our preferred Disney stay often gives us four proper full park days and a shorter final day. The full days get the full budget; the shorter day naturally tends to cost less.
But if you extend the holiday with nights before or after Disney, those days still cost money. Food in Calais or Paris, a day around Val d’Europe and the inevitable shopping-centre purchases all need a budget too.
That is why our eventual spending-money calculator will use your actual Disney dates, ask whether arrival and departure are full days, half days or evening only, and allow for extra holiday days before or after Disney.
Why it helpsA five-day Disney booking can sit inside a seven-day holiday. Budget for the holiday you are actually taking.