How to Choose Your Universal Orlando Park Tickets
How many parks do you want to visit?
The next option in choosing your tickets is how many of the parks you’ll want to visit, and whether you wish to visit multiple parks on the same day, or just one park per day.
One-park, two-park, or three-park tickets
Before buying your tickets, you should decide which of the Universal Orlando theme parks you want to visit. A two-park ticket will include admission to the Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios parks. A three-park ticket adds Volcano Bay.
Here’s my 60-second quick guide to Universal Orlando. For an in-depth look at the resort I highly recommend the Unofficial Guide to Universal Orlando.
One-park-per-day tickets
If you want to confine your touring to just a single park each day, select the one-park-per-day option. One-park-per-day means just what it says: your ticket will give you admission to a single park on each day.
So if you have a one-day one-park-per-day ticket you will have to choose which of the theme parks you’ll be spending all your time in on that day. For two-days or more tickets, Universal automatically includes the two-park option. This allows guests to visit Islands of Adventure on one day and visit Universal Studios on the other.
If you’re buying a ticket for two or more days at Universal Orlando, you also have the option to select a three-park ticket. This ticket adds Volcano Bay into the mix.
If Volcano Bay is in your plans, note that there is not much of an incremental increase to go from a two-park to a three-park ticket. And Universal will frequently add that third park in for free as a promo ticket.
Just remember that for any of the one-park-per-day options, whichever park you enter first is the only park you can enter for the rest of the day.
Park-to-Park tickets
If you want to see more than one park on the same day, you’ll need a park-to-park ticket. Universal sells both two-park and three-park park-to-park tickets (that’s a mouthful!).
I highly recommend purchasing at least a two-park park-to-park ticket, to cover admission to both Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure for the same day. Not only are these parks literally next to each other, you must have a two-park park-to-park ticket to ride the excellent Hogwarts Express train between Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade Village.
Allow me to take a short detour here into the Wizarding World.
Quick guide to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter
If the Wizarding World of Harry Potter is a priority for you, you will want that two-park park-to-park ticket. Universal has cleverly built the Wizarding World into both of the Orlando theme parks. It is possible to see all of it with just a one-park-per-day ticket, if you visit for at least two days. But it is much more enjoyable to be able to hop between Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley during the same day.
If you are only visiting Universal Orlando for one day, and you’re going to see the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, it is really imperative that you get a two-park park-to-park ticket.
Adding the park-to-park option to your Universal Orlando park tickets
It’s easy to add the park-to-park option to your two-park or three-park tickets. On Universal’s ticket page you’ll see the option in the menu as you choose your tickets.
The additional cost of including park-to-park access to your two-park ticket is about $60, no matter how many days your park tickets include. Not $60 per day, just an extra $60 on top of the cost of your ticket. So if you’ve got a three-day ticket, your incremental cost to add park-to-park access is $20 per day. This is another example where going for multiple days can pay off.
Yes, this is one more thing you have to pay for. And if you really only want to focus on one park each day, and the Hogwarts Express is not important to you, you can save some money by just getting the one-park-per-day option.
