In general, I don’t like to shill for things here on Undefeated Daddy. This is no exception. I’m not telling you that you have to go out and go to Elitches with season passes. However, we have gotten season passes to Elitch’s for two years now, and they are worth it, if you go even just two times. So, if you live here, or visit Denver a lot, it can be a good deal.
2015 Elitch’s Season Passes
So, how do you know if getting an Elitch’s season pass is worth it for you?
First, look at the cost of the season pass. For 2015 the Elitch Gardens season pass is $69.99. There is a flat $5 processing fee for each order, so if you are going to buy more than one season pass, buy them all at the same time. If you buy 4 season passes all at once, that’s $1.25 fee per pass, and that isn’t so bad. Buy them separately, and that’s $20 total worth of processing fees. Yuck. You might as well be buying stuff from Ticketmaster at that rate.
The main thing you get with a season pass, of course, is free entrance to the amusement park. The admission is good for both the water park and the rides part of the park, but keep in mind that the water park doesn’t open until Memorial Day and closes at Labor Day.
Single day tickets are $45.99 for for adults (actually for people over 48″), and $31.99 for kids. In other words, if you go twice as an adult, you may as well have bought a season pass, because those two admission would cost $90.
Now, most people know that with a little effort you can get discount Elitch Gardens tickets, or online coupon codes for Elitches. However, those discount Elitch’s admissions are almost always a discount off of the full gate admission price, and many of them are not good on weekends, or sometimes just Saturdays.
Online Discount Elitch Gardens Tickets
In reality, you can always get discount Elitches tickets by buying them online before you go. Online adult tickets are $34.99 (kids tickets are still $31.99). But, even then, two visits ads up to $70. Technically, you would only break even if you only went twice.
However, there are some other good perks with the Elitches season passes. The biggest one is free parking. Lots of people have their ways to park for free and walk to the park, but why bother? If you are already breaking even in just two visits, you might as well get a pass, and then you get free parking. Just show your pass to the guy at the ticket booth and he’ll wave you inside. That saves you $15 right there. (Parking was only $10 per car last season, so you save even more this year.)
We went five or six times last year. The free parking alone paid for one of our season passes.
You do get 3 “bring a friend” tickets, but only one of them is good on the weekend. The other two have to be used during the week, or in September.
You also get a coupon book, but we never ended up using any of them.
The one nice thing we did use was a free drink bottle. Every time you use the bottle, you can fill it with soda for just 99 cents, which is a pretty great deal where everything else is amusement park prices.
Go More Often with an Elitches Season Pass
Obviously, if you are travelling in from out of town to visit Denver and go to Elitch’s, a season pass probably isn’t as beneficial for you. But, if you end up in Denver on a fairly regular basis, one of the great things about a season pass is that it actually turns Elitches into something you can do for fun for just a couple of hours instead of something you have to do from dawn to dusk to get your money’s worth.
With free parking and free entrance, you can literally show up at 2:00 pm, ride a few of your favorite rides, hit the Ferris wheel and then go to dinner. A free afternoon of fun at what is otherwise, a fairly pricey attraction. It was these quick afternoon and early morning visits that convinced us to get season passes again this year. Well… it was that and our 5-year old counting down the days until he could go on the “ghost ride” again 🙂