TO HOP OR NOT TO HOP...THAT IS THE QUESTION

Once you have settled on the time of year and the length of your Disney trip, you will need to purchase tickets.  For those arranging your own travels plan as opposed to using a travel agent there is no difference in the cost of the tickets.  Typically, we book our trips as a package (hotel + tickets + dining package) through the Disney website (https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/tickets/).  Regardless of your method you will be faced with two important questions:

1. How many days do we need park tickets for?
2. Do we need the park hopper and/or water park fun and more options?

Cost of tickets for Disney and other parks in the area are front loaded like interest on a mortgage.  The first couple days are the most expensive and the cost decreases as the length of your trip increases.  For us, we purchase 7 days worth of tickets.  Because the cost of the 7th day comes out to $42 for the family, we prefer to have the option to go to the park our first day in Florida.  That said, we typically do not add an 8th day in order to go park on the day we depart.  Some people feel that they need a break from the parks and do not feel the need to purchase tickets for every day of their trip.  Again, for us it is Disney Boot Camp and we like to have the option to go to park or not.  Which usually means we are going somewhere.

Because we chose to have 7 days of park passes, we do not feel that it is necessary to pay the extra $236 for the park hopper option for two main reasons.  The first is that there are 4 parks and we have passes for 7 days.  Therefore, we can get back to 3 of the parks at least twice.  For us, we usually spend 3 days in the Magic Kingdom, 2 days in Hollywood Studios, 1 day at the Animal Kingdom and Epcot respectively.  With the base tickets you are allowed to enter/re-enter one park each day.  Secondly, it is somewhat unreasonable to think that you can cover that much ground in a single day with young kids regardless of how convenient the transportation is.  Not once during the past 2 trips have our kids said that they did not get to see or do everything they wanted.

As far as the water park and more option, we have not really felt the need to exercise that option.  Our kids are more than content swimming the hotel pools.  If your plan was to visit both of Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon, it is in your best interest to bundle that into the cost of your ticket package versus buying separate passes.