While reading friend’s blogs the other day, I came across this gem talking about Disney and ticket prices. And it hit home a bit after Sarah’s and my anniversary trip last week.

On our trip, we went to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. That was pretty much the sole reason we went to Asheville. Sarah had read about their award winning wines and the estate looked beautiful, so she thought it’d be something fun to do. I agreed because, well, free wine tastings are always good.

So we get to Asheville around 1pm or so on the 29th and we stop at the ticket/information center. And that’s where our jaws dropped.

You see, to get onto the property, you have to buy a ticket. That doesn’t sound bad, until you see that the price for a ticket is $47. Per person.

Now, let’s think about this. You’re visiting a giant house with 43 bathrooms. There’s a beautiful garden nearby, some expensive, high-quality restaurants, and if you want an audio tour or one of their other tours there, they’re about $15 a person on top of the price you already paid for the tickets. Of course, you do get a complementary wine tasting, but still.

So for us to get in to see everything, we’d be paying about $94 and tax. Just to walk around a house and taste wine. Hell, if I wanted to do that, I’d stay at home and buy a lot more wine.

The woman working at the register–who was a trainee at the estate–saw our hesitation and that we were only interested in the winery really and then tells us that there’s a disabled ticket that we could buy for $32. Well, saving about $15 a ticket, eh, we’ll bite. The catch to the disabled ticket, though, is that you’re only allowed admission on the second and first floors of the house. While that might seem like its a lot, the house is four stories and a basement, so you’d be missing three stories of the house.

So we buy our disabled tickets, feeling like our assholes have just been violated, and we begrudgingly park and head towards the house. And when we get to the front door, that’s when I see the sign about no cameras or cell phones allowed in use inside. Great. So we might have just saved $30, but we now can’t take pictures of our visit. So much for making that money up in pictures.

Even still, once we were in the house, noone checked our ticket and saw the small print that said “disabled.” We got to see all five levels of the house, and saved 1/3rd of our ticket price. We did a few other things, took some pictures of the gardens, bought some wine, and just enjoyed ourselves before going out to a hibachi dinner at a local restaurant down the road.

But the point I wanted to get at is that we’re sitting here and charging so much for these attractions, and I understand that the money here goes to the restoration of the property, but maybe there should be a limit to things there. When we were there on property, we brought the average age drastically down. Most of the elderly folks on the property were staring at us, wondering what a couple of our age might have of interest at a property that was so hoity toity, so high strung. It was strange for them to see a couple who actually still had color to their hair and didn’t have a stroller with them.

Maybe, just maybe, we should let things be a bit more open. Maybe we should just lower some of these “entertainment/amusement” prices and let people enjoy them more rather than worry about their wallet or avoid them all together. I dunno, there’s really no way to think about it seeing its privately held or owned, just like the Biltmore, Disney, Hard Rock, Universal, Sea World, etc. But when you’re thinking about the admission costs, that high initial sunk cost with little to nothing to show for it just doesn’t feel right at a place like Biltmore. Sure, you get some more out of Disney/Universal/Sea World for rides, animals, and sight-seeing, but there are historical places like Biltmore that could be much better for the costs they have, or could reconsider their costs.

But the most fun we had for the least amount of money had to be hiking up to Anna Ruby Falls. For $2, we were able to park and walk up to enjoy that. And I got to take pictures.

Suck it, Biltmore.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 9:16 am by Adam and is filed under Babbling, Writings/Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.