How Much Does it Cost to go to Halloween Horror Nights?

With Halloween Horror Nights started, I figured we should try to plan a vacation to go see it at Universal Orlando. This event is a fan favorite year after year, and some amazing houses are coming to Orlando this season. Stranger Things is back for its third house at the event and the Last of Us is coming as well. It should be a very good event year so let’s break down the numbers to see how much a trip to Halloween Horror Nights will cost. We will assume that it is one person coming down in a group for one night. They would like to stay on-site, traveling from Pensacola, Florida on 9/20 and leaving on 9/21.

Travel

They will be driving down to the event, and it is 450 miles away. The car lasts 300 miles, so this journey will have three plus fill-ups. Assuming they have a 13-gallon tank to fill up and the average price per gallon is $3.75 in Florida it will be $48.75 to fill up the car which will be $146.25 for the trip but we will round up to $160 so you aren’t pushing.

Lodging

The hotel prices range from just over $100 all the way up to over $1,700 for a night’s stay on the property. The price for the cheapest room is the Dockside Inn and Suites for a two-bedroom suite you pay $130.89 on the Wednesday night. It has access to Universal transportation if you can get a little carried away with the drinking. It might be on a packed bus though so have to take that into account. With the parking fee of $28 per car per night your stay will be $158.89. There is also a package that includes an HHN ticket for that night for $219.06. With the parking, it will be $247.06. We are Looking at tickets next to determine if the deal is good.

Tickets

We know where we are sleeping and how we are getting there, but what are we doing? A single ticket to HHN on the night of the 20th will be $85.19. This would bring our total to $244.08 without the package and $247.06 with the hotel package. Wild to see it actually be a worse deal.

Food

Food is consistently a large expense when we are taking these trips to the theme parks. It is also somewhat invisible in vacation mode so please be careful not to overspend here. We do need to eat dinner BEFORE horror nights. Dining can eat into your time at HHN, and you need all the minutes if you want to get everything out of the experience. We will add a snack trip and try one of the mixed drinks during the event. For dinner, we will go to the Portofino and eat at Mama Della’s. One of the best restaurants on the property and they serve Italian food. Every item on the menu that I have had is excellent, but I usually can’t escape without paying $45 a person with an appetizer, tip, and entrée. The Portofino is a short boat ride away from City Walk and the dining there easily trumps anything that City Walk has. We will ride the boat back over to City Walk after our meal and it drops you fairly close to the entrance to Universal. Our snack will be at Surfer Boy Pizza from Stranger Things where we will get a Hawaiian pizza ($9.99) and a tropical dream punch ($12.50). Including tax which Florida is around 6.65%, you can expect to pay about $23.98. Adding up our meals for the night is $68.99.

Totals

Just to spend one night at my favorite Halloween event in Orlando will cost you $473.07. This is with two meals, gas to get there, your ticket, and your hotel. When we compare to one of our last blogs when we projected to stay one night at the Contemporary the total for that was $1,614.38. More than three times the cost of this one. The next blog will be a lovely trip to Disney’s Halloween event staying at their cheapest hotel.

How to Save

We have two weeks to save for this, but it can be done. Hopefully, you could plan much further out but the total isn’t too bad. We have to save $236.54 each week. To keep it under our 50/30/20 goal we need to have an income of $788.45. This pay would be $40,999 per year of post-tax dollars. If you aren’t at that pay scale you can always pick up some hours, work a double or two, maybe run some side hustle for the extra money each week. If we kicked it out six weeks of saving, we would only need to save $78.85 per week. With our scale, we would need to make $262.82 per week to make that work. If that’s your part-time pay rate with no bills, we can make it work.