During our family trip to Florida in January 2025, I decided to book a Universal Studios VIP Tour at the Universal Orlando Resort.
We’d previously visited the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park in Los Angeles, Florida, and enjoyed the Universal Studios Hollywood VIP experience. I was excited to see how the Universal Orlando VIP tour would compare with the Universal Studios Hollywood VIP Tour.
I was also keen to see how the Universal Studios VIP experience would compare with our recent experience of the Disney World VIP tour.
Like the Disney VIP experience, the Universal Studios VIP Tour is a private guided tour led by one of the park’s expert guides and privatized to suit your group. You’ll enjoy unlimited priority access to all of the tour’s attractions, complimentary meals, and other additional VIP benefits like VIP parking and discounts on merchandise.
So, read on to discover what went well on our Universal Studios VIP Tour, the parts that didn’t go so well, and whether I think the Universal Studios VIP Tour is worth it.
Universal Orlando VIP Experience Logistics
Universal Orlando is a theme park and entertainment resort covering nearly 1300 acres in Orlando, Florida. It’s one of the world’s most popular resorts, and around 21 million people visit it every year.
The resort has two theme parks: Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure. A third park, Universal Epic Universe, will open in May 2025.
There are two VIP tour options at Universal Orlando:
Small Group Tours
Nonexclusive tours are available for small groups of up to 12 people, and you can book to visit 1 or 2 parks.
The 1-park tour lasts 5 hours and includes skip the line access to at least 8 major attractions at either Universal Studios or Islands of Adventure. The tour generally starts at 9.30am and also includes a complimentary breakfast.
The 2-park tour takes in both parks and lasts 7 hours, starting at either 9.30am, 10.30am, or 11.30am. This tour includes both breakfast and lunch, along with front-of-the-line special access to at least 10 major attractions.
A 1-Day, 1-Park tour costs $259 per person, and a 1-Day, 2-Park tour costs $269 per person. Every person in the group pays a flat rate for the tour, whether they’re 2 years old or an adult, and you have to pay for theme park admission on top of the VIP tour price.
Private VIP Tours
VIP tours give you access to an expert guide who will create the ideal itinerary for your Universal Orlando visit. You’ll have unlimited Universal Express access to all Universal Orlando’s attractions throughout the day, even after your VIP tour time has ended.
You can also ride every attraction an unlimited number of times, so it’s great if you’re a serious coaster fan who wants to maximize your time in the park.
Private tours also include a complimentary buffet breakfast and full-service lunch and dinner. VIP parking is included, and you’ll receive discounts at several merchandise locations across the parks.
The price per person for private VIP tours varies depending on when you visit.
How Much Does The Universal Orlando VIP Experience Cost?
The Universal Orlando VIP tour is priced per person, and our total cost for four people came to around $4500, including park entrance.
This worked out cheaper than the Disney World VIP Experience for our family.
The Disney VIP tour is priced for an entire group of up to 10 people, and costs between $450 and $750 per hour for a minimum of 7 hours per day. In addition, you also have to pay for each person’s park ticket.
There were only 4 people in our group, and if we’d filled up the 10 places on the tour, the price per person would have been much cheaper.
How Old Do You Have To Be For the Universal Orlando VIP Experience?
There’s no minimum age for entering Universal Orlando, but VIP Tour Experience guests under 18 must be accompanied by an adult. They must also meet any height or age requirements to ride the individual attractions.
Universal Orlando VIP Experience Change And Cancellation Policy
The Universal Orlando VIP Experience is non-refundable, non-transferable, and requires 48 hours prior notice for cancellation.
You can change the dates of your visit by contacting the company you used to book the tour or adjust your tour dates within the Universal Orlando mobile app.
Our Universal Orlando VIP Experience
Your Universal Orlando VIP Experience includes free valet parking, but we took an Uber to and from the resort.
When you arrive, you’ll enter through a separate VIP entrance, where you’ll see signage for VIP check-in.
After checking in, you’ll meet one of Universal Orland’s expert tour guides and receive your special lanyard to wear throughout the tour.
This is your VIP credential that lets you skip the line and enter VIP areas.
The Day Starts With Breakfast
One thing to know about the Universal Orlando VIP experience is that you get a lot of food.
The VIP Experience tour price includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner; in fact, there was too much food for us to eat!
After you’ve collected your VIP credential, you’ll go with your VIP guide to get breakfast in a separate restaurant.
There was a pretty big buffet of hot dishes like sausages, bacon, potatoes, and eggs, and a separate selection of things like pancakes, waffles, and French toast.
On top of that, you can choose from a range of pastries, yogurts, and cereals.
Beverages included tea, coffee, fruit juice, and specialty coffees like cappuccinos and lattes.
The selection was massive, and if you’ve booked one of the later start times for your VIP tour, you’ll only need a light breakfast before heading to Universal!
While we were eating, our guide chatted to us about our must-do rides and our comfort levels with the more intense rides. That gave him an idea of which rides we definitely wanted to go on and how to structure our day.
Unlimited Ride Access
The Universal Orlando VIP guests receive unlimited exclusive access to all of the park’s major attractions, including the Jurassic World VelociCoaster and Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.
At first, I considered only doing Universal Studios instead of adding Islands of Adventure into our day. Islands of Adventure has a lot of big roller coasters like Doctor Doom’s Fearfall and The Incredible Hulk Coaster which didn’t interest us. I worried that might mean we wouldn’t make the most of our VIP tour experience.
This was the main reason I upgraded from the small group tour to the private tour. If you’re on a small group tour, you have to wait for the rest of the group to do the rides they want to do, even if you don’t want to go on them.
In the end, we toured both parks because booking the private VIP Experience gives you full control over which rides you go on. You can pick and choose the rides your group likes, without wasting time hanging around rides you’re not interested in. This allows you to make the most of your unlimited access pass.
An Exciting Theme Park Experience
After breakfast, we went to Universal Studios first and then our guide transported us to the Islands of Adventure park. As with Disney, you’ll get some behind-the-scenes access, and your VIP guide can use these “backstage” areas to take you on shortcuts between the different rides.
There are a lot of character-focused rides that are themed around films or TV shows, like Revenge of the Mummy, and more pure ‘thrill’ rides at Universal Orlando than at Disney World.
In general, the rides at Universal are more intense than Disney rides, and that was undoubtedly true at Universal Studios Orlando. So, if you love big roller coasters and thrill rides, you’ll enjoy a day at Universal Orlando!
Both parks offer rides suitable for smaller kids and other unique experiences like character meet-and-greets that young kids will love, too.
However, at Disney World, it feels more like you’re immersing yourself in a different world, whereas Universal Orlando feels more like a generic theme park.
Lunch At Mythos
The Universal Orlando VIP Experience also includes lunch and dinner.
We ate lunch at Mythos, a Greek-themed sit-down restaurant that serves a mix of Mediterranean, Asian, and American food. We each had a voucher to cover appetizers, an entree, dessert, and a non-alcoholic drink.
The menu included appetizers like grilled octopus or a mezze platter and entrees like Beef Loin Medallions on Yukon potato puree or Sea Scallop and Barley Risotto with roasted wild mushrooms.
There were a few vegetarian options on the main menu and a separate kids’ menu that offered kid-friendly options like burgers or pizza and child-sized portions of some of the entrees.
Our guide ate lunch with us, and the staff were really good about trying to make lunch as quick as possible. We’d been advised to look at the menu in advance so we’d be ready to place our order as soon as we sat down, and the guide let them know that we were in a rush. The Mythos staff also did a good job of handling our group’s food allergy requirements.
According to our guide, Mythos has won several awards for theme park food, and I can believe that – eating at Mythos was one of the highlights of our visit. Our lunch was much better than you might imagine for a theme park restaurant, and there was far too much food for all of us.
Dinner At The Cowfish Sushi Burger Bar
We had dinner after the end of the tour, and our guide gave us a voucher to take to The Cowfish Sushi Burger Bar, where he’d made a reservation for us.
When I upgraded our booking to the private VIP tour, the booking staff said I could make lunch and dinner reservations at the point of booking or when we arrived at the resort. I decided to make reservations on the day, because there wasn’t anywhere we specifically wanted to eat.
If there’s a restaurant you really want to try, I’d recommend making your reservation when you book the tour, especially during the peak tourist season.
The menu at Cowfish includes a range of burgers and sushi options, or you can choose a bento box that has a little of both. They also have something called a Burgushi, which is a sushi roll filled with burger meat.
The food was fine, but it wasn’t as special as our gourmet lunch at Mythos. The portions were huge, and they served some pretty epic milkshakes as big as my forearm.
I wanted to use the dinner vouchers because we’d paid for them in the VIP tour ticket price, but I felt bad because there was far too much food for us all. It felt like a real waste of food.
Something else to note is that the guides don’t have access to snacks or bottled water throughout the day, and they can’t get you to the front of the line or order ahead for you. That’s certainly a difference between the Disney World VIP experience and Universal Orlando.
What Worked Well?
There were a lot of positive aspects to our Universal Studios Orlando VIP experience.
Skip Every Line
One of the really great things about the Universal Orlando VIP Experience is that our guide could get us to the front of the line at just about every ride.
At Disney, we were often caught up behind members of the general public in the “Lightning Lanes,” Disney’s name for their express lanes.
At Universal Studios Florida, the VIP guides can get you straight onto all the rides ahead of the general admission guests. You might go in through the exit or a special VIP entrance, or the guide might have a backstage way of getting you to the ride quicker.
It felt like Universal Studios Orlando was a lot more efficient than our Disney VIP experience, which was one of the coolest parts of the Universal VIP experience.
Maximize Your Time
We did more rides at Universal Studios Orlando compared to the number of rides we did at Disney World.
Part of that was because we didn’t have to wait in a long line very often, thanks to the efficient tour guide. The VIP tour gives you unlimited express access to the rides, which meant we went on some rides multiple times, rather than feeling like we needed to get in line for the next ride right away.
We also did more rides at Universal Orlando because the park is more compact than Disney World, so you don’t have so far to travel between the rides.
That all adds up to more time spent enjoying the rides rather than standing in line or walking to the next ride, making the Universal VIP experience feel better value for money.
What Didn’t Work Well?
Although we had a great day and really enjoyed the attractions, I wasn’t impressed by every aspect of our Universal Orlando VIP experience compared to our Disney VIP Tour.
Not As Much Flexibility
When we booked our Disney VIP tour, they offered a lot of flexibility to make the day work for us. We could choose our start time, how many hours we wanted to hire the VIP guide for, and which park we wanted to start our tour in.
Universal Studios Orlando VIP tour experiences don’t give you as much flexibility. We didn’t have a choice of places to start our tour, and although the Orlando VIP tours start between 8.30am and 10.30am, we were given a start time of 9am without any option to move it.
Less Special Than Disney
We had a great time at Universal Orlando, but our Universal VIP tour experience wasn’t as memorable as Disney’s.
Our guide was very efficient and got us into all our favorite rides, but he didn’t seem as professional as our Disney VIP guide. He didn’t have as many fun facts and stories to share, and he couldn’t provide light refreshments or place our food orders ahead for us.
He also didn’t offer the same VIP treatment as our Disney guide. There were none of the little things that made our day at Disney special, like when our guide unexpectedly ordered me a coffee while I was on one of the rides.
For that reason, I didn’t tip our Universal Studios guide as much as our Disney guide. There’s no official guidance on how much to tip your VIP guide at Universal Studios Florida, so you might want to tip 10% of the VIP Experience cost or an amount that you feel is appropriate for the service you’ve received.
Is The Universal Studios VIP Tour Worth It?
If you’re only in Orlando for a few days, the Universal Studios VIP Tour is a great way to make the most of your time.
We went on around 20-22 rides during our day at the resort, including some we rode multiple times. The VIP guides can get you right to the front of the line, so you don’t waste time waiting to ride the attractions. Booking a private Universal Orlando VIP tour also means you don’t have to wait for people in your group who are riding attractions you’re not interested in.
Compared to the Disney VIP tour, the Universal Orlando VIP Experience was cheaper and included 3 complimentary meals. It also provided better express access to the attractions, making it easier to get the full value of the tour.
On the other hand, I don’t think the Universal VIP tour felt as exclusive as the Disney World VIP tour, and our Universal Orlando guide wasn’t as professional as our Disney guide.
Overall, we had a great time on the Universal Orlando VIP Experience. I’d recommend it as an excellent way to see the parks and maximize your time there.
