With the arrival of EPCOT Center in 1982, Disney was forced to take a look at its pricing structure. The old ticket-book strategy wouldn’t work for this new park, with its megalithic corporate-sponsored pavilions. With every corporation paying handsomely for a seat at the EPCOT table, how could Disney tell one sponsor that their attraction was a D- or C-ticket, when their neighbor’s was an E? Disney had to act like everything at EPCOT was an E-ticket and, to be fair, it was indeed a very different park than Disneyland, with a very different mix of attractions. There’s an obvious difference between, say, a Main Street trolley and the Matterhorn, but how do you quantify the difference between Kitchen Kabaret, Horizons, and Impressions de France?

When you add into the mix the fact that the sponsors wanted to make sure that as many guests as possible visited their pavilions, and didn’t want people skipping over an attraction because they were out of tickets, it became apparent that EPCOT simply wouldn’t work with the time-honored admissions system.

This led to the rise of the Passport – the all-inclusive, full-day admission. For the first time, guests could enter a Disney park and ride every ride as much as they wanted. It was a big change, and so in Spring of 1982 Disney published this article in Disney News to help explain the new policy:

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