Oogie Boogie Bash 2024
We recently attended Disney’s Oogie Boogie Bash at Disney California Adventure Park.
OOGIE BOOGIE BASH DETAILS
Disney’s Oogie Boogie Bash is a relatively new Halloween centered, special ticket, celebration held at Disney California Adventure Park. Tickets vary slightly based on dates. We paid $154 per person to attend in mid September.
With this special event ticket you can enter the park at 3pm. The event officially starts at 6pm and ends at 11pm.
USING POINTS FOR FLIGHTS AND HOTEL STAY
The morning of Oogie Boogie, we took a mid morning flight from Denver (DEN) to Long Beach (LGB). We flew Southwest and paid 13,510 Southwest points each for the roundtrip flight +$11.20 each in taxes.
If you are flying to visit Disneyland or Huntington Beach I’d recommend LGB & SNA airports as they are very small. We were in our Uber within 25 minutes of landing at LGB. Another cool thing at LGB… they use the front & back airplane exits (with stairs on the back) so deboarding is lightning fast.
We took an Uber (about 35 minutes) to our hotel, Hyatt Regency Orange County. We booked 2 nights here at 15K points/night. For the 1st night we transferred Hyatt Ultimate Reward points to Hyatt to book. For the 2nd night we used a Hyatt category 1 – 4 free night certificate. You can see a full review of this hotel here.
Our Southwest flight arrived a little before 1pm. We were able to Uber to the hotel, check in, get into park attire and uber over to the park for the opening at 3pm.
OOGIE BOOGIE BASH THOUGHTS/TIPS
We arrived to Disney California Adventure Park at exactly 3pm. By this time, they’ve turned most of the check in lanes to special event check in lanes (not general park admission). I’d read that these lines were crazy so I had been dreading it a little. This was not the case at all. We maybe waited 10 – 15 minutes for bag check, ticket scan, get your special event wrist bands & to get our Halloween treat bags.
EVENT HOURS/PARK ACCESS
You can enter the park at 3pm (and ride rides or do whatever you want) but the event doesn’t start until 6pm. We used the time from 3pm – 6pm to do a little shopping, eat, and ride a low wait time ride.
SHOPPING
We rarely buy Disney merchandise. But this event has its own themed merchandise and 2 different event focused sweatshirts. When we got to the park we rented a locker ($7 for small, $10 for big). Then we did our shopping right away and put those sweatshirts in the locker so we wouldn’t have to carry it around. The other reason you’d want to rent a locker is if you plan to get crazy amounts of candy – you could always circle back and put some in the locker so you don’t have to carry it around.
FOOD
We didn’t try any of the special event treats. There are some themed foods and drinks, but we didn’t go out of our way to try those. As I mentioned, we entered the park at 3pm but the event doesn’t start until 6pm so we used this time to eat. The BEST thing we ate on the entire trip was from Studio Catering Co. food truck in Hollywood land. You MUST try the Asian-inspired Spicy Pork Tacos if you go there. WOW!
RIDE WAIT TIMES
Wow! Disney special ticket/after hour events are quickly becoming my favorite way to experience Disney! As soon as 6pm hit it felt like a different park. We went straight to Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission Break ride and it was walk on (no wait!). Then we hit Web Slingers and that was walk on. When we walked over to this ride area, there were rows of Disney cast members (employees) making sure you had your bracelet on for the event – without a bracelet you have to leave the park.
The longest line we waited in the entire night was Radiator Spring Racers – maybe 25/30 minutes. But we could have chosen to do this later at night and had less of a wait time.
PARADE
People LOVE Disney parades. We usually don’t bother with them. Is that a Disney sin? Why do I feel weird admitting that? 🙂
But we’d heard this parade was a do not miss. People line up sooooo early. It’s a long story, but we ended up getting insanely lucky with amazing front row curb seats right on the corner, with a perfect view. The parade starts with a headless horseman riding a horse. Then the rest of the parade follows about 10 minutes later. Overall super cute.
HALLOWEEN TREAT TRAILS
One of the main draws to this event are the treat trails. I was so confused about what the heck that was until I experienced it. So when you enter the park, you’ll get a treat bag. Many people bring their own sturdier/larger treat bags – we did but didn’t end up needing to use it because we didn’t visit every treat trail.
Each treat trail is just a winding line, where you’ll be given candy from these huge bins probably 5 – 8 stops within the line. And then each trail has a villain on display. Sid from Toy Story is by far the best treat trail villain. It’s a real person being funny and snarky. His line was one of the longest waits to get into (maybe 5 minutes). These lines go super fast so don’t worry.
THE ONE THING I WOULDN’T DO AGAIN
I’m going to get some flack for this. But the Villain’s Grove is so bizarre. Honestly, I think the entire thing went over our heads. Because reading this, it seems cool. But in reality, for us, it was walking in a very dense line of people, through woods that had weird lights/fog/weird smell. We did this at the very end of the night and it was too crowded for my preference.
ABSOLUTE BLAST
Like I mentioned in the beginning, these special ticketed events are truly a game changer if you don’t love crazy crowds and long waits. It’s something I’m finding myself more drawn to. I am so glad we got to experience this event.
OFFSETTING TICKET COSTS
The best way to offset the cost of theme park tickets will vary by the points you want to use
Chase Ultimate Rewards –
Once you login to your Chase account and click on your points, you’ll see this option at the top. You can either cash out points or use Pay Yourself Back to essentially use points to cover a purchase you’ve already made.
So you can see, you’d need to cash out 15,900 points for a $159 ticket.
BUT I think the better option is to Pay Yourself Back. That way, you are also earning points on your purchase. At the time we bought our tickets, there was a 5x quarterly rotating bonus on the Chase Freedom Flex®. *This card has quarterly rotating bonuses – “entertainment” was one of the categories for Q3 2025 – Disney tickets, when bought through Disney, code as “entertainment” so I was able to earn 5x Chase Ultimate Rewards Points for this purchase.
In this example, you can see I could select a purchase I’ve already made and use points to remove that charge.
Capital One
You’ll have similar options with Capital One. However, with Capital One, the “cover travel purchases” is a MUCH better option than cashing out points.
After logging into your account and selecting “cover travel purchases” you’ll be given a list of eligible travel purchases you can cover. Your tickets MUST CODE AS TRAVEL to be eligible. Which means you can NOT buy from Disney or Universal directly – you must purchase from somewhere they code as travel – like Undercover Tourist.
But as you can see, it’s 1 cent to 1 point. Not terrible.
BUT if you convert to cash…
This only gives you HALF a cent to each point. TERRIBLE! Don’t choose this option 🙂
HOW TO EARN POINTS TO COVER THIS VACATION
Hotel – my standard go to is earning Chase Ultimate Reward points and transferring them to Hyatt so I can book $0 award stays at Hyatt. THIS is how I earn so many Chase points.
Flights – We were able to find super cheap tickets via Southwest Air which is our go to for flights in the US. For Southwest we almost always earn points from our Southwest Rapid Rewards® Plus Credit Card.
Tickets- Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card: Earn $750 when you spend $6,000 on purchases in the first three months after account opening. This card has NO annual fee!
My favorite Chase card to earn Chase points with (to transfer to Hyatt OR Southwest) is Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card.
My favorite Capital One card to earn Venture miles with is Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card.
