We're booked for WDW August 5-12 and now I'm researching ticket prices for 3 adults & 1 child. The cost for a 5 day base ticket is $215 per adult on the WDW website and $260 for a 5 day Hopper Pass. I can buy an 8 day base ticket for $221. Is it possible to get a base ticket with more days than we will be there, "hop" to another park if we choose to and have the ticket just burn up one of those extra days I purchased?

You can not hop on non hopping tickets. The system will recognize your non hopping ticket as having been used that day at another park. If you buy the non hopping and later decide to hop you can upgrade your ticket. I would seriously consider the hopping option, it is really nice to be able to go from one park to the other. You may want to do something at a park you missed on another day with out having to spend an entire day there. You can also go some where else after the park your in closes, like the Animal Kingdom closes pretty early most nights after it closed you could go to Epcot or MK for the rest of the night.

We made this mistake when they first started the MYW tickets. Fortunately for us it was a short trip and we didn't even try to hop until our last day. We thought the same thing, we'll just use one of our unused days but nope, can't do. Sorry for the bad news!

A base ticket is one major (theme) park per day. You are allowed to re-enter the same park if you leave it on one day, but it can only be used at the one park.

Note that the ticket will state on it either "Not Valid For Park Hopping" or "One Theme Park Per Day". That should be a hint.

If you put the ticket in the turnstile of another park the display on the Guest side of the turnstile will be "ACCESS DENIED". The top line of the display on the Greeter side will give information about the ticket, and the second line of the display will say "CROSSOVER NOT PERMITTED". The turnstile will not unlock.

This is because Disney charges $2.00 per day over five days on an adult ticket, but charges $45 to allow hopping. It does not make economic sense for Disney to allow this.

If you actually have multiple tickets (more than one physical ticket per person) as opposed to multiple day tickets, you can use these tickets for multiple entries. But it makes absolutely no economic sense as a separate ticket costs a lot more than adding hopping to a ticket.