Good Evening! I know there were lots of rumors about the My Disney Experience, My MagicBands, and Fastpass. I am going to try to cover some of the questions, but I have a few points to get out first.
1. I am in no way official to Disney.
2. I am human, I do make mistakes.
3. This information is current as of now. This could change in a day, a week, a month, or never.
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” – WD
The My Disney Experience is the total package organized into one place; dining reservations, hotel reservations, fastpass+, and tickets.
The MagicBands are being rolled out slowly and everyone is different. Cast Members, DVC members, and Annual Passholders are by invitation only, with some exceptions. For general guests the biggest determining factor is what hotel you are staying at, then party size and length of stay are considered. There is no magic formula to get chosen or not. If you are chosen and do not want to participate you can decline the offer. In the first wave of testing there were only 2 or 3 hotels chosen (I know Pop Century was one). They are now in full swing at those hotels; if you have a room there you are getting a MagicBand. Look for them in the mail as far as 60 days out, if it is less than 30 days till your trip give Disney a call. If your trip is less than a week out, you will still get MagicBands that will be gray at checkin. Starting yesterday (Sept 4) a second wave of hotels are being tested, again I don’t know which ones.
Now on to Fastpass and Fastpass+. The original Fastpass system is not going anywhere. If you have a Magicband you get the use of the Fastpass+ system. Each person gets 3 a day. Now from what I have come to understand through a friend of mine using the Fastpass+ you can’t get both Fastpass and Fastpass+. I also understand it to be you get three columns and you can pick one from each column. For example Soarin’ and Test Track are in the same column so you can’t get Fastpass+ for both of those.
I still have questions myself that I will be asking on my next trip. If you have questions, post them in the comments or get them to one of the leaders of our little band of merry men and they can pass them to me. I will do my best to get them answered. Please be specific so I can get the right answer the first time.
Since I just got confirmation that I have MagicBands on the way I will keep you all informed from a first hand opinion.
- Discovery Island and River Country - February 5, 2014
- Just a Bunch of Hocus Pocus….. - October 11, 2013
- My Hollywood Studios (stress on the ‘my’) - September 27, 2013
Carol B. when you get there talk to the people at guest services or call in advance (I think there is a number just for MagicBand and Fastpass+ questions). I have been told that an extra person can be temporarily added at each attraction but please double check that.
One additional comment. Once you select your 3 passes and times for that day, you can go back and “adjust” if you wish. Example, if they had your times too far apart for your taste, you can go back and adjust one or more of the times to get them closer or farther apart that originally assigned. I have been back in several times to do that particularly as others in our party added their fp + times. I am sad, however, that we have 2 members of our party staying at a non-participating resort who cannot get the FP+ options. I was hoping I could add them as part of our touring party, but it doesn’t seem possible, even though we are traveling together and our reservations are linked on the DME site.
Techlady, it is always good to be consistent. When it comes to Disney stuff I am the voice for our family. It does make record keeping easy for both you and them if there is one central person.
I have not had that issue either. I actually like the system, they have set up. Thank you very much for the feedback.
This is good stuff, thanks for putting it out there. I have to echo CarolB’s experience with being chosen for the bands (WOOHOO!!!) We are APs, and we’re staying at POR at the end of October, and the FP+ gave us the opportunity to grab 3 attractions from each park, and didn’t discriminate an “A ticket” attraction from an “E ticket” attraction, nor did it limit the E tickets. I also did not get an option to select fireworks shows, either, but was able to schedule character meetings at Character Spot.
I’ve booked 4 days of FP+ (1 for each park).
Here’s how it went down: When you log in, it shows the length of your stay, you select your day, then your park, then you are presented with a list of the attractions that are available on FP+. After you make your selections, you get 4 columns of choices on times based on what’s available and whether or not you have ADRs in the system (it schedules around the ADRs). One is labeled “best choice” or something like that, but in our case, only 2 of the 4 were actually best for us, it seemed arbitrary to me on how that particular column was labeled best. Maybe it’s all based on length of time between attractions??
MagicBand info: I’m beyond excited to be a guinea pig for our Mouse. I didn’t receive notification that we were selected for bands, though, so don’t despair if you haven’t yet been chosen. The DisneyHipsters tweeted that they’d just received their MagicBands about 2 weeks ago and I begged them to tell me what they did to get the bands, they were cheeky and said it was because they were the DisneyHipsters, but it incensed me that our party hadn’t been picked. I’ve tried to be strategic with interacting with Disney, always booking under the same name, even if the party changes, so that I build a record of going (maybe I’m overthinking it…but I figure they gotta track that stuff) interacting with the Disney site, even if we don’t have a whole lot of changes to our reservations. I logged into Disney’s site, after reading their tweet like a desperate little kid who’d been told she couldn’t have what the big kids were having….and BOOM, there it was, “Customize your MagicBands”. We got to choose a color for each band, and it says that our names will be imprinted on them. I think we should have them early October.
I don’t know if it helped or not, but I made sure to increase my activity on Disney’s site regarding our trip. I made ADRs, I registered our APs and tickets to MNSSHP to the individual, and although I booked our lodging through AAA, as soon as I got that confirmation number I assigned it to our trip.
Great info. My only comment is I have been chosen to get the bands (in fact mine arrived today) and while I am not planning to use FP+ in general, I did want to try it out on at least one day. I was able to get Test Track, Soarin, and Nemo and Friends on the same day…we do not go until first week of Oct however…so there was not “column” or type issue. All were on the list. However, I did not have an option for Iluminations, which I understand some people have been able to chose.