Fastpasses for Groups

[chilly2336]

My son is in marching band and they are headed to WDW next spring to march in Magic Kingdom. We have been told by tour company the following:

"Unfortunately, setting up fast passes for groups is very complicated we do not recommend it. Your tickets are in Orlando so we would have to have them shipped to you (our office will pay for the shipping charges and the cost of insuring the package ONLY if we're shipping UPS Ground), then you can have the ticket numbers. Sorry. Disney only gives us the tickets and not a list of ticket numbers. We would need your Room List submitted earlier then it's due date to ensure that the tickets can get to you on time. We talked about this at a recent Travel Consultant meeting and the BIG issue with this is it then becomes the Director's responsibility to make sure everyone has their ticket when they get there. Also, the Fast Pass times are most important as we would not want them to conflict with the time of your parade or workshops. To explain, the parade final details with Disney often change before your departure so we would not want your travelers to arrange their Fast Passes during a portion of the performance or workshop time. Disney has already had a group "hint" that they wanted their performance/parade time changed because it interferes with some prearranged Fast Pass that another group made and they have stated that they will not be rearranging any schedules to better suit Fast Passes. They simply cannot do this."

My question is how do we find a way to get some Fastpasses for major attractions that will not have them available once they arrive at the parks? Any help would be appreciated and thanks!

 

[poober25]

Is your group staying on site? I have done group trips (small homeschool groups) for 5 years now. It was more complicated last year, but I was given our confirmation and entered that into MDE. ALL tickets then showed up in my account, and I had to re-assign them. I just had everyone connect to me in MDE, which was not the easiest thing in the world, but finally got it all done. I then assigned the tickets out that way, no physical tickets, and everyone was able to book their own Fastpasses. We did wind up with almost all of us riding Tower of Terror together by booking the times right after our YES class ended. I don't know if any of this work with a tour company, but it's worth pursuing. Oh, and I did not know that no tickets would be shipped when I entered the confirmation number in MDE..found that out after the fact. I did have to ask them to issue 3 tickets (out of about 30) for 3 people that weren't getting Magic Bands.

I will be ordering our first round of tickets for this year's trip tomorrow, and hopefully it will go much more smoothly this time.

 

[chilly2336]

Yes their group is staying on site and will have around 100-125 people.

 

[poober25]

If someone is willing to take getting all of them linked to an MDE acct., you should be able to get the tickets distributed that way. It would be complicated, though. I've always done everything myself, and not had another company involved, so I don't know if you CAN even do that through a tour company. I'm probably going to have around 60ish people this year, and that's all families, but I do still have to do a bit of managing to get everyone connected to MDE. I'm probably not being much help, sorry.