Part 5 - My Disney Experience - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Well, howdy folks! It has been a while indeed! Cheer and gymnastics season has FINALLY wound down for the year and things are slowly returning to normal. No trip cancellations have occurred so that is making my happy.
This has been a much different experience than planning our last trip. There has been so much going on of late that I really have not given as much time and thought to it as I would have liked. (As evidenced by the ridiculously long hiatus in posting.)
Now that the 60 day window has opened, I am starting to feel a bit behind the curveball.
When last we spoke, I had booked a few dining ressies, booked 3 nights at WL and had 5 nights lined up off site. Those plans have remained wholly unchanged and are now the Official Bubba Plan.
As I pondered what might be pertinent / relevant to this somewhat sporadically posted musing, the topic that keeps coming up is FastPass+.
This was the primary motivation for adding a night on property at the beginning of our trip.
Brief Recap: at the time, FP+ was ONLY available for on-site guests, there were NO more legacy FP offerings available, and the thought of going July 4 week without a FP was making me neurotic. I added a night so that we could at least have 2 days worth of FP+ (check in and check out). One night became 2 which then became 3 after the discounts came out.
With the FP+ window now open, it seems like a good time to talk about how it has all worked out for us.
Warning – what follows is not a tale of joy and harmony. If you can’t handle hearing bad news about Disney, I recommend you skip past this section. That is all.
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Now, for those who stayed, my take on booking FP+.
So far things have not gone as smoothly as I would hope.
For some months now, we have had a My Disney Experience account setup and I have had mine linked to my Brother-In-Law’s account to setup dining ADR’s. It was great, I loved it, it made life very easy. Dining reservations went smoothly, were easy to change, and I love the way I can break everything down in one place. To that point, I was singing the
MDE Love song.
And then came along FP+ and my joy was no longer full.
Our first problem began with my park tickets not linking to our My Disney Experience page. More specifically, the tickets linked on the back end, but did not show up on the website. When I would try to relink them, I got a message that they were already linked. Disney Tech support could see that they were missing on my page, could see that they were associated in their system on the back end, but could not quite figure out the issue. After two calls, an hour on the phone and a promise they were “Working on it” I finally got a set of emails telling me tickets had been associated with my profile.
That was half the battle.
The other half was my BIL’s profile.
When we went to do our FP+ reservations at our 60 day window, My Disney Experience decided that even though my BIL’s family are all on the same package, in the same resort, with the same tickets on the same dining plan, and all show up in MDE under the resort and dining reservations, when it comes to FP+, only my BIL was going to be displayed as having a valid park ticket. My SIL and nieces errored out with a message stating they had no valid park admission on the dates listed. Another call to Disney Tech support and day’s wait corrected it. At least we thought it did.
The next day, (the day they added the 7 Dwarfs Mine Train to FP+) the entire system went down. When it finally came back up, our profiles were once again unlinked. We got them back eventually, but never could get all 8 of us to show a valid park ticket. Every time I opened FP+, one of us (randomly it seemed) would show as being ineligible to book FP+ reservations. Another call to tech support and another day’s wait and it seems that we are now finally all showing up in the system.
At least on the website.
The mobile (iPhone / iPad) version is still not wholly functional. Sometimes, I can see all of us listed, other times, it changes all of my existing FP+ reservations from a group of 8 to a party of 1 and randomly lists one of us as the lucky FP holder. They still show as 8 on the website and Disney Tech Support seems unconcerned by the Mobile Platform issues. They assure me that the actual FP+ reservations are not being changed.
The fact that they WANT you to use the mobile version in the park to update / tweak the FP+ reservations presents some potential drama for our upcoming excursion.
While my first temptation was to say forget it we’ll skip FP+ and just go with the flow when we get there, in reality it isn’t practical; for the week of our trip, FP+ was a necessary commodity.
With the reports of 5 hour wait times to meet Ana and Elsa, the insane lines sure to crop up at 7 Dwarfs Mine Train, the always crowded Soarin and Toy Story Midway Mania, I was getting insanely stressed out that our entire vacation was going to nothing but endless lines and that we would wind up with nothing but same day FP+’s to useless attractions.
Using a PC, I have managed to finally book FP+ for all the things we wanted so that part is nifty. The stress to get there was not. I spent literally hours banging my head trying to get things setup. I’m sure the system will be great once it’s stable, but it was royal 4 day long pain in my biscuit to try to get the kinks worked out.
I also recently discovered that Disney is skipping EMH on ONE Sunday all summer…the Sunday we are there. Multiple calls to multiple people (guest relations, reservations, concierge, itinerary planning) confirmed that NO ONE knows if it is a website typo/oversight or an ACTUAL EMH cancellation. Their best recommendation is to ask in the park that day. That’ll be great for planning.
Between the frustrations of MDE and EMH, the chaos that fills my life of a campus tech at the end of the school year, and going into pre-production next week for our Project 168 film, I am NOT feeling the magic right now.
Don’t get me wrong, I know it will come eventually.
I KNOW it will get better.
I know I will roll up to that resort and be so overwhelmed that all I can do is point and recite the pledge of allegiance. I know I'll be grinning ear to ear when I buy my mug. I know I'll be giggling like a fool when I am heading to the pool. I know I'll be shouting THIS IS WHY I’M HERE! when we are Soarin. I know I will stand in the France pavilion, break wind at the French flag and declare “I Fffffffffaaaaart in your general direction!” I know I'll be pointing and shouting at Illuminations. I know I'll send a message to ZZUB from the Canadian Outpost. I know I will be in awe when I leave Epcot the first night and realize I am ACTUALLY heading to my room the Lodge.
I know all of that.
But in the here and now, I can’t get there yet.
This concludes the negative portion of this PTR. We now return you to the regularly schedule postings.
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One of the best things I have done is subscribe to Touring Plans. It has made life much easier and changed the way I went after Fast Pass Reservations.
Rather than going with attractions “I Like” (which was kind of the direction I was leaning) I instead went for FP+ for the attractions which listed the longest wait times. It makes sense really. Adding my FP+ reservations to their customizable plan engine resulted in touring arrangements I never would have come up with on my own. A couple of times, it even recommended I ditch certain FP+ reservations because they actually increased my overall daily wait times. Granted they are merely calculated projections, but the plans it created will allow us to hit far more attractions that I would have thought possible otherwise. I’m excited to try it out this summer and see how reality matches to their predictions.
Here is what we scored as far as FP+ is concerned.
Day 1 we won’t be in the park (Epcot) until late evening so there isn’t a whole lot of need for FP+ with one exception. (I don't even need ot mention what it is.) This night it will only be my crew of 4. For that day we went with Soarin, Spaceship Earth and Mission:Space for FP+. The last two really aren’t needed, but then again, none of the other Tier 2 Epcot options were either. Plan is for all 4 of us to do MS Green in standby line, then FLB will remain in the exit “Mission Control” area while the girls and I use FP+ for the orange side.
Day 2 – MK – Enchanted Tales with Belle, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Peter Pan’s Flight. Believe it or not, there was ONE Fastpass+ attraction that was gone for our first day. It was… “Meet Anna and Elsa with a Visiting Princess at Princess Fairytale Hall”. Luckily we have 2 days there.
Day 3 – DHS – Toy Story Midway Mania, Tower of Terror, Star Tours
Day 4 – AK – Expedition Everest, Kali River Rapids, Kilimanjaro Safari
Day 5 – Epcot – This is my BIL’s family only Epcot day so there will be a couple of repeats. Soarin, Spaceship Earth, Turtle Talk with Crush
Day 6 – MK – Meet Anna and Elsa with a Visiting Princess at Princess Fairytale Hall, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Splash Mountain.
That does it for now.
Hope you all have a great day!
The one that I had the hardest time adaption to was "Go with". I instinctively say the missing pronoun. I just can't leave that one hanging. My in law's are always cracking up over "a'int" and "I tell you what".
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for each of our days at MK, before the insanity commenced! The app was crazy and saying that I only had all FP's for 3 of us, not my DH, yeah that would have went over real well. I couldn't get online to confirm because the site was crashing every few minutes. When the dust settled and the site came back up all was well, but it took days for the app to follow suit. 
THAT is my primary complaint about 
