Do I have to deactivate old Magicbands?

[camtheriot]

In my disney experience... Do I need to deactivate the old magic bands?

 

[erionm]

If they were lost or thrown out, then yes. Otherwise, you can if you want but it's typically not necessary.

 

[camtheriot]

So then, if my son wants to use his old band instead of the new one that was sent... Either magic band will work? Or do I need to deactivate the one we plan NOT to use?

 

[Jon84]

So then, if my son wants to use his old band instead of the new one that was sent... Either magic band will work? Or do I need to deactivate the one we plan NOT to use?

If they still have battery power left, they will still work and are interchangeable while they are all linked.

 

[bc7ate9]

We have 6 Magic Bands each - we've never deactivated any of them and have never had an issue.

 

[erionm]

So then, if my son wants to use his old band instead of the new one that was sent... Either magic band will work? Or do I need to deactivate the one we plan NOT to use?

If they still have battery power left, they will still work and are interchangeable while they are all linked.

MagicBands will continue to work for most functions long after the battery has died. The battery is only used for the long range transmitter which is used to automatically link attraction photos/videos to your PhotoPass account. Nearly every other function uses passive RFID which draws power from the touch point.

The long range transmitter can also be used to track guest movement, so Disney wants you to have a MagicBand with a functional long range transmitter.

 

[camtheriot]

Ok, then I think we will be ok!! Thanks everyone!!

 

[P'colaBeachBum]

We had ones from 2013 and deactivated those and also a set from 2014. I read that if you have too many that are active there may be an issue.

Disney deacctivates old Magic Bands if they think you have too many

 

[erionm]

We had ones from 2013 and deactivated those and also a set from 2014. I read that if you have too many that are active there may be an issue.

I currently have 8 active and have not any any issues.

 

[Jennytoon]

When we were just there we had a split stay and were warned when we checked in at the second resort that they have been having issues with having guests have "too many".

We had five each, one from each of our resorts that trip (no option to decline when we customized them), one AP, and one that we had paid for from a previous trip when no one had one. I thought that was not "too many" and left them all active.

We did not have any issues with using any magic bands at any time to enter the parks or ride rides.

BUT: At our first resort, all our magic bands worked on the door, including the ones we had prior to this trip. At our second and third resorts, magic bands did not open our room doors unless they had been specifically re-coded at the desk. That is, all bands worked at the park, not all bands worked on the room door.

Based on some other mutterings from the various CMs we encountered during this process and a few things I know from my real life, I subsequently formed the suspicion that "too many bands" means "we don't want to recode each band individually at the resort and we don't want to hear you complain about or be frustrated by them not working". I also have a suspicion (not tested but can be tested by anyone who cares to and has a extra magic band that worked on an old room but doesn't work on a new room), that deactivating the band releases any room coding that is associated with it. So a shortcut to getting all your bands to work with the room might be to deactivate them and reactivate them in MDE after you check in at your new resort (might have to wait a day, might not for the old resort hold to vanish from the system), which would allow you to have all your bands active without having the overhead of waiting at the front desk while some CM recodes 30 bands.

 

[thornton0511]

We have done several split stays since the the introduction of Magic Bands and I deactivate the current ones once we get home from each trip only because I don't want to chance something on a future trip being ending up on an old MB. We take one annual trip a year and I like to start that vacation with a brand new band since it's one a year. Now with that being said I will definitely be taking advantage of only having one set shipped to us for our entire trip if we do future split stays because having more that one band for a trip was a bit obnoxious. When we checked into WL this year the CM made a comment about how I had all of our old bands deactivated and how that made things easier to keep track of.