And yet if you dig into the forum’s archives, during that time period, people were complaining about the high costs. Again, Disney didn’t change - we did.
Ahh, yes, River Country... Great story from that trip - Check-out day. We had used our park tickets, but still had WP access, so we ventured to FW, took the bus over to River Country and had a great few hours being 29yo kids.
Packed up our stuff, and hopped the bus back to parking, and realized we didn't have the rental car key. Panic! Ran back to the bus, back to RC, searched the sandy area where we had our stuff... Nothing...
Dejected, we return to parking, and at this point just need help. Walked over to the old kennel facility there and asked to use a phone to call the rental car agency. The sweet CM working there, says, "Oh shoot, we have a key service - I'll call them. Where is your car?"
She then directed us to call the rental agency to get "the key code" for the car. This was much easier than I anticipated, and we scribbled it down.
We walked back to our car - and waited 3-5 minutes, before we see a Disney van creeping around the lot like they were looking for someone. We flag him down, he jumps out and slides open the side door of the van. We see racks and racks of key blanks jingling like "tinker" bells. The locksmith collects our scrap of paper, selects a blank from one of the loaded wires, and cuts us a key right there in the parking lot. We are ecstatic!
We then ask him what we owe him, and he says, "Not a thing, sir. Have a magical day".
I'm not sure you can get a new key fob these days for less than 6 or 700 bucks! We celebrated with the drive to the Poly pool bar for that Maitai I mentioned earlier, ate dinner at Ohana as a walk in, and watched fireworks from the beach.
Ahh, memories of kinda better times...