How many times have you scanned a MB, and how many times didn't it work?

Lavitz

Mouseketeer
Joined
Oct 30, 2013
Messages
456
I'm really curious on how widespread these MB issues are and how it might affect my future trips so I wanted to see what people have experienced. I'd like to see the MB success (or failure for those half glass empty people :rotfl:) rate based on what people say. If you went with family and want to include the ones you personally saw go for it.

Also, to consider the swipe as "not working", please only include those swipes that couldn't be resolved in 30 seconds. So if you got a blue Mickey and had to re-swipe at a ride, or got asked a security question at the front gate and these were resolved in under 30 seconds, count it as MB working. Taking more than 30 seconds counts as a failure in my book since they didn't have an alternate procedure I would consider appropriate in place, which affects me and also those behind me.

I'll start it off for my family of 5 (4 people with MBs). Looking back, park entry + 3 FP + dining + shopping + MM + in and out of rooms really does add up.

Times MB worked: 400
Times MB didn't work: 2

Only two times it didn't work for me was opening my room door. For the life of me I couldn't get my MB to work. Also problem once when buying something at a store, gave up and used a credit card.

If it helps, I think 5 MB uses per person day is fair to estimate. Enter the park, 3 FP+, and one random one for opening the door/buying something.
 
Ours worked every time. It was me and DD, 4 days, 3 parks, 3 FPs each day. No dining plan or charging.
 
I mean, it would take forever for me to come up with an approximate number of times that our party used the MagicBands over the course of 4 days in April, but I can tell you that it worked 100% of the time with zero hiccups for every type of use.
 
We had a group of 8, 4 separate rooms at POR for 6 nights, ME, 2 separate DxDDP, 2 OOP, charged everything to room and had FP+ everyday. We had 0 problems with Magic Bands, this was the 2nd week of June.
 

just a guess......Me alone....3 weeks of park visits. (2 in Jan, 1 in June)
about 5 times it took 2-3 scans to work
3 times, I had to show ID and get it reset....a CM with an IPad did that

But I don't think it was the MB, I think it was the finger scans. I have always had some problems with them
 
We used ours for a week in November. 4 adults, 7 days. Opening doors, entering parks and fastpasses. We didn't do any room charges or dining plan, but ours worked 100% of the time - never had an issue.
 
/
Our 10 day May trip the bands worked 100% of the time.

Our 10 day December trip they worked everywhere but the resort door. We never tried to get them fixed as we had room keys that always worked.
 
Our party of 8 just got back from a 2 week trip with a split stay and APs (so multiple magic bands per person). I had 3 problems during my trip. Once was when I was entering a park one day, and it was resolved by the people with the ipads at the gate in about 2 minutes. The second was a ride photo linking the wrong ride photo to me (was the car in front of me). The third was photos at an event not linking to my band, but I'm pretty sure that one was due to an error by the PP photographer, not an issue with the band itself. Everything else worked great which was a pleasant surprise, given the number of issues I have seen on this board.
 
I mean, it would take forever for me to come up with an approximate number of times that our party used the MagicBands over the course of 4 days in April, but I can tell you that it worked 100% of the time with zero hiccups for every type of use.

LOL, ya I didn't think about that. I've added an extra line about 5 MB uses per day on average per person to my opening post in case others want to try and estimate how many times they swiped.
 
We used four MB throughout our 8 day stay in April. My band, DH's and DD's all worked without fail. For some reason DS's gave up problems, but only when he was entering a park. He could open the door, make purchases, etc. Every time we went in the park, the CM's hand would go up and a supervisor would come over and get him through. :confused3
 
I have experienced zero failures in two trips (one 2 day, one 5 day). The only issue I had was when I had to reset my pin, but it was because I had it wrong; the band scanned fine.
 
In 6 visits ranging for several days to day trips we have only had 1 issue. The issue was when we were staying at AKL in June for my son's birthday. The magic band did not open the room. When we went back to the front desk it was taking a while. The CM asked if it would be okay of someone took us to our room and let us in while she worked on the bands. We said fine and she said she would personally bring the bands to our room. When she did bring them she explained they were defective and got us new ones in the colors we choose. She also brought my son a stuffed Mickey and autograph book for his birthday, the manager called the room a little while later and apologized foray trouble and gave us $100 resort credit.
 
Thus far we've done two 10-day trips with the bands and utilized them for everything except dining, charging, and our second trip (May) was offsite so we didn't use them for room entry on that trip. They were used both times for park entry and as AP holders we do hop quite a bit, as well as 3-8 FP+ depending on how lucky we were when it came to selecting those extra FP+.

We (5 people in total) never ran into a single blue Mickey.
 
One time during a week in December my band didn't work in the gift shop in Japan, although it worked fine before that and after that.

During a 5 day trip in January we had 0 problems.
 
DH and I used our bands for everything on our last trip back in October. We switched to a different room on the second day of our 8-day trip, and the CM at the front desk forgot to reprogram DH's band to the new room. The CM who fixed his band told us it was still keyed to the first room. So, the only time one of our bands didn't work was due to human error and not MB failure. Hoping they work as well on our next trip!
 
I have more than 10 bands.

One is attached to the incorrect MDX account and that one will not work on anything that is listed on the account I primarily use.

Out of the others, on a couple of occasions I have had trouble using some of them for opening resort doors. I've had others that did work so I didn't even try to have that repaired.

Have never had an issue scanning any of them for park entrance or FPs.

Had an issue only once with a band not working for room charges, and that was because the resort had mistakenly entered my charging limit as zero.

I can't say how many times I have attempted to scan bands.
 
Over the course of a 14 day trip, two of us used Magic Bands each day to enter the parks (often more than one park in the same day), for FP+ and for the dining plan.

We only experienced a fail once at Fulton's Crab House when the bands wouldn't work however our server told us that it was more likely to be a problem with her handset and not the bands so I'm happy to consider it a 100% success rate.
 





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