We check in next Wednesday, Oct 9 for 7 nights. Our issues are still not all resolved and I'm guessing may not all be before we leave. If we get to use FP+ for everyone that will be great. The world won't end and our vacation will not be destroyed if our magic bands don't work 100%. I'm not stressed and I'm sure we'll have a great time.
We had a very complicated reservation. I started putting things into
MDE at least 2 months ago. We have 9 people in 2 DVC rooms arriving on different dates. 2 people have DVC annual pass vouchers, 4 people have tickets purchased through Disney and 3 have
Undercover tourist tickets. We have 6 different dining reservations and only one has everyone on it. Because of the way the different systems (DVC, disneyworld.com, etc) operate I had 3 different log in ids (one for DVC, one old id that was not an email address and id that was an email address). All 3 ids were connected to the same email address and each id had part of the reservation details. This caused all kinds of problems. Tip - if you have more than 1 id connected to a single email address do not use both! Over the years, the different Disney systems have operated fairly independently, like stovepipes. MDE is trying to bring everything together and it is causing problems. I've dealt with DVC IT and MDE IT many more times than I would have preferred to, the longest call was over an hour. The 2 people I spoke with tried very hard to solve the problems (unlinked tickets, missing reservations, inability to create fast passes for everyone). I think the resolution for one problem ended up causing other problems. They finally did get things moved under one id which helped address a number of the issues. These first line people do not understand the detail inner-workings of the systems nor should they, they should be experts at understanding how to make the system work. They all had training but the system is very complicated, it is new and changes are being made every day so they are also learning as the go along. I've managed IT groups so I know what they are dealing with. I guarantee they are getting a lot of experience fixing problems. They have very thankless jobs and I'm sure they get a lot of grief. I don't fault the callers either. It is very frustrating dealing with issues that just don't seem to get resolved. I will say that the people I have talked to have tried very hard, have made progress and have called me or emailed me a number of times to give me detailed status updates. They have always been courteous and professional. There were problems they could not resolve that needed to be elevated. When the first set of problems was elevated (about 7 weeks ago) I was told the ticket would get put in a queue and resolved in order of arrival date. The guess I was given was a few weeks. I'm sure it was just a guess. It has taken over 4 weeks and someone is actively working on the problems. I am sure there were a lot more issues than they anticipated.
As of today we have 7 of the 9 park passes linked correctly and all 4 of the
MNSSHP tickets linked. 3 of the 9 Magic Bands had to be re-ordered and shipment expedited. We should get them in a day or 2. Two of these were children whose tickets had to be relinked under other ids. The 3rd has to do with a corrupted log-in id. All of our dining and resort reservations are now linked. The 2 tickets that are not linking did not come from the same place, 1 came directly from Disney and the other was
UT. The UT one was originally linked but it was under my son's online id that is now corrupted. The same day his avatar got changed (by him), his id became corrupted and the ticket is no longer accessible. That may be the root cause of the problem, or maybe it's something else entirely. I will probably never know. Disney IT's next level of support cannot get his ticket linked to a magic band. The first level of IT support has been able to create fast passes for everyone, even those with no tickets linked. The downside is that we will not be able to change the fast passes online for people without linked tickets. Changes not linked to tickets need to get changed at Guest Services.
It will all get resolved before we go, or it won't and it will be fine. We have tickets, room reservations and dining reservations, and probably FP+ reservations linked to magic bands but we will carry our regular tickets with us and all of our reservations. I think the system will be great once they get the problems ironed out. I wish the problems were ironed out before I had to deal with them but I agreed to be part of testing.I could have decided otherwise. As I said, we will have a great time no matter what happens. I am not going to get stressed about it. It's not worth it. When we return in February I'm sure it will be a different experience.
