Just back...everything was great, but photopass was a miss

[Drusilla99]

We just got back from 2 weeks in Hawaii, one week on Waikiki & one at Aulani. Aulani is a beautiful resort and I had read so much about the photopass there and eager to use it, but once there found the photographers hard to find. I have an ap at the parks, so I'm quite familiar with how they work and pre purchase the digital cd, even though not photopass, on all my Disney cruises, so I had assumed their presence would be as noticeable as I'm used to. By day three, I finally got a map of where the photographers "generally" hang out. A couple of times a day my group would make the rounds to try and catch someone, with no luck. We only found them out on the beach at sunset once out of the 4 times we tried. A couple of times we'd see someone by the pool and I'd send my teens over and they were told they had to wait because they were taking specific family's pictures. They stood around for quite awhile, but I finally just went over and took my own pictures. Out of the whole week we only took 5 pictures. I never did get a single picture of the four of us...so that was the only bummer.

 

[cmph]

I had every intention of buying photopass, but I didn't either. We had booked a family portrait session, which lets you buy it for $50. But it wasn't even worth that. Every evening, they'd stand along the walkway that runs by the Ewa wing... and every evening we were either going to dinner reservations and couldn't stop, or the kids had an Aunty's activity pre-booked, or we were still in pool clothes and not looking photo-worthy. Even if we had stopped, it would have been the exact same photo every night since they were in the same place. 8 night stay, and literally the first time we stopped for a character photo that actually had an accompanying photopass photographer was the LAST day! I was pretty surprised how often they didn't have one. At that point, we had taken all of our own photos everywhere else and with all the other characters b/c the "handler" is always happy to take photos with your phone, and learned that the character meal photos weren't even included in the basic photopass package. The only thing I wish I had seen were the Aunty's photos of my kids. I never stopped to look at photos in the gift shop, and when we tried to use the thing on our TV - it was some other family. They told me "yeah, that happens some times" when I got our private session disk, but then I never bothered to see them any other way. Ultimately it wasn't worth $50 when we had so much on our phones.

 

[CampbellzSoup]

When I went there were roaming photo pass people. I think the photos that they took were beautiful!