First of all, THANK YOU to all of you for your information - it made our trip so much more enjoyable and incredibly easy. I wanted to return the favor and share a few things I haven't seen yet. Some may seem negative (and downright annoying at the time), but we really did like it overall.
1. We had the infamous UCT ticket problem. I called IT 3 or 4 times to resolve the issue, and it was finally resolved on Monday 9/23. We checked in on Wed, 9/25! There were plenty of times still available and I got all our fp+ lined up before we left.
2. DH's magic band still had ticket issues when we got there. Apparently it had a ticket associated with it, but it didn't work right at the tapstiles. We had the plastic tickets, but the problem was that we had to go through each one individually and figure out which plastic ticket had not been used. Somehow, he got into the Magic Kingdom on someone else's ticket, which caused issues at HS the next day. I would recommend taking a Sharpie and putting names on your plastic tickets to avoid this issue. I didn't do that when I first linked our tickets and wish I had.
3. My mom's magic band also had issues - we were on the same reservation but wanted to link different credit cards for our purchases. It never did get set up right, and one day at the park it turned her down because somehow she had a credit limit of $0 on her account. Again, it took time to get fixed and was a pain because we had to call our resort and talk to them, and then the resort had to talk to the store.
4. Each night, I'd redo our plans for the next day. I could easily switch times/attractions the night before with no issue.
5. Once we got to the park, it was somewhat easy to change in the morning, but as the day went on, the app got slower and slower, and fp+ times were harder to come by. Yes, some of it was that the regular fp were gone, but several times, I couldn't even see our current plans because the app wouldn't work at all.
6. My absolute favorite thing with the magic bands is the security it gave me with my kids having it on. My daughter loved it, and we told her early on not to take it off for any reason while we were out of our hotel room. Once we got to the parks, it was nice knowing if she did get lost, a CM could easily identify her with the band. I didn't think of that ahead of time, and it helped my peace of mind. She also loved it - she thought it was the coolest thing ever and went around telling all of us to "touch Mickey to Mickey."
7. I loved being able to schedule things like Toy Story, ETWB, and Peter Pan ahead of time. We still did rope drop, but we could stay ahead of the crowds and use our fp+ later in the day when lines were long and it was hot out. We barely waited at all our entire trip - Great Movie Ride was our longest wait at 20 min.
8. We really only needed one fp+ at HS (Toy Story), and I tried to cancel our other 2 that day to make selections at Epcot for later that night. It wasn't working that day and wouldn't even let me cancel our later fp+, much less try to schedule Epcot ones. I asked about it when we got to Epcot just to see if it was possible since we didn't use all 3, and the CM said what I expected - park hopping isn't a feature open during the test. She did say they were going to add that later, and then gave me 2 anytime fp+ attached to our magic bands to use. Unexpected, but because of that we were able to ride Test Track.
Overall, we liked it. We prioritized our fp+ selections on what we really wanted to make sure we did and fit everything around those selections/times. It worked out perfectly in the end - we did everything we wanted and more.
1. We had the infamous UCT ticket problem. I called IT 3 or 4 times to resolve the issue, and it was finally resolved on Monday 9/23. We checked in on Wed, 9/25! There were plenty of times still available and I got all our fp+ lined up before we left.
2. DH's magic band still had ticket issues when we got there. Apparently it had a ticket associated with it, but it didn't work right at the tapstiles. We had the plastic tickets, but the problem was that we had to go through each one individually and figure out which plastic ticket had not been used. Somehow, he got into the Magic Kingdom on someone else's ticket, which caused issues at HS the next day. I would recommend taking a Sharpie and putting names on your plastic tickets to avoid this issue. I didn't do that when I first linked our tickets and wish I had.
3. My mom's magic band also had issues - we were on the same reservation but wanted to link different credit cards for our purchases. It never did get set up right, and one day at the park it turned her down because somehow she had a credit limit of $0 on her account. Again, it took time to get fixed and was a pain because we had to call our resort and talk to them, and then the resort had to talk to the store.
4. Each night, I'd redo our plans for the next day. I could easily switch times/attractions the night before with no issue.
5. Once we got to the park, it was somewhat easy to change in the morning, but as the day went on, the app got slower and slower, and fp+ times were harder to come by. Yes, some of it was that the regular fp were gone, but several times, I couldn't even see our current plans because the app wouldn't work at all.
6. My absolute favorite thing with the magic bands is the security it gave me with my kids having it on. My daughter loved it, and we told her early on not to take it off for any reason while we were out of our hotel room. Once we got to the parks, it was nice knowing if she did get lost, a CM could easily identify her with the band. I didn't think of that ahead of time, and it helped my peace of mind. She also loved it - she thought it was the coolest thing ever and went around telling all of us to "touch Mickey to Mickey."
7. I loved being able to schedule things like Toy Story, ETWB, and Peter Pan ahead of time. We still did rope drop, but we could stay ahead of the crowds and use our fp+ later in the day when lines were long and it was hot out. We barely waited at all our entire trip - Great Movie Ride was our longest wait at 20 min.
8. We really only needed one fp+ at HS (Toy Story), and I tried to cancel our other 2 that day to make selections at Epcot for later that night. It wasn't working that day and wouldn't even let me cancel our later fp+, much less try to schedule Epcot ones. I asked about it when we got to Epcot just to see if it was possible since we didn't use all 3, and the CM said what I expected - park hopping isn't a feature open during the test. She did say they were going to add that later, and then gave me 2 anytime fp+ attached to our magic bands to use. Unexpected, but because of that we were able to ride Test Track.
Overall, we liked it. We prioritized our fp+ selections on what we really wanted to make sure we did and fit everything around those selections/times. It worked out perfectly in the end - we did everything we wanted and more.
