Magic Key Program

[AndrewC]

Also, just like the dining alert sites, anyone want to set up a business? I 100% know there would be a small market for a Disney Key optimizer website to show up. You select what key you have and how many open reservations you have. You select priority on things (total number of visits, total number of weekend visits, major holiday priority) and the algorithm spits out a plan for you to follow. Heck, it probably could even pull from the public availability calendar and text you an alert if a day opened. You could probably charge $5/mo for use of it and maybe $10/mo for people that wanted alerts.

Would be curious how many keys they sold, but even if it was some "small" number like 10k and you only got 5% using a service like that, before expenses that would be $2,500/mo revenue...

Anyone with some decent website skills and some good math skills could build that. In fact it's kinda making me think about doing it... Get a good iOS coder and you could make a little iPhone app too you could sell for $5 + the subscription. These passes can still be very powerful, it just requires identifying what YOU want from them and planning in advance. They are NOT the drop in everyday type of passes where locals would go for lunch or dinner and then just leave a couple hours later. The can provide a huge discount (probably down to like $20/day if you did a bunch of week day visits and maybe $40 a day with mixed weekends and weekdays). $20 to $40 to swing by Disney for the day is still a fantastic deal, even if it's just to go have dinner somewhere since it includes free parking, basically that's what you would pay most places in a busy city just to park for dinner!

 

[AndrewC]

@AndrewC your scenario only works if you bought the Dream Key in the first month. When I bought my Dream Key in October the next available weekend reservation was January 9. It was good they paused the sales of that key. It is a stupid amount of money to not be have access to weekend days for the next three months.

I am lucky that I can use my key on weekdays AND weekends, but my older son can really only go on weekends because he’s in school. He has Believe and when I decided to pull the trigger and buy our keys I chose to gamble on being able to pick up cancelations in November and December. We will see how that goes.

Sort of and sort of not. The key doesn't become active until you enter the parks. If you have self control and waited two to two and a half months and made your first visit a weekend you could "start" your pass with weekends.

You also could "struggle" past those first two months with a handful of random days after school or a winter break if there was a week day still open on it, etc and just make sure you had a reservation to book for that first weekend. It's less optimized and you might have a weird "waiting period" of a month or two without before you can get on a cycle, but you could do it if weekends were extremely important.

I also feel for you that it is a lot of money without "short notice" weekend availability. But, the parks felt VERY busy last week and insane on the weekends. They aren't empty parks with no reservations. I think staffing issues are still a thing and it's possible we see better availability in 2022 when Disney has "claimed" that staffing will be "back to normal levels."

 

[MonocularVision]

Also, just like the dining alert sites, anyone want to set up a business? I 100% know there would be a small market for a Disney Key optimizer website to show up.

Maybe I should put up an interest list signup page?

 

[AndrewC]

Maybe I should put up an interest list signup page?

I actually legit am now thinking about that... it might be something I dig deeper into and I'm kind of surprised it isn't already done (or even back when the FlexPass started with reservation based stuff)

 

[DLgal]

Also, just like the dining alert sites, anyone want to set up a business? I 100% know there would be a small market for a Disney Key optimizer website to show up. You select what key you have and how many open reservations you have. You select priority on things (total number of visits, total number of weekend visits, major holiday priority) and the algorithm spits out a plan for you to follow. Heck, it probably could even pull from the public availability calendar and text you an alert if a day opened. You could probably charge $5/mo for use of it and maybe $10/mo for people that wanted alerts.

Would be curious how many keys they sold, but even if it was some "small" number like 10k and you only got 5% using a service like that, before expenses that would be $2,500/mo revenue...

Anyone with some decent website skills and some good math skills could build that. In fact it's kinda making me think about doing it... Get a good iOS coder and you could make a little iPhone app too you could sell for $5 + the subscription. These passes can still be very powerful, it just requires identifying what YOU want from them and planning in advance. They are NOT the drop in everyday type of passes where locals would go for lunch or dinner and then just leave a couple hours later. The can provide a huge discount (probably down to like $20/day if you did a bunch of week day visits and maybe $40 a day with mixed weekends and weekdays). $20 to $40 to swing by Disney for the day is still a fantastic deal, even if it's just to go have dinner somewhere since it includes free parking, basically that's what you would pay most places in a busy city just to park for dinner!

There are already a few twitter users providing this for free. If you follow them and turn on alert notifications, they tweet whenever a day becomes available after being fully booked up. They tell you the date and the dream key type. I would like to know how this works, because these tweets are so numerous that it cannot be an actual person composing and manually posting them. It seems they wrote a program that constantly refreshes the availability calendar and generates a tweet automatically. It's fascinating.

 

[SOCALMouseMommy]

Sort of and sort of not. The key doesn't become active until you enter the parks. If you have self control and waited two to two and a half months and made your first visit a weekend you could "start" your pass with weekends.

You also could "struggle" past those first two months with a handful of random days after school or a winter break if there was a week day still open on it, etc and just make sure you had a reservation to book for that first weekend. It's less optimized and you might have a weird "waiting period" of a month or two without before you can get on a cycle, but you could do it if weekends were extremely important.

I also feel for you that it is a lot of money without "short notice" weekend availability. But, the parks felt VERY busy last week and insane on the weekends. They aren't empty parks with no reservations. I think staffing issues are still a thing and it's possible we see better availability in 2022 when Disney has "claimed" that staffing will be "back to normal levels."

I upgraded a park hopper so it was activated immediately. Everyone will have a different scenario.

 

[AndrewC]

There are already a few twitter users providing this for free. If you follow them and turn on alert notifications, they tweet whenever a day becomes available after being fully booked up. They tell you the date and the dream key type. I would like to know how this works, because these tweets are so numerous that it cannot be an actual person composing and manually posting them. It seems they wrote a program that constantly refreshes the availability calendar and generates a tweet automatically. It's fascinating.

Right, which is great. But think past that. Think of a site that lets you pick three specific days because that's the Fri-Sun weekend of your child's birthday and you guys have passes but missed the reservation window when it just opened. Or you're sitting down trying to figure out how you get your spring break, a couple birthday weekends for family members, Memorial Day, and 4th of July in as the most important days there are. You dump that info into it and it'll send an email reminder a few days before the booking window opens to make sure you have open reservations, or it'll alert you if a last minute cancelation opens. It'll also tell you, "you have three reservations free to use from now until XYZ date" while still being able to book your most important dates.

The hardest part of these passes is using it how you want, personal important days, weekends, holidays, etc. People need to basically map out for the year what's important to them and then keep track of which day a reservation window will open. If there was an algorithm that did all of that for you, you could optimize the pass more without stressing out that you tied all your reservations up on those far away important days, etc.

 

[AndrewC]

I upgraded a park hopper so it was activated immediately. Everyone will have a different scenario.

I still think there would be a way to get onto an optimized schedule for you to hit a lot of weekend days... would just have to think about it for a bit, again, which a website would be perfect for... seriously actually think this would be something people would use, lol. I need to go figure out if I have any buddies great with math that have free time on their hands...

 

[laugard]

@AndrewC your scenario only works if you bought the Dream Key in the first month. When I bought my Dream Key in October the next available weekend reservation was January 9. It was good they paused the sales of that key. It is a stupid amount of money to not have access to weekend days for the next three months.

I am lucky that I can use my key on weekdays (with my younger son) AND weekends, but my older son can only go on weekends because he’s in school. He has Believe and when I decided to pull the trigger and buy our keys I chose to gamble on being able to pick up cancelations in November and December. We will see how that goes.

If it helps give you hope, I only upgraded to a Believe two weekends ago and have booked two Saturdays and a Sunday in November, a Friday and Sunday in December and a Saturday in January during the long weekend.

 

[SOCALMouseMommy]

If it helps give you hope, I only upgraded to a Believe two weekends ago and have booked two Saturdays and a Sunday in November, a Friday and Sunday in December and a Saturday in January during the long weekend.

I mean, I knew what the reservation situation and I bought the keys anyway. I decided to risk it and hope for cancellations. I’ve actually already used my Dream Key twice since I bought it a week ago (I just went today). I hope it doesn’t come across like I’m mad, ha ha.

But I do think Disney needs to make some adjustments. I feel bad for people who impulsively upgraded tickets to Dream Keys after being prompted in the app without realizing they might not be able to reserve another weekend for three months. Easy for me to pick up cancellations when I live pretty close but not so easy for everyone. Then lets say my SIL and I would like to go together, now we all have to see if we can pick up cancelations. Not to mention that having different key reservation buckets adds an additional layer of annoying if you’re trying to pick up cancellations. My son and I have two different keys so I have to try for the same day in two different buckets. It’s all just really complicated now.

 

[MonocularVision]

I actually legit am now thinking about that... it might be something I dig deeper into and I'm kind of surprised it isn't already done (or even back when the FlexPass started with reservation based stuff)

I guess I wasn’t clear: I have been actively working on alerting service plus app to send you notifications when days become available. But I welcome any competition!

 

[laugard]

I mean, I knew what the reservation situation and I bought the keys anyway. I decided to risk it and hope for cancellations. I’ve actually already used my Dream Key twice since I bought it a week ago (I just went today). I hope it doesn’t come across like I’m mad, ha ha.

But I do think Disney needs to make some adjustments. I feel bad for people who impulsively upgraded tickets to Dream Keys after being prompted in the app without realizing they might not be able to reserve another weekend for three months. Easy for me to pick up cancellations when I live pretty close but not so easy for everyone. Then lets say my SIL and I would like to go together, now we all have to see if we can pick up cancelations. Not to mention that having different key reservation buckets adds an additional layer of annoying if you’re trying to pick up cancellations. My son and I have two different keys so I have to try for the same day in two different buckets. It’s all just really complicated now.

Oh no, definitely not mad! Just wanted to send a good vibe out there as I was feeling the same about hoping I'd be able to pick up Nov and Dec weekends. Though the day I accidentally removed someone from my party for a Nov Sunday instead of the intended Oct date was definitely not fun. It's tough when you know picking a weekend day back up right away isn't a given and if anything, unlikely. (I did get the date back a couple days later.)

I'm like you in that I knew the risks before buying the key. I felt pretty good about a key still working for me by utilizing advance reservations as well as cancellations and semi-short notice visits. (I'm not local local so don't just drop by last minute and do have to plan some. But I'm local-adjacent so do also have flexibility.) But it also helped that I've seen what early adopters' experiences have been so I knew what to expect. I'm sure I'd find this much more frustrating if I'd bought early on and assumed availability would be easy. I never expected it to be like the Flex (which I had and loved), but wouldn't have guessed how it is now either, especially for Dream Key holders.

 

[AndrewC]

I guess I wasn’t clear: I have been actively working on alerting service plus app to send you notifications when days become available. But I welcome any competition!

I’ll contact you so you know where to send my cut

Seriously though, do you have any plans for adding in some optimization abilities (reminders on when reservation windows open for specific days, how many reservations to keep open if someone lists they want Christmas, New Years, spring break, Memorial Day, etc) or just purely a notification portal?

 

[MonocularVision]

I’ll contact you so you know where to send my cut

Seriously though, do you have any plans for adding in some optimization abilities (reminders on when reservation windows open for specific days, how many reservations to keep open if someone lists they want Christmas, New Years, spring break, Memorial Day, etc) or just purely a notification portal?

My initial release will be notifications only for subscribed days. My scripts already can grab the reservation calendars for non-MK holders, working on MK right now. I store everything I collect so I do plan on offering the historical data as well.

 

[PMGuernsey]

Once you hit your reservation limit for example 4 with enchant key. How soon after using your first reservation are you able to make another reservation? I have a 5 day trip planned in January and am trying to decide if I should plan a day of doing something else, or if we might be able to snag another reservation after using our first reservation.

 

[dina444444]

Once you hit your reservation limit for example 4 with enchant key. How soon after using your first reservation are you able to make another reservation? I have a 5 day trip planned in January and am trying to decide if I should plan a day of doing something else, or if we might be able to snag another reservation after using our first reservation.

As soon as you scan in for that first reservation.

 

[PMGuernsey]

As soon as you scan in for that first reservation.

That was my hope... Thanks!!!!

 

[theluckyrabbit]

I guess I wasn’t clear: I have been actively working on alerting service plus app to send you notifications when days become available. But I welcome any competition!

 

[Jaina]

I have a reservation (starting a DL) for Dec 3rd (Friday) that I need to drop. PM me if you want to try to snag it when I drop it. Can we do that here?

 

[DLgal]

My initial release will be notifications only for subscribed days. My scripts already can grab the reservation calendars for non-MK holders, working on MK right now. I store everything I collect so I do plan on offering the historical data as well.

Have you found a way to work out the fact that these reservations may show available for literally less than a minute before becoming unavailable again? I don't know how happy people would be to pay for a service that doesn't actually net them a park reservation, which isn't something you can technically do on someone else's behalf.

At this point, it's all a game of timing and luck. I would not simply pay for a service that notifies me that a date has become available because likely, by the time I go to make my reservation, it will be gone.