My husband and I were talking about it today while waiting in the lines at
Disneyland (ironically). I think what we've decided to do is not renew our MK (expires 9/3) and buy tickets for our Christmas stay. If Magic Keys are available at that point (at the end of our Christmas trip), we'll take the value of the tickets and apply it to a new MK. If they aren't available, I guess we just do tickets going forward and go when we want. One thing that really annoyed me was that with our Magic Key passes we couldn't book reservations at the 4 month mark even though we had hotel (VGC) reservations. You only get to book park reservations 160 days out if you have regular tickets. This is different than at WDW where annual pass holders can book the same day as ticket holders when they have a hotel reservation. I know this is probably only a theoretical annoyance as there doesn't seem to be a problem securing reservations at 120 days for hotel guests (and even well under that), but it just kind of reinforces the second class citizens of APs and VGC in general. We (VGC owners) never got the perks they did at WDW (we've been AP holders at WDW for 5 years or so as well). We'll see how my FMO works tomorrow when I walk by the lines to renew, LOL.