MDE setup, should I manage my family?

[Lisa0503]

I haven’t been to Disney in 10 years and so much has changed. I have a split stay planned for my family of 4 (2 teens) along with my best friend and her son in a 3 bedroom villa. I just ordered park tickets from undercover tourist so I know I need to make park reservations. My question is what are the pros/cons of me managing everyone’s plan or should everyone have their own account and link them? Also, we got the park hopper plus tickets with genie plus. Can we use the plus option of going to the water park on the first day without affecting the 6 days we plan for the parks? Should we plan to buy magic bands? The last time we were there, they were just starting to roll them out by resort but not where we were staying so we never got them. Thanks for any other tips you can give me. We are a rope drop kind of family and I hope to figure out the Genie to stack rides for our afternoon/evening park.

 

[Lilsia]

I would talk to your friend about how you all plan to tour. Are you all planning on spending all day, every day together or are you going to go off on your own and meet up for meals, etc? If you are planning on spending all of your time together, then it is easier for one person to do all of it for the group. But if you are going casual, let everyone do their own thing.

 

[FrannyFrogs]

I would give everyone their own account and link them. It allows you to make more than one dining reservation for the same time slot, in case you want to do that. It's sometimes easier to book two small tables than one big one, even if you're eating at the same place.

 

[_19disnA]

I agree it partly depends on what you are planning to do as a group vs. separate. When we last went to Disney in 2019 we went with relatives and we stayed in 3 separate rooms. What worked best for us was to have one account for each room and then just add those people to your MDE. We linked the 3 rooms as 'family/friends' or whatever Disney calls it so we could see information for others and one person could make ADR's & FastPass for the entire group. If someone isn't good with computers, they can mess things up and/or mistakenly delete things so also depends on how computer savvy everyone is. One person made all of our dinner reservations since we ate together and that worked out fine. We found that if you planned to split up and eat at different places, MDE wouldn't let one person have multiple dinner reservations for the same date/time. I assume that is to prevent people from hoarding reservations just because they couldn't decide were to eat. Don't know if that is still true.

Not sure of any advantage for everyone to have their own account, it never mattered for us. Disney IT has always been unreliable and at times things don't work or work unpredictably. Having multiple accounts is just one more thing to go wrong that you have to spend time trying to resolve.

MDE lets you charge things to your room if you have a credit card on file. In your example, the other party could just pay with a credit card if buying something at a Disney store.