maryland_mom said:
sorry if this is a crazy question but what is room charge? or key charge?
One of the perks of staying at a Disney owned-and-operated resort is that you have charging privileges. You can put down a credit card, debit card, cash, travelers checks, even Disney Dollars at your resort's front desk when you check in, as the basis for charging future purchases to your room account.
For example, let's say you want to set up a room charge for $500. They run your credit or debit card just to make sure it's an active account, but
no charge or hold will be placed on the account at that time. Your room key, which is credit-card sized and has a magnetic strip, will also double as your room charge card. ANY purchase you make at any of the theme parks, water parks, resorts, and the Disney-owned stores within Downtown Disney can be made simply by presenting that room card. The card will be swiped, and you will have to sign a charge receipt. You will also get a receipt.
There is no cumulative limit on room charges. When you reach your limit, you can just set up another one, it's that simple. Let's say you set up a $500 room charge. If your next purchase attempt puts you over the limit, that charge will be declined. At that point, you can simply call your resort and authorize another room charge to be started -- they are TOTALLY set up to do this by phone. They did this by design, to make it as easy as possible, especially nowadays when every self-respecting 4-year-old seems to have a cellphone.
When you reach your limit, THEN your credit card or debit card is automatically charged. And like I said, you can set up another charge and keep going.
As often as you like, you can go to your resort's front desk and get an up-to-the-minute printout of your account. If you see you are near your limit, you can decide to have them charge that amount to your credit/debit card at that time, and then set up a brand spankin' new room charge account so you won't be sidelined for a few minutes on the phone later that day or the next day to set up another room charge account.
WDW sets upper limits for room charges based upon level of resort -- $500 for Values, $1K for Moderates, $1.5K for Deluxes. Like I said, these are UPPER limits. You can request a smaller amount.
Your personal financial info is NOT on the room key. It just tells Disney to charge the purchase to your room account; your credit card number isn't encoded on the room key. The name of your financial institution isn't even on your room key. If you lose your key, no one has access to your financial information.
And like I said, you don;t even need a credit or debit card to do this -- cash, travelers checks and Disney Dollars work just fine.
This set up is SOOOO convenient. I think we had $200 in cash with us for a week there with our 2 kids. Between this set up and the availability of ATMs, there was no need to bring enough cash with us to last the whole week. Except for the airport and the ice cream place at DTD (which isn't Disney-owned), I think I spent less than $10 in cash the whole week.
my question is...
