MIChessGuy
(Almost) Too Old for Roller Coasters
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2008
- Messages
- 1,384
Last night I decided to renew my AP, which I've had since 2011. Unfortunately the website process for renewing is not exactly a model of clarity. After logging in and clicking on a button for online renewal, I was taken to what seemed to be a second log-in screen that asked for "visual ID."
What the heck? I had no idea what this was, so I just typed in my pass number (the long one, not the PIN) and it worked. Then I typed in some additional data like for any online purchase and everything went fine.
Something else puzzled me: I know only from reading the boards here that the renewal period is 30 days on either side of the expiration date. After spending a LOT of time reading through the AP portion of the Universal website, I could find no mention of this. Am I just doing something wrong here? Of all the FAQs an existing passholder might have, this would probably be the most frequent. And yet you won't find it on the site. Other information, when it was available at all, took a lot of clicking to locate.
Anyhoo, I did manage to renew and beat out the AP price increase, assuming one is coming, which I think it is. My suggestion to others who will be renewing is to use the phone number and not mess around with renewing online.

Something else puzzled me: I know only from reading the boards here that the renewal period is 30 days on either side of the expiration date. After spending a LOT of time reading through the AP portion of the Universal website, I could find no mention of this. Am I just doing something wrong here? Of all the FAQs an existing passholder might have, this would probably be the most frequent. And yet you won't find it on the site. Other information, when it was available at all, took a lot of clicking to locate.
Anyhoo, I did manage to renew and beat out the AP price increase, assuming one is coming, which I think it is. My suggestion to others who will be renewing is to use the phone number and not mess around with renewing online.