Thanks for the information, Sue!
I can now tell you what both the area manager and the person one up from the area manager have told me about how manual wheelchair users are supposed board and exit PoTC. According to what I was told, a person in their manual wheelchair is to be greeted by the CM working at the greeter position and asked if they want to stay in their own wheelchair, or transfer to one of the WDW wheelchairs found at the front of the attraction. If you answer yes that you wish to stay in your own manual wheelchair they are supposed to ask you if you want to have your own manual wheelchair at the end of the ride or if a WDW manual wheelchair would be acceptable.
If you choose to stay in your own wheelchair, you are supposed to be asked this question by the CM greeter, the CM at the wheelchair "gate" who tells you which side of PoTC you are supposed to go into (which will now always be the left side) and also the ride operator CM at the boarding area. This is to try and prevent what happened to me.
Due to the communications breakdown, no one mentioned any of this to me and so my manual wheelchair was not waiting for me at the end of the ride. This meant my spouse had to lift me into a WDW wheelchair because I can't really transfer without the wheelchair legs being swung back for me (something that the WDW wheelchairs legs do not do).
Which is how I ended up talking to multiple managers to make sure that I had how boarding and exiting the ride now worked.
If you do not tell every single CM you meet along the way that you need to have your own personal wheelchair at the end of the ride, they will move it from the boarding area back up to the front and leave it in the wheelchair/
ecv "corral" at the beginning of the ride. You will then have to use one of the WDW wheelchairs at the ride exit to go back to the front of the ride and then transfer back to your personal chair.
If you do tell them, then your personal wheelchair is supposed to be at the end of the ride waiting for you. I wouldn't count on the CM's working the ride to remember to ask you, so I would suggest being pro-active and telling them yourself just to make sure it is there at the end of the ride.
Hope this helps and hope that the policy doesn't change yet again so that the information above becomes obsolete immediately.
