Preface: I am not interested in and will not reply to any trollish nonsense. Everything below is OUR FAMILY'S experience and opinion on FP+, and we're not out to offend anyone. YMMV. Just providing our thoughts for those interested, and if you aren't, this isn't the post for you to read. 
Preface #2: This is long. If you aren't a patient person and interested in this topic, this post is not for you.
Preface #3: We stayed at Fort Wilderness for 9 days beginning December 28 through January 5. We are Annual Passholders, and were previously casual paper FastPass users (3-4 per day usually). We were issued both MagicBands (pre-customized and mailed to us) and KTTW cards. We didn't "double/triple dip" for extra paper passes on this trip.
MagicBands:
- PoS transations: No problems buying stuff.
- Park Entrance Gates: Our APs were properly attached to our bands. We did not have a problem using our bands at park entry gates. They had to reset my fingerprint on the first day, which took all of 30 seconds with a CM and his iPad, but after that 0 issues.
- Resort Gates and Locks - This is where we DID have problems. They apparently still have some serious bugs with band (and KTTW) activations for door locks and parking gates.
I will say there is nothing like standing outside the Comfort Station in your pajamas at 2am needing to pee and not being able to get inside with any of 6 bands or KTTW cards. (Thank goodness for the other guest who woke up to pee shortly after I did and let me in, just as I was considering the bushes. If you are reading this, thank you again.
)
The bands and cards did not work on the parking gate either. The parking Security guy was quite disgruntled that he had to let us in the first time we tried to drive back in with them. He wasn't mad at us personally, and he wasn't rude to us, but he made it clear he was pretty annoyed that Reservations/Check-In can't seem to get these cards and bands consistently keyed right. He has to leave the "monitored" side of his hut and walk all the way around the car to the other side, to put a piece of equipment against the gate and let you in. Meanwhile, cars needing to come through the "monitored" side are waiting.
Worse, when my husband went to the Front Desk the next morning to get them fixed, it took over an hour to get it done. And the only thing they fixed was the KTTW cards, not the bands. After waiting in line more than half an hour for his turn, the person at the front desk told my husband that she could not "redo" our KTTW cards/bands without a manager's help/approval. 15 minutes later, she still had not been able to find a manager. She finally decided to go ahead and redo the cards without said manager, which took another 15+ minutes to complete. Husband was thoroughly annoyed by the time this was all done. When we discovered that the bands still didn't work, but the KTTW cards did, we decided to leave well enough alone and used the KTTW cards for resort parking entrance and Comfort Station access for the remainder of the trip.
Final Verdict on Magic Bands: Ambivalent. Even if they had worked on the Comfort Stations and the Parking Gates, they don't do anything we need that our KTTW plastic didn't do for us before. I did have fun painting mine before the trip, so that's something I guess.
Fast Pass +:
Here's where it gets sad and ugly. The ONLY day we appreciated having pre-scheduled Fast Passes was New Year's Eve in Epcot. The FP+ that we had were the only 3 things we rode that day beyond a rope drop Soarin ride, since Epcot+NYE=Oversold and 200+ minute waits for a lot of things.
Otherwise, our experience with FP+ was this:
1. On a "good" day, we used all 3 passes. We had a lot of downtime between them. Which was fine, we would find a place to sit and people-watch, usually. (Interestingly, it did not motivate us to do more shopping. We spent less on souvenirs than we ever have on a trip, and the bulk of what we did spend was in Mitsukoshi's store... nobody even found a Disney t-shirt they wanted this time.)
- The "fast pass" lines aren't really very fast passes right now, in busy seasons. With few exceptions we waited ~10-15 minutes in the fast pass line to actually get on the ride, because Disney is issuing a LOT of fast passes. This was true even towards the end of our trip when the crowds had thinned considerably and it was officially "value" season. Perhaps the removal of the paper machines will change this.
2. On a "bad" day, which we had several of, Disney mistakes or other factors kind of blew the whole day's schedule to bits and we didn't get to use all the passes.
A couple of examples from a single day at Animal Kingdom:
- We had a reservation at Tusker House for 1pm for lunch. We had a FP+ on Everest from 2-3. Now TH is a buffet, and we are not malingerers; we've eaten at TH often and we're always out of there in under an hour. However, they seated us an HOUR late due to a "computer malfunction". This caused us to miss our Everest fastpass window. We tried to reschedule it via the phone app when we realized how badly behind the restaurant was, but no more times were available. I'm sure we could have run over to Asia the minute we got out of Tusker and convinced a cast member to let us ride late, but nobody wanted to jog across the park fast after eating, so we gave up on it and didn't ride Everest this trip at all.
- We had a FP+ scheduled for Kali River Rapids as our "last thing" of the afternoon, around 3:30, so we could go home and put on dry clothes before the evening's activities. A thunderstorm hit literally 10 minutes before our fast pass window opened and they closed the ride. Totally cool and understandable, safety first. We waited for a little while to see if it would pass, and it didn't. What's funny is that because the ride closed, Disney automatically converted it to an "Omni" pass where we could pick any other (open in a thunderstorm) AK ride that had available fast pass times left for the day. And no rides came up for us, so essentially it was a useless fastpass.
So, at the end of this Animal Kingdom day, we'd used one FP+ and lost the other two to circumstances. Because we knew the other parks were crowded, and because we couldn't schedule the 2 unused fast passes anywhere outside of AK, we ended up leaving Disney property for the rest of the night for dinner and a movie over at the Pointe (so we spent our money that night off property, Mr. CFO
).
3. I witnessed guests giving FP CMs every single story in the book as to why their MBs were turning the FP things blue. The CMs seemed overwhelmed and usually let the guests in, even if none of their bands worked. I got the feeling that a LOT of people were scamming their way into the fast pass line. Just a feeling, based on the triumphant looks and comments often exchanged between these guests on their way into the ride.
4. I witnessed entrance point FP CMs not even WATCHING to see if the guests going into the FP line had bands, if the bands were turning green, etc. The CM would look away at some distraction and a group of people would rush in. Sometimes, the cast member at the "inside" FP scanner would catch them and send them back, but not always. Probably about 40% of the time I personally entered a FP line, the CMs weren't even looking at me when I scanned my band.
Final Verdict on FastPass +: This thing is not ready for Prime Time (usage, not the Diner.
). Generally, we felt over-scheduled the whole trip. Normally the only "appointments" we have to keep up with at WDW are park opening times (optional, if we feel like rope dropping) and table service ADRs (required, if we want table service). Now, we had to keep up with three fast pass appointment times, too (required, unless we want to spend all day in lines). It felt like half the conversations my husband and I had, we were anxiously checking with each other to be sure we were "on time" and "on schedule" for whatever was coming next. It just felt unhappy to all of us. When you layer on the problems we experienced with the FP system and its policies, it was a bust for us.
My Disney Experience App:
The iPhone version of this app is not ready for prime time. While AT&T's partnership with WDW has somewhat improved the WiFi access in the parks over what it was a year ago, the WiFi and/or the data transaction layer for queries within the app still isn't reliable - from inside the parks, searches time out more often than they complete (all kinds of searches, from ride waits to table reservations). The app itself crashed on all 3 of our phones so often that we dubbed it the "black screen of death". We can pretty much reliably crash the app by performing a specific set of steps to adjust Fast Passes and search for Dining, and these are things that QA should have caught and Development should have fixed.
Suggestions for Disney:
1. Tiering is bad. Don't do it. If everyone wants to fast-pass ride Soarin and Test Track once in their Epcot day, LET THEM. If you've got so many guests in your park that you cannot give each of them a ride time for these two rides, then perhaps you're selling too many tickets.
2. Three fast passes is not enough. It needs to be at least four, preferably five.
3. Forcing all three FP to be in the same park is bad. For example, when guests get rained out top tier rides at one park, they should be able to reschedule the converted Omni passes at ANY park.
4. Park Hopping guests should be able to schedule their 3 passes anywhere they darn well want (after all, they paid you extra for daily multi-park access).
5. Offering Omni passes to replace closed rides is a nice gesture, but make sure there are other rides available to pick, or it just looks like you don't know what you're doing. (Opening up Omni pass selections to all parks would help with this, at least for those with PH/AP access.)
6. Do some more serious work on the in-park Wifi and App/Database infrastructure. The app should not crash so frequently and searches should not time out constantly.
7. Make the FP+/band reading system a ton more reliable, so your CMs can turn guests with "blue" results away with confidence to be helped by a FP+ booth CM, instead of being bullied into letting them through.
Our Future at WDW:
As it stands, our annual passes expire in May and we do not plan to renew them, for a number of reasons. Some personal, and some to do with what it is like to "vacation" at WDW right now. One thing I don't mind saying is that we feel we spend too much money to be on-property guests at WDW for the current level of service and access to things. The prices need to be lower, or the experience needs to improve.
Preface #2: This is long. If you aren't a patient person and interested in this topic, this post is not for you.
Preface #3: We stayed at Fort Wilderness for 9 days beginning December 28 through January 5. We are Annual Passholders, and were previously casual paper FastPass users (3-4 per day usually). We were issued both MagicBands (pre-customized and mailed to us) and KTTW cards. We didn't "double/triple dip" for extra paper passes on this trip.
MagicBands:
- PoS transations: No problems buying stuff.
- Park Entrance Gates: Our APs were properly attached to our bands. We did not have a problem using our bands at park entry gates. They had to reset my fingerprint on the first day, which took all of 30 seconds with a CM and his iPad, but after that 0 issues.
- Resort Gates and Locks - This is where we DID have problems. They apparently still have some serious bugs with band (and KTTW) activations for door locks and parking gates.
I will say there is nothing like standing outside the Comfort Station in your pajamas at 2am needing to pee and not being able to get inside with any of 6 bands or KTTW cards. (Thank goodness for the other guest who woke up to pee shortly after I did and let me in, just as I was considering the bushes. If you are reading this, thank you again.
)The bands and cards did not work on the parking gate either. The parking Security guy was quite disgruntled that he had to let us in the first time we tried to drive back in with them. He wasn't mad at us personally, and he wasn't rude to us, but he made it clear he was pretty annoyed that Reservations/Check-In can't seem to get these cards and bands consistently keyed right. He has to leave the "monitored" side of his hut and walk all the way around the car to the other side, to put a piece of equipment against the gate and let you in. Meanwhile, cars needing to come through the "monitored" side are waiting.
Worse, when my husband went to the Front Desk the next morning to get them fixed, it took over an hour to get it done. And the only thing they fixed was the KTTW cards, not the bands. After waiting in line more than half an hour for his turn, the person at the front desk told my husband that she could not "redo" our KTTW cards/bands without a manager's help/approval. 15 minutes later, she still had not been able to find a manager. She finally decided to go ahead and redo the cards without said manager, which took another 15+ minutes to complete. Husband was thoroughly annoyed by the time this was all done. When we discovered that the bands still didn't work, but the KTTW cards did, we decided to leave well enough alone and used the KTTW cards for resort parking entrance and Comfort Station access for the remainder of the trip.
Final Verdict on Magic Bands: Ambivalent. Even if they had worked on the Comfort Stations and the Parking Gates, they don't do anything we need that our KTTW plastic didn't do for us before. I did have fun painting mine before the trip, so that's something I guess.
Fast Pass +:
Here's where it gets sad and ugly. The ONLY day we appreciated having pre-scheduled Fast Passes was New Year's Eve in Epcot. The FP+ that we had were the only 3 things we rode that day beyond a rope drop Soarin ride, since Epcot+NYE=Oversold and 200+ minute waits for a lot of things.
Otherwise, our experience with FP+ was this:
1. On a "good" day, we used all 3 passes. We had a lot of downtime between them. Which was fine, we would find a place to sit and people-watch, usually. (Interestingly, it did not motivate us to do more shopping. We spent less on souvenirs than we ever have on a trip, and the bulk of what we did spend was in Mitsukoshi's store... nobody even found a Disney t-shirt they wanted this time.)
- The "fast pass" lines aren't really very fast passes right now, in busy seasons. With few exceptions we waited ~10-15 minutes in the fast pass line to actually get on the ride, because Disney is issuing a LOT of fast passes. This was true even towards the end of our trip when the crowds had thinned considerably and it was officially "value" season. Perhaps the removal of the paper machines will change this.
2. On a "bad" day, which we had several of, Disney mistakes or other factors kind of blew the whole day's schedule to bits and we didn't get to use all the passes.
A couple of examples from a single day at Animal Kingdom:
- We had a reservation at Tusker House for 1pm for lunch. We had a FP+ on Everest from 2-3. Now TH is a buffet, and we are not malingerers; we've eaten at TH often and we're always out of there in under an hour. However, they seated us an HOUR late due to a "computer malfunction". This caused us to miss our Everest fastpass window. We tried to reschedule it via the phone app when we realized how badly behind the restaurant was, but no more times were available. I'm sure we could have run over to Asia the minute we got out of Tusker and convinced a cast member to let us ride late, but nobody wanted to jog across the park fast after eating, so we gave up on it and didn't ride Everest this trip at all.
- We had a FP+ scheduled for Kali River Rapids as our "last thing" of the afternoon, around 3:30, so we could go home and put on dry clothes before the evening's activities. A thunderstorm hit literally 10 minutes before our fast pass window opened and they closed the ride. Totally cool and understandable, safety first. We waited for a little while to see if it would pass, and it didn't. What's funny is that because the ride closed, Disney automatically converted it to an "Omni" pass where we could pick any other (open in a thunderstorm) AK ride that had available fast pass times left for the day. And no rides came up for us, so essentially it was a useless fastpass.
So, at the end of this Animal Kingdom day, we'd used one FP+ and lost the other two to circumstances. Because we knew the other parks were crowded, and because we couldn't schedule the 2 unused fast passes anywhere outside of AK, we ended up leaving Disney property for the rest of the night for dinner and a movie over at the Pointe (so we spent our money that night off property, Mr. CFO
).3. I witnessed guests giving FP CMs every single story in the book as to why their MBs were turning the FP things blue. The CMs seemed overwhelmed and usually let the guests in, even if none of their bands worked. I got the feeling that a LOT of people were scamming their way into the fast pass line. Just a feeling, based on the triumphant looks and comments often exchanged between these guests on their way into the ride.
4. I witnessed entrance point FP CMs not even WATCHING to see if the guests going into the FP line had bands, if the bands were turning green, etc. The CM would look away at some distraction and a group of people would rush in. Sometimes, the cast member at the "inside" FP scanner would catch them and send them back, but not always. Probably about 40% of the time I personally entered a FP line, the CMs weren't even looking at me when I scanned my band.
Final Verdict on FastPass +: This thing is not ready for Prime Time (usage, not the Diner.
). Generally, we felt over-scheduled the whole trip. Normally the only "appointments" we have to keep up with at WDW are park opening times (optional, if we feel like rope dropping) and table service ADRs (required, if we want table service). Now, we had to keep up with three fast pass appointment times, too (required, unless we want to spend all day in lines). It felt like half the conversations my husband and I had, we were anxiously checking with each other to be sure we were "on time" and "on schedule" for whatever was coming next. It just felt unhappy to all of us. When you layer on the problems we experienced with the FP system and its policies, it was a bust for us.My Disney Experience App:
The iPhone version of this app is not ready for prime time. While AT&T's partnership with WDW has somewhat improved the WiFi access in the parks over what it was a year ago, the WiFi and/or the data transaction layer for queries within the app still isn't reliable - from inside the parks, searches time out more often than they complete (all kinds of searches, from ride waits to table reservations). The app itself crashed on all 3 of our phones so often that we dubbed it the "black screen of death". We can pretty much reliably crash the app by performing a specific set of steps to adjust Fast Passes and search for Dining, and these are things that QA should have caught and Development should have fixed.
Suggestions for Disney:
1. Tiering is bad. Don't do it. If everyone wants to fast-pass ride Soarin and Test Track once in their Epcot day, LET THEM. If you've got so many guests in your park that you cannot give each of them a ride time for these two rides, then perhaps you're selling too many tickets.
2. Three fast passes is not enough. It needs to be at least four, preferably five.
3. Forcing all three FP to be in the same park is bad. For example, when guests get rained out top tier rides at one park, they should be able to reschedule the converted Omni passes at ANY park.
4. Park Hopping guests should be able to schedule their 3 passes anywhere they darn well want (after all, they paid you extra for daily multi-park access).
5. Offering Omni passes to replace closed rides is a nice gesture, but make sure there are other rides available to pick, or it just looks like you don't know what you're doing. (Opening up Omni pass selections to all parks would help with this, at least for those with PH/AP access.)
6. Do some more serious work on the in-park Wifi and App/Database infrastructure. The app should not crash so frequently and searches should not time out constantly.
7. Make the FP+/band reading system a ton more reliable, so your CMs can turn guests with "blue" results away with confidence to be helped by a FP+ booth CM, instead of being bullied into letting them through.
Our Future at WDW:
As it stands, our annual passes expire in May and we do not plan to renew them, for a number of reasons. Some personal, and some to do with what it is like to "vacation" at WDW right now. One thing I don't mind saying is that we feel we spend too much money to be on-property guests at WDW for the current level of service and access to things. The prices need to be lower, or the experience needs to improve.
