What I learned today!

[bballbabe]

Don't forget about the new Kim Possible attraction and all of the characters that are there to see

 

[ktcov]

I LOVE LOVE LOVE this thread. Even tho we arent newbie's to WDW I'm learning a lot from this thread. This will be our 1st trip with a child.

Plus if I hear one more person tell me DD wont remember the trip & its a waste of money I will scream I know she wont remember it. But DH & I will...its our magic place and we want to share it with her.

 

[SPOERLX3]

Also, if you are going to an early morning character breakfast there are special buses for that (at least during peak season). You get on the bus marked Character Breakfast and tell the driver which breakfast you are going to and they will usually take you right there (with possible stops for other guests along the way)

Does anyone know if the breakfast buses run during Free Dining? I have been in March and in December and have never seen one of these but I went during value season so it was never crowded. I would love to know since this year we are going the 1st week of free dining and would love to be able to use one of these buses to get to our early breakfast ressies.

 

[jamieguffey]

Woo hoo we are at the 45 day mark. If I am not mistaken that means we should be getting our travel documents any day now? I booked on March 23 which was exactly 90 days out. That means we are halfway there!

The tip today is another link to a cool piece of research for first timers. It comes from wdwinfo. They have a series of videos on their Magic Kingdom Park Guide of a guy touring the Magic Kingdom on an scooter. This video does a few things for someone who has never been there.

1. It puts some scale to the out of scale maps you have been looking at. You can see the size of the attractions and how they relate to each other.

2. It gives you some time line to your walking trip. The ECV moves at a leisurely walking pace, you can see some of the commandos passing right by and the stragglers getting left behind but mostly he was just keeping up. If you note the time on the video you can give yourself some idea about how long it takes from attraction to attraction. I am going to take out my map and write down the times from the video. This is important when you are trying to figure out if you will be able to make it to a show before it starts.

3. And probably most important of all it alerts you to the sheer magnitude of the crowd. I am not sure exactly what time of year the video was done or what time of day but it definitely was eye opening as to the traffic we will encounter.

Not to mention the fact that you can super impose yourself into the video and imagine how cool it is going to be when you get there. For the old vets I would imagine it would be a great reminder too.

Check it out here:

http://www.wdwinfo.com/disney-podcast/kart-kam.htm

 

[mrstomrice]

We got our MYW packet info and 3 luggage tags on Saturday, which was about 35 days prior to our arrival. They are within one booklet whereas they used to be individual pages with the coupons. It is getting real now!

 

[Alesia]

Does anyone know if the breakfast buses run during Free Dining? I have been in March and in December and have never seen one of these but I went during value season so it was never crowded. I would love to know since this year we are going the 1st week of free dining and would love to be able to use one of these buses to get to our early breakfast ressies.

The buses to MK always start around 6:30. The buses to other parks start a little later, but are running by 7:00.

 

[jamieguffey]

Today’s tip is one fraught with pitfalls and I am looking for a LOT of feedback. If I get too much negative feedback I will edit. However, if it works right it could represent a HUGE savings.

I was reading the definitive guide to Disney’s Photopass on Stitchkingdom, like I said there isn’t a lot on there but what they do have is great. There is a section that talks about the PhotoCD and it talks about participating in a photo share.

Basically it works like this. You are going with friends for a week. Instead of each of you buying the PhotoCD you combine your efforts and upload the photos from all of your different cards to one account and order one PhotoCD. Thus sharing the cost of the CD between two of you. Now that the price has gone up I think that would turn into $75 each instead of $150. This sounds like a great idea!

Now there is a little sentence at the end of the section that really got my wheels turning, it mentions doing this with virtual strangers.

So I came up with Jamie’s Guide to Photosharing.

I am going the week of 8/22/09. Help me out here. I know there is some kind of thirty day rule or something???? So for the sake of argument since I don’t really know how that works I am going to say that it is 30 days from the time the first picture is taken. So I have until September 21st to order the CD. I visit the Official August and September 2009 thread and find 7 other DIS’ers that want to do the Share. That makes 8 of us total. 8 goes into $150 roughly $19. (Apparently, there is no maximum number of photos. If it takes 3 CD’s to house all the photos on an account so be it they send you 3 CD’s)

So to cover the cost of organizing, buying CDS, and shipping them out I say give me $23. ($1 for CD and $3 for Shipping)

Once you have paid me I give you my user name and password to the photopass account and we say that on 9/15/09 everyone will be done with uploading and editing. On that day, I order the CD. When it arrives a couple of things can happen. 1. If there is some way to change the name of the photo everyone does that so they can be extracted so we all don’t get 1300 pictures of people we don’t know and have to sort through them. Or 2. I simply make copies of the CD’s and everyone gets everyone’s pictures and we each extract our own photos. I ship them out and we all got a great deal on PhotoCD’s?

Here are the pitfalls I mentioned earlier.

#1 in my mind…is this the right thing to do? First let me say I do not pirate software, I do not burn CD’s, I never used music stealing(sharing) sites, and I don’t buy bootleg movies. Not because the quality stinks but because it isn’t right. The people making that movie are doing a job and they deserve to be paid for it. I understand they get paid way too much but if I didn’t want to watch it I wouldn’t. There are a lot of loopholes being exploited in this sharing system. The fact that many ID’s can be combined, the fact that you can have unlimited photos, etc. This kind of thing may be partly to blame for the price going up. I am really struggling with this one. If your argument for doing it is that Disney makes billions of dollars and this won’t hurt them then save that, it is the wrong thing to do. If the argument for doing it is that Disney has set up the system knowing full well and accepting the fact that this will happen (kinda like letting you come back when ever you feel like it on a fastpass) then fine let’s do it. If your argument is you paid $5000 for a vacation that you really didn’t have and you don’t have another $150 to spend….well that is a gray area.

#2 You give someone money, you upload your photopass id to someone else’s account. 2 months later no CD arrives with your pics. They have been deleted from the system and you have lost everything. This is one reason why I would never do a share unless either I was the organizer or someone I knew very well was the organizer.

#3 Someone gets on and ruins your pics on September 14th because they are evil and you don’t find out until your copy of the CD arrives. Probably a good reason NOT to do it with 8 total strangers.

#4 Order Day comes and people still haven’t finished editing and then they get mad at you because even though you told them they better be done because you are ordering it they figured you would know they weren’t done yadda yadda yadda. Probably a good reason to let someone you know really well be the organizer. And again not do it with 8 strangers.

#5 You told everyone there were 8 people so everyone paid you $23 dollars but it turns out only 5 people came through so it should have been $33 so you end up having to pay $50 for a CD everyone else paid $23 for. Again let someone else organize, or figure it is still a great price for the CD plus you had the added bonus of confidence knowing you were not going to get hosed.

#6 Everything works great your organizer sends you your copy of the CD but the Photo Release is addressed to the account holder so you can’t find anyone to print your pics for you. Well for this one I hope you have a photo quality printer. (not sure how the release works so this may not be a pitfall, plus most of your online labs really could care less so it isn’t really a big thing anyway).

#7 There are probably a lot more that I didn’t list, but like the ones I did list, they mainly stem from trying to be too aggressive. It is probably best to find a friend or a DIS’er you have become friends with and just go halves on it. Most of the pitfalls, including the personal struggle one get minimized a great deal.

Like I said, please give me your feedback. If the sharing system is just the wrong thing to do or if people have had terrible experiences with it I will edit this post.

 

[bballbabe]

Quick note, when we purchased the photopass cd last year, in our info from Disney with our cd said you were able to make copies of the cd. My parents and my sister's family each have a copy of the cd and have had no problem with printing pics off of it.

 

[Alesia]

Paid photo shares have been banned on the disboards. I'm guessing it has a lot to do with the reasons you mentioned.

I have no desire to trust a total stranger with my money and my personal information.

A lot of people have done them and had great experiences. Some have had disasters. I was never willing to take the risk.

 

[JeNScHuB]

I like the idea, but my guess is that it is probably illegal. Maybe if you are going with other family members you could all do something like that. I am going with my sisters family and we will probably get some pics taken together and some independently so i don't know how that will work out.

 

[Alesia]

I like the idea, but my guess is that it is probably illegal. Maybe if you are going with other family members you could all do something like that. I am going with my sisters family and we will probably get some pics taken together and some independently so i don't know how that will work out.

You should definitely go in on it together. It isn't illegal.

 

[DISDANCEMOM]

Today’s tip is one fraught with pitfalls and I am looking for a LOT of feedback. If I get too much negative feedback I will edit. However, if it works right it could represent a HUGE savings.

I was reading the definitive guide to Disney’s Photopass on Stitchkingdom, like I said there isn’t a lot on there but what they do have is great. There is a section that talks about the PhotoCD and it talks about participating in a photo share.

...

Like I said, please give me your feedback. If the sharing system is just the wrong thing to do or if people have had terrible experiences with it I will edit this post.

For all of the reasons that you have listed I probably would not participate in a photoshare with "virtual" strangers. That being said...I did do one last time with some friends. We were at Disney with my dd's dance team and there were three families that spent a lot of time together. There were many pics that had all three families or all of the kids in the picture, etc. The 3 families (mine included) ended up doing one CD since it was difficult to separate the various photos. This worked out fine b/c we see each other on a weekly basis and know each other very well.

 

[jamieguffey]

Paid photo shares have been banned on the disboards. I'm guessing it has a lot to do with the reasons you mentioned.

I have no desire to trust a total stranger with my money and my personal information.

A lot of people have done them and had great experiences. Some have had disasters. I was never willing to take the risk.

What does paid photo shares mean? Is it what I described? By paid it sounds like you are saying someone besides disney makes money of the deal. I certainly would not be in favor of someone making a business out of it.

 

[mickeyluv'r]

Disney used to publish a travel map. It was how to get from point A to point B. They used to give it out in your welcome packet. They don't anymore, but I think you can still ask for one. Incidentally, if you plan to drive, you an get a free WDW road map. I was surprised once that the road map we got from a car rental place was not accurate. I don't recall which comapny it was.

Anotehr tip on photopass - you could just skip it. I have found that often to really take advantage of Photopass you have to wait int line for the Photopass photographer. That's time you could tkae your own photo and be doing something else.

Remember Time is money at WDW! Every trip is different, but take teh approximate overall cost of your trip and divide by the number of waking hours you'll be in WDW. I usually get at least $20 per hour! It can easily go way up from there:

Airfare: say, $200 per person
room: $800 - $over 4,000
food: $40 per person per day or more, about $15 for kids under 12
Alcohol:?
rental car
Park Tickets:

Let's say you get a low end total of $3000, and will be there for a week. You are awake about 16 hours per day, maybe 17 at WDW. So that's $25 per waking hour! Now if you are to subtract out down time - like getting ready inthe morning, transportation between parks - your numbers will really skyrocket!

 

[Alesia]

What does paid photo shares mean? Is it what I described? By paid it sounds like you are saying someone besides disney makes money of the deal. I certainly would not be in favor of someone making a business out of it.

A paid share is exactly what you described.

Everyone splitting the cost and then sending their share to one person who orders the CD.

 

[JeNScHuB]

You should definitely go in on it together. It isn't illegal.

I agree....I will definitely do this with my family....but with strangers i am going to have to say it is probably the wrong thing to do.

 

[JeNScHuB]

Now that i think about it though, there are many things just like this on this site that we all use to try to save some of our hard earned money....examples are the refridge and stroller sharing, as well as the one guy who recently posted about trying to reuse his outdated mugs from last year!!!
Disney is making money off all of these things and it seems many are trying to get around that high price...just that some seem sneakier than others.
So did i figure out if its a good idea or not....NO...but it makes me think it's 2:00 am and i probably need sleep!

 

[jamieguffey]

I got our shanrene.com bracelets yesterday. There is a red one for Noah its his favorite color and a princess pink one for Sophie. It has their name and a little note that says If lost please call (Daddys Cell Phone Number) Thank you to Alesia for the tip we are going to give them to the kids on the airplane as a present (They both LOOOOOVE stuff with their names on it)

GET YOUR GLOW STUFF BEFORE YOU LEAVE.

This tip is on every tip site there is. Walmart has them, dollar stores have them, etc. Oh and if you are wondering what glow stuff I am referring to. It is the little necklaces, bracelets, sticks, etc. Most of them illuminate when you crack them so you can throw them in your luggage and they will be ready when you need them.

Besides saving you money by not having to buy the stuff at the park, because your kids will most assuredly want them, having a bag full of these that you paid a couple of dollars for can do a couple of things. Got a child that is uneasy in the dark. Put it on. Want to make sure you can pick your child out at night make a special color pattern.

And this one might be the my favorite tip of all the tips I have found so far. Teach your kids about sharing the magic. Break open a special lot of the necklaces and let your kids hand them out to other little ones. You pay 5 dollars for a bag of them and your kids get to be the star of the show! (I saw that one on allears and what a wonderful idea).

 

[Alesia]

I got our shanrene.com bracelets yesterday. There is a red one for Noah its his favorite color and a princess pink one for Sophie. It has their name and a little note that says If lost please call (Daddys Cell Phone Number) Thank you to Alesia for the tip we are going to give them to the kids on the airplane as a present (They both LOOOOOVE stuff with their names on it)

GET YOUR GLOW STUFF BEFORE YOU LEAVE.

This tip is on every tip site there is. Walmart has them, dollar stores have them, etc. Oh and if you are wondering what glow stuff I am referring to. It is the little necklaces, bracelets, sticks, etc. Most of them illuminate when you crack them so you can throw them in your luggage and they will be ready when you need them.

Besides saving you money by not having to buy the stuff at the park, because your kids will most assuredly want them, having a bag full of these that you paid a couple of dollars for can do a couple of things. Got a child that is uneasy in the dark. Put it on. Want to make sure you can pick your child out at night make a special color pattern.

And this one might be the my favorite tip of all the tips I have found so far. Teach your kids about sharing the magic. Break open a special lot of the necklaces and let your kids hand them out to other little ones. You pay 5 dollars for a bag of them and your kids get to be the star of the show! (I saw that one on allears and what a wonderful idea).

Make sure that you pack the glow stuff in your checked luggage and not your carry-on.

Carly passed out glow bracelets every night we were there. She had sooo much fun.

 

[cassie58]

We also brought glow stuff last yr., and I even found swords and wands at my dollar store! Packed in double baggie in case any came open during travel.
Love the idea of sharing as well!

cassie58
11/08-ASMo & Timeshare
8/09-CSR