What I learned today!

[RandFamily]

I'm loving this thread, and I have a couple of suggestions.

The transportation system is indeed easy, but I've found it to be very time consuming and tries the patience of all of us (We've waited as long as 25 minutes for them to load a couple of scooter chairs on a bus). We ALWAYS rent a car - the cheapest we can get. It is so much quicker to drive and park and therefore we get less cranky. I think it makes the trip much more fun.

Second, we have been following the touring plans in the unofficial guide like a Bible for many, many years and have always enjoyed the early openings - until the last two years. It seems that more people are using them than before and we have carefully compared the crowds on different days and found that we are MUCH better off NOT going to the early opening or the extra evening hours. I've been surprised by this, but we've made four trips in the last 2 years already and it's been pretty consistent.

Anyway have a terrific vacation - I'll be down with you at the same time

 

[jamieguffey]

Magic Express seems to good to be true. I mean can it really work that well? We check our bags in Dayton and Magically they just show up in our room at the All Star Movies later that day? The smoke and mirrors of it all worries me so I have been trying to find a good reason not to use the little yellow tags that showed up a couple of weeks ago and just do it the old fashioned way.

As far as I can tell, there really isn't any cause for concern. Sure there is a chance that things get messed up but but from all I have read as long as the mistake is on the Orlando end and not on the home airport end it is really nothing more than an inconvenience. You might have to wait until later that night for everything to get sorted out but it does and the bags show up. Now if the error was made at your home airport things get a little dicey. First off you don't find out until much later than you normally would. You come back to your room later that night and you don't have any bags. Now instead of having someone working on the problem at 11:00am when your plane landed you are dead tired after a plane trip, a bus trip, a monorail trip, and some welcome to Disney world touring and it is 11:00pm before anyone is working on the issue. So the tip from an allears reader was to make sure to check your checked bag tags before they send them off to your plane. There are a few more good tips at all ears: http://allears.net/rta/tips.php?q=Disney+Magical+Express+Tips

Most important of all the tips I have read is to make sure you have everything you need to make it through the night in your carryon bags. My wife wears contacts but when she flies she wears her glasses. That way she isn't trying to manage her contacts if something gets lost.

On stitchkingdom I just read that if you have you voucher booklet and you have your yellow tags on your luggage you can just go straight to the buses now. http://www.stitchkingdom.com/2009/0...xpress-streamlines-check-in-process-for-most/

Here are some other sites I have been browsing:

http://allears.net/acc/mexpress.htm

http://www.wdwinfo.com/Transportation/magical-express.htm

http://www.mousesavers.com/magicalexpress.html

http://www.magictrips.com/plan/dme.htm

And then of course the Unofficial Guide.

 

[jamieguffey]

A quick one from allears.

If you are planning on going to the parks on your last day out. We are because the plane doesn't leave until 8:00pm. Do the EMH park. I never really thought of it but what a good idea. If you are staying onsite using ME I think you can check in for the airport anytime after 5:30am. Leave your carryons at the luggage check and go have fun until time to leave! Come back to the resort get your carryons and off you go. Sounds like a plan to me.


EDIT: Well it sounds like a plan to me but unfortunately it is not a plan FOR me. Apparently, at some point they stop offering a Morning EMH Park everyday. July has one everyday and so does August...that is until the weekend we arrive. Then on the day we depart I can't find one either?
See you do learn something new everyday.

 

[MHSweb79]

On the topic of luggage, I made sure we packed everything we needed for our first day in our carryon luggage, only to be horrified when my very expensive, allergy-free sunscreen was thrown out at security becuase it was more than 3 oz. I wanted to cry but I kept my mouth shut (with difficulty!) It never occured to me that my very thick cream was a "liquid" and I had to use my DH's Coppertone Sport that gives me a rash for the rest of the week....

So my tip is bring your own sunscreen and make sure everything in your carryon meets current standards.

 

[DianaLeslie]

My tip for today is any time you create a document plan on your computer either print it out or email it to yourself.

All my careful charts and plans of when parades are and who has EMHs on what day is on our tower. Which is currently not working and I swear knows to do this to me just weeks before any planned trip.


So in short, my tip is to Print everything as you go.

(I at least do have my ADR numbers written down and they are also stored in email.)

 

[jamieguffey]

Once again allears supplies this one. (There are Thousands of tips on there categorized by the particular subject matter)

Go here often: http://allears.net/rta/tips.php

One allears reader suggests getting a hanging shoe holder the kind with the clear pockets. Of course you can use it for your shoes, but it can also be used for a TON of other things to keep your room neat and organized.

Toiletries (Toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, hairbrushes, contact stuff, razors, etc etc.)
Kid's Stuff (Snacks, toys, stamps pressed penny M&M tubes, and on and on.)
Extra Batteries, Camera Media, etc
The possibilities are ENDLESS.

It can serve as a great way to organize your daily park stuff too. Hang it on the back of the door out of the room. When you come in. Throw your KTTW Cards, Photopass, cameras, etc in the pockets. Put them up high and you wont have to worry about the kiddies losing stuff.

I think I am going to get two of them one for the bathroom (apparently the value resorts are short on counter space.) and one for the door out.

 

[JeNScHuB]

I just bought on of the over the door storage pocket things at my local dollar tree! Thanks for the tip!

 

[jamieguffey]

So I was on allears last night looking through some tips (surprise) and I came to the travel -by air tips.

There must be 30 tips on there where people ran into trouble at airport security trying to get everything from gel filled reusable ice cubes to snow globes on the plane. So the tip today is a simple one. Go to the TSA website and print out the list of prohibited items, do a check before you leave for the airport on BOTH ENDS. You might have been all legal at home but it would certainly stink to have your child's favorite souvenir confiscated.

List is Here

http://www.tsa.gov/assets/pdf/prohibited_items_brochure.pdf

Of particular note is that Gel Shoe Inserts are not permitted, So if you are accustomed to Gellin', you better pack them in your checked baggage or you might become a felon!

 

[jamieguffey]

I have seen this in a couple of places. But have experienced it more times than I can count. Every time I have ever stayed at a hotel / motel for more that 2 or 3 days I have had to go back to the front desk at least once to get the key reactivated. From what I hear it is almost always a case of the strip being demagnetized. It is important to take care of your keys at Disney for one major reason. It can be a REALLY long walk back to the front desk (especially at an all star resort.) Getting off your bus at the end of the day with cranky kids and walking all the way to your room only to have to turn around and go back to the desk would not be fun.

Another option is to periodically stop by and make sure it is live.

 

[jamieguffey]

This another one that comes up a lot. Carry all of your ADR #'s with you to the meal? I have heard both sides of this. Some people say it isn't important some swear it is a necessity. I am not sure either way but it is not difficult to deal with so we plan to do it.

First off if you didn't write down all of your numbers or if you just want to confirm the numbers call wdw-dine and have them look you up. If you booked with Disney Travel they will look up your Resort confirmation number and your ADR's will be attached to that.

I am going to print ours out on a credit card sized piece of paper and laminate it so it will fit in my wallet.

 

[jamieguffey]

Holy cow 3 weeks from today at this exact time we will be about to board the plane for DISNEY WORLD!

I considered not posting this as a tip because I think my wife might look at this from time to time. But in EPCOT at the Japan Pavilion the have a pick your own pearl set up. I plan to surprise the wife as I don't think she knows about this (YET).

I could write up some stuff on it but everything you need to know is here:

Pearl Thread

It was started in 2007, the 2009 stuff starts around page 45 or so.

 

[mrstomrice]

This another one that comes up a lot. Carry all of your ADR #'s with you to the meal? I have heard both sides of this. Some people say it isn't important some swear it is a necessity. I am not sure either way but it is not difficult to deal with so we plan to do it.

First off if you didn't write down all of your numbers or if you just want to confirm the numbers call wdw-dine and have them look you up. If you booked with Disney Travel they will look up your Resort confirmation number and your ADR's will be attached to that.

I am going to print ours out on a credit card sized piece of paper and laminate it so it will fit in my wallet.

Here's a hint I learned from the Dis...enter your adr into your calendar on your cell phone. You can check your calendar to remind yourself what time your adr is and you'll have the adr # right there for you

 

[Piglets Mommy]

I have seen this in a couple of places. But have experienced it more times than I can count. Every time I have ever stayed at a hotel / motel for more that 2 or 3 days I have had to go back to the front desk at least once to get the key reactivated. From what I hear it is almost always a case of the strip being demagnetized. It is important to take care of your keys at Disney for one major reason. It can be a REALLY long walk back to the front desk (especially at an all star resort.) Getting off your bus at the end of the day with cranky kids and walking all the way to your room only to have to turn around and go back to the desk would not be fun.

Another option is to periodically stop by and make sure it is live.

This happened to me in 2007. I accidentally put my cell phone in the same pocket as my KTTW card, and it demagnified the stripe. I was in a store in DTD and went to charge my purchase to the room, but the card wouldn't work. Fortunately, I had my credit card with me, so it wasn't a big deal, but if we were in a restaurant trying to use dining plan credits, or trying to get into a park it would have been a pain to go all the way back to the hotel to get the card re-programmed. I immediately bought a lanyard with a pouch for my card, so it won't happen again.

 

[abandcsmom]

So the "Tip" today is listen to the veterans. Schedule Breaks and Save something for next year! I don't want the kids to miss anything but as the Unofficial Guide says something in the neighborhood of 70% of kids under 10 remembered and had the most fun at the Resort Pool. (It was something like that anyway).

Can I say that I have been going to WDW since birth and this just clicked with me on our trip in June of this year. I think it was because we planned our trip in a week and we were just all so happy to be there and the whole trip just seemed surreal, so we tried to do things we hadn't done before. We slept in some days, we rented a pontoon boat, we visited resorts we hadn't been to before, we did dance parties at Downtown Disney, we hung out at the pool. Our 3 year old only had one meltdown and that was on our first day before the whole "we don't have to do everything they have to offer on this trip" attitude kicked in. Our 7 year old says it was her best Disney trip yet. I think it was my best trip yet, too. So seriously, don't overplan. Don't spend 8 AM until 10 PM in the parks. Do the things that are important to you, but also take time to enjoy all the extras that make Disney special.

 

[abandcsmom]

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.

I did a photoshare on our trip last october with 9 stranger families. I wasn't the organizer, but in my mind, it couldn't have been a smoother process. We had to pay up front in order to be a part of the photoshare. At that time, the CDs were only $100, so it was $10 per family. I want to say going in that we also agreed that if someone didn't pay, whatever the cost would be covered by the other members in the photoshare and the person who didn't pay would not be give the username and password to log on to the photopass site. Maybe the people on my share were just super-responsible, but everyone paid up front, had their photos edited on the right day, the CDs were ordered (there were 5 CDs for our share), the organizer received the photos, burned them for us, and that was that. It was really fun to see all the pictures of other families in the photoshare and I got more than a couple of comments from other families about one really special picture taken of my sleeping 3 year old in Animal Kingdom. I also did not have any problem with having my pictures printed.

Regarding #1, I am the same as you on not using music sharing sites, not doing bootlegged movies, not using pirated software, etc. In my mind, Disney gives the owner of the account all rights to the photos on the CD. They give the owner the right to reproduce, broadcast, view, do whatever to the pictures on that CD. The owner of the accout (aka photoshare organizer) chooses to share all the photos with everyone in the photoshare. It wasn't a big leap to me.

I am doing a photoshare for my November trip, but we have a Grand Gathering of 4 families going, so we are just sharing the cost amongst ourselves.

 

[DISDANCEMOM]

This another one that comes up a lot. Carry all of your ADR #'s with you to the meal? I have heard both sides of this. Some people say it isn't important some swear it is a necessity. I am not sure either way but it is not difficult to deal with so we plan to do it.

First off if you didn't write down all of your numbers or if you just want to confirm the numbers call wdw-dine and have them look you up. If you booked with Disney Travel they will look up your Resort confirmation number and your ADR's will be attached to that.

I am going to print ours out on a credit card sized piece of paper and laminate it so it will fit in my wallet.

If you don't have your ADRs with you the consierge at the hotel can also print up all of your ADRs on one page for you.

 

[MidgeD79]

I saw the tip on the over-the-door organizer and ending up buying 3 of them (different styles/sizes). None of them fit over the bathroom door at Pop Century. The door was too wide.

 

[bjakmom]

Just wanted to say what a wonderful job you are doing with this thread, jamieguffey!
Haven't found anything that I don't agree with after 30+ trips.
I have always taken my ADR conf #s with me (I do index cards - one for each day) - in June they couldn't find my lunch ADR at Crystal Palace - I was really glad I had the # - they found it with that.

 

[poohbear8]

I saw the tip on the over-the-door organizer and ending up buying 3 of them (different styles/sizes). None of them fit over the bathroom door at Pop Century. The door was too wide.

I just remembered I had issues with this at ASMusic last year. I ended up hanging it from the wire shelf in the closet. It wasn't the most secure thing, but it held all of the brushes, ponytail holders, toothbrushes, etc.

 

[HerdOHuds]

This happened to me in 2007. I accidentally put my cell phone in the same pocket as my KTTW card, and it demagnified the stripe. I was in a store in DTD and went to charge my purchase to the room, but the card wouldn't work. Fortunately, I had my credit card with me, so it wasn't a big deal, but if we were in a restaurant trying to use dining plan credits, or trying to get into a park it would have been a pain to go all the way back to the hotel to get the card re-programmed. I immediately bought a lanyard with a pouch for my card, so it won't happen again.

It isn't necessary to return to the hotel to re-activate your KTTK card. Any customer service counter can help. I did it at the customer service at Epcot when I figured out the whole cell phone/key card issue. Took about 3 minutes to fix. I think I had to show ID IIRC.