Magic Bands, My Disney Experience, and FastPass+

We've been hearing a lot about the new Magic Bands and FastPass+ system being tested at Walt Disney World over the past several months.  Well, now it's our turn to give it a try.  We just got emails inviting us to customize our Magic Bands and make FastPass+ reservations for our upcoming trip.  Let's see what the process is like.

MyMagic+

MyMagic+ is the name for Disney's project, which includes the My Disney Experience website and mobile app, Magic Bands, and FastPass+ reservation system.  Disney's been hard at work on this for over 4 years, and guests are finally starting to see some of it with the rollout of the new website, and the testing of Magic Bands and FastPass+ at the Walt Disney World Resort.

Just a few days ago, we received some Mickey Mail, which included a customized guidebook, as well as a cool Mickey USB drive pictured above.  On the USB drive were a couple of shortcuts to videos about the program.  The USB drive can hold about 4GB and is ours to keep!

http://www.disneyworld.com/incredible/

http://www.disneyworld.com/incredible2/

My Disney Experience

The My Disney Experience is a new section of the Walt Disney World website that organizes your Resort reservations, tickets and passes, dining reservations, and FastPass+ reservations in one place.  In order to use the site, you must have an account, which you can sign up for free of charge. (If you have and existing Disney account, it should have transferred over to the new system). Once you have an account, you can add information for all your family members, and link your reservations using the confirmation numbers.

We had an existing account under my name, to which I added Lisa, Bella, and Jackson.  Once our upcoming reservation had been made, I was able to link it to our account by providing the confirmation number.  Then, when we bought our Annual Passes this summer, I was able to link them to each family member as well.

There is also a "Family and Friends" feature, that allows you to share and see plans of other accounts by inviting them via email.  This is helpful if your traveling with a large group or meeting up with friends while at Disney.

At 180 days out, we made our dining reservations and they were automatically linked to our account.  If they are not linked, you can do so using the confirmation number. 

With the free mobile app, we can access all this information on our phones, as well as make modifications or new reservations.

Magic Bands:

Photo from Disney's website.

Magic Bands are Disney's new wearable devices.  They look like bracelets, and contained embedded RFID (radio frequency identification) chips.   These bands act as your room key, park ticket, and eventually much more.  PhotoPass has already moved over to the My Disney Experience website, so using the bands to link your photos to your account should be coming very soon!

When I first went to Walt Disney World as a kid, I had a paper ticket that would be stamped with the date I used it.  Later, that changed over to paper tickets with a magnetic strip like a credit card, or a hard plastic "Key to the World" card that acted as our resort room key as well as park ticket.

On our latest trip, our Key to the World card had the embedded RFID chip, which made accessing our room slightly easier.  It still had to be inserted into the park turnstiles like the old magnetic strip tickets, so that was the same.  Where it got clumsier was using it to pay for things.  In the shops and restaurants there was the added step of entering your pin code.  This wasn't so bad in the stores, but in the restaurants, the servers would have to bring the equipment for reading your card and entering your pin to the table.  They also needed to do this in the beginning of your meal, which added to the awkwardness.

Customizing Your Magic Bands

Once we received the email confirming that we would have Magic Bands for our upcoming trip, we were given the option to customize them using the My Disney Experience website.

In the upper right, there is a box letting you know how many days you have to customize your bands before they are shipped to your home.

You customize the bands individually for each family member.  Jackson also gets a band even though he is under 3 years old and doesn't require a park ticket.  I had already customized my band to be green with my name.  I still needed to do everyone else's bands.

The bands default to grey, and have your name as it appears on your account.  You can choose between Red, Green, Pink, Blue, Orange, Gray, or Yellow for your band color, and you can change your name to whatever you like, up to 9 characters long, including letters, numbers or spaces.  (Letters are case-sensitive, but no special characters are allowed)

If you don't customize your bands, you'll receive generic gray bands at your resort when you check in.

Now, these bands are provided at no extra charge, but you do have the option of accessorizing your bands to make them even more.  Accessories can be purchased in the resort and park gift shops.

FastPass+

We've been fans of Disney's FastPass system ever since we first tried it years ago.  If you've never used it, it was basically a ride reservation system.  In each park, certain attractions had the option of getting a FastPass to return at a later time for a shorter wait, as opposed to standing in the regular standby line.  Often that would mean you could avoid standing in an hour long line if you went and did something else and came back later, and your wait then would be 10 minutes, maybe less.

We quickly adapted our park strategy to account for the FastPass system.  And now, Disney's changing it with FastPass+.

What's the difference?

The good: 

• More attractions offered, including parades and shows.  
• The ability to make reservations before you arrive, from anywhere you can access website or mobile app.
• Modify reservations as your plans change.  
• Reservation window now an hour long.
• No more paper tickets, reservations linked to Magic Bands.

The Bad:

• Limit of 3 FastPass+ reservations per person, per day.
• Limit of one park per day 
• Potential for Reservations to run out prior to park opening.
• Tiered choices mean you can't use all your FP+ on one ride, or all on "tier 1" rides.

*FastPass+ is still in the testing phase.  We have no idea if this is exactly how it will be once it is offered to everyone.


We haven't used it yet, so I'm trying to reserve judgment until I see how it works in the park, but I'll admit that the limitations of 3 per day and the "tier" system are disappointing.  We often used more than 3 FastPasses in a single day, and sometimes more than once for the same ride. 

Too bad they aren't more like dining plan credits, so you are allotted a certain number based on how long your stay is and how many people are in your party, and then you can choose to allocate how many you use each day, and who uses them.  But perhaps that is something we will see in the future with additional FP+ upgrades that you can purchase, like some have been speculating?

Making your FastPass+ Reservations

Since we had an idea of which park we would be visiting each day of our trip, we could make our FP+ reservations for each day.  We quickly found out that this is quite a process, with many many steps.  

*Tickets are required to make FP+ selections.  In our case, all four of us have Magic Bands, but only 3 have tickets.  So we can only choose FP+ for those three family members.

Step 1: Select a Day

you can see here that we already made FP+ selections for EPCOT on Thursday, along with a Dining reservation.  So I selected Friday to make more reservations.

Step 2: Choose members of your party to make FP+ selections for.

You can select just certain family members, or use the "select all" in the upper right.  If most of your reservations are going to be the same, then I'd suggest using the "select all", and then going back to modify those few that are different. 

Step 3: Select a Park   (You can only choose one for the day)

We plan to spend the whole day at the Magic Kingdom, so the choice was easy for us.  If park hopping, the best you can do is to choose the park you most want to use your FP+ selections for.

Step 4: Choose your 3 FP+ Experiences.   (You must choose 3).  

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Depending on the park, the attractions may be tiered, meaning there will be a group of attractions categorized as "tier 1", of which you can only choose 1, and the other 2 selections must be made from the remaining "tier 2" attractions. 

Right Now, Epcot and Disney's Hollywood Studios have tiered listings.  If you choose less than 3 experiences, the remaining will be chosen for you when your options are presented.

Step 5: Prioritize your 3 experiences by importance.

I'm not sure if this is supposed to determine the order in which the selections are made, or if it is just used for resolving conflicts if the only available time slots are the same?  In our case, it didn't seem to matter.  I wouldn't agonize over this step.

Step 6: Choose your Options.  

You are presented with 4 options, labeled A - D.  (One of these letter options will be replaced with "Best Match").  Each option has designated different times for your selected attractions.  Choose the one that best works for you, keeping in mind that you can go back and alter any or all of your selections.  Ultimately, none of these options was perfect, but it seemed that for the most part it grouped our options together in time periods.  

At this point in this process, we ran into our first snag.  When we tried to confirm these options, we got a page saying that one of our party (me) had reached their FP+ limit.  Our options were to continue with the rest of the party only, or to "trade" options from another day for these.

We chose to proceed without me, in hopes of fixing it later, and confirmed the FP+ selections for Lisa and Bella.  

After doing some research, it seems that Annual Passholders have a limit of 7 days of FP+ reservations they can be holding at any one time.  We are AP holders, but this was only the second day of reservations we were making, so this must have been a glitch of some kind.

We tried a few more times to get FP+ selections for myself, with no luck.  Along the way, we got a few more errors:

Hopefully these glitches will all get ironed out as the testing progresses.

The good news is that I was able to get my FP+ reservations for that day, eventually, thanks to a tip from a friend who suggested that I "copy" the FP+ reservations from Lisa or Bella to myself.

For some reason, this worked, and I now have virtually the same reservations as they do.

Step 7:  Manage your FP+ Selections.  

If your experience is like ours, then none of the options presented to you will be perfect.  So, you'll want to tweak them by changing the times, or possibly swapping out one attraction for another.  This is where you do that, and this adds another 4 or 5 steps for each change you want to make.

From the page listing our itinerary for the day, choose "Manage FastPass+" from the "Add Plans" Drop-Down Menu.

"Select or Replace" will throw away current options, if any, and start a new selection.  Using this is just like starting all over.

"Change" will let you modify your selection by changing the attraction for the same time slot, or by changing the time slot for the same attraction. 

"Copy" will let you copy all FP+ selections from one person to another.  You can't copy just one or two. This will copy all of them.  

"Cancel" will bring up a list of all your FP+ selections for each person and let you choose to cancel any or all for that day.  

Choose which selection you want to modify.  (We have two listings for Enchanted Tales with Belle because the window I eventually got was slightly different than Lisa and Bella's)

For that selection, select if you want to change the experience or the time, and which family members the change will apply to.  Under Current Experiences, the one in bold type is the one you are changing.

We chose to modify the time, and were presented with a good range to choose from.  I assume it didn't show us anything before 10am or between 11:30 and 12:30 because of our other FP+ reservations in those slots.

FastPicks

A few times throughout the process, you have the option of clicking to select "FastPicks".  If you want, you can let Disney choose your selections for you.  You have three options:

1. Select the day, and let Disney select the Park, then you can select experiences.
2. Select the Day, and let Disney select the Park AND experiences
3. Let Disney make selections for your entire stay

Just to see what would come up, I asked Disney to select a Park and Experiences for me on one day, knowing I could cancel them. 

Disney selected EPCOT, and of my 3 experiences, only 1 was one I might have changed as long as these were just for me alone.  Soarin' and Mission Space are pretty popular FP+ attractions.  Living with the Land is not necessarily an attraction that has a long wait, so using FP+ on that is debatable.

I don't think I'm adventurous enough to let Disney select my entire trip, however.  


Final Thoughts

In short, customizing Magic Bands was super-easy.  Making FastPass+ selections gave me a headache.  I can't even begin to imagine what it will be like to try and change my selections using the mobile app once we get to the parks.  Hopefully it won't be as bad since I already have selections made, and I'll just be modifying them.

We look forward to seeing how this all plays out in the park.  We've still got over a month to go until we arrive, and hopefully things will go smoothly.  We may even try this little trick we learned from Kenny the Pirate on getting more FastPass+ selections, if it still works by then.

Stay tuned to find out how it goes.

Do any of you have experience with Magic Bands and FastPass+??  We'd love to hear what you think?