Tag: disney-world

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2014 Disney World

My Magic Band Experience

We were fortunate to be part of one of the first roll outs of Magic Bands last September during our stay at Disney’s Pop Century resort. Overall I am very pleased with them. We never used cash or our credit cards once. We did have to use our key to the world card at one table service restaurant, I’m not sure why though.

Things I love about Magic Bands:

  • Don’t really need to carry a wallet.
  • The server using our Magic Bands to locate us in Be Our Guest restaurant was so cool.
  • They control everything.
  • They’re always accessible. (This will be much more important on our next trip as trying to juggle money, Harry and a stroller at the same time will be challenging.)

I have two minor annoyances with the Magic Band system.

  1. Typing in a PIN each time is a pain. I see why it’s necessary for security but why can’t it be like some MasterCard/Visa payments that do not require a PIN for low cost items? Maybe it is because Disney doesn’t have any low cost items? 🙂
  2. Sometimes “getting the Mickeys to touch” is difficult. A few instances I had trouble getting the Mickey to turn green. Worse case it took me 2-3 attempts (a couple extra seconds) but maybe increasing the range of the RFID scanner a bit would help? Not really a big deal. The more I used the Magic Band the easier it was to get it to work on the first try.

Other than that, I have no other complaints about the new Magic Bands. I can’t wait to get our new ones during our fall Disney World excursion. Little Harry gets one too. We even let him pick his own colour.

Categories
2014 Disney World

Free Dining

Staying 9 nights at Disney World during free dining equals a lot of food. Unlike last time our plans will be a little more modest. We will not ever again eat 2 table service meals in 1 day, nor will we be scheduling any extra dinner shows out-of-pocket like last time. This year. We will be trying two signature restaurants which will use more dining credits so we won’t have to stuff our selves silly every night. This will even give us a night off to snack around the world in Epcot since we will be going during the food and wine festival.

We made the reservations 180 days in advance, getting up each day at 6am. We got everything we wanted except Be Our Guest. We keep trying several times each day but still no luck.

Here’s our table service dining lineup.

Categories
2014 Disney World

Disney World 2014

We’re going again! This time we’ll let little Harry tag along. I figure he’s old enough now to meet Money Mouse. We will be going in the fall and staying at Pop Century again, this time for 9 nights. It will be a VERY different type of trip with the boy as he is too short to go on any “thrill” rides. We will also have to slow down our touring style a bit. Instead of dodging the families with strollers this time we’ll be one of them. It’s not all bad though, with Harry along we can get away with doing more kids centric activities like character dining and meet and greets. I’m sure we’ll feel a little less conspicuous during “Turtle Talk with Crush” not having to pretend one the children at the front is our kid. I’m also happy to use Harry as an excuse to play in the “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids” playground. Oh yah and he’s free. And that’s not a word you hear too often at Disney World.

Categories
2013 Disney World

Disney World FastPass+ for Be Our Guest Lunch

Signed up for a FastPass+ for Be Our Guest lunch on our Magic Kingdom day. Process was very interesting. Entered our numeric reservation ID from our luggage tags and the system let us in. We were then able to select a 15 minute window to arrive at Be Our Guest and also had the option to pre-select our meal choices. From what I have been reading pre-selecting will save us even more time. Excited to see how this works. I was originally planning to line up for BOG lunch at 10:30am, now I don’t have to waste precious park time waiting in line.