Magic Bands

Jan, did you have special circumstances or a particular reason why you won't receive your bands until you get to Boardwalk? Just curious as we'll be staying there in April and I know there are still many experiments going on with the magic band implementation.

It's just because we are in Canada and they only ship them to addresses in the U.S. I'm a little disappointed we won't have them to use for the Magical Express.

Aw that's a bummer! Seems like they could at least include Canada. I mean, all the money they're shelling out on little Incredibles boxes with flash drives and personalized "your vacation's coming soon!" books...doesn't seem like a little extra postage would break the bank!

Well, we're exactly at the 3 week mark until we check in at the Boardwalk and we can still make changes to our Magic Bands online. Does it actually give you a cut off message at some point? Or do the changes just get ignored? We did get the "This is your last day to customize your Magic Bands" message a few weeks ago. Then the warning just went away and we can still customize.

Interesting.

I was actually surprised on Christmas Day. Over the years read some horror stories , but it really wasnt that bad. Dont get me wrong , it was crowded , but not shoulder to shoulder , cant move crowded. My wife & I remarked to each other several times during the day that we had experienced worse crowds there several times. We did plan ahead w/ Fastpass plus to get on our favorite rides , but honestly , Epcot the next day on Dec 26th was more of a zoo.

I customized my band for February. I'm going with blue this trip.

So I am sorry, I didn't read the whole thread. So I apologize for possible repetitive questions. But as a soon AP holder, I know these will be given to AP holders... Is it safe to assume that the band will become the AP card? (I really want a pink one)

Also, and you may or may not know any information about this, but do you have any idea how this affects Cast Members? My Brother will start working for the Company on January 18th, and I was just wondering if these bands are replacement to the Main Gate Pass.

That's great to know. I remember MK being full to capacity on Christmas Day when my kids were young. We just headed back to our RV in Ft. Wilderness.

From my understanding (since I am now in the middle of the whole mymagic+ testing) that magicbands will replace all tickets sometime this year. That also includes AP holders and cast members. But I don't know when this will actually take place since everything is still in the testing phases. Some think that magicbands will roll out for AP holders and cms around March. Not sure though since they are keeping a lot of it hush hush for now. Maingates are still being used and can't be linked up to the my Disney experience website.

Thanks for your answers. I guess in my Brothers case, it will be a game of wait and see I am just excited at the thought of getting a pink band xD (hopefully)

NHShorty and I are AP holders and used our Magic Bands during our recent stay in the world (12/29 to 12/31, a report will be forth coming) and didn't have any problems until we checked out of the WL on the 31st. They didn't work cleanly when we tried to get into the HS after check out. A couple of iPAD carrying CMs had to intercede. They basically waved their magic wands over our Magic Bands and asked me a couple of "security" questions like what park I had visited the day before. There were no problems with the Fast Pass+s we had, just trouble getting into the park.

As a side note, entry to the MK was shut off at 10:30 AM on the 31st due to the size of the crowd.

I may have mentioned this elsewhere, but it seems like this thread is a more appropriate location. We really loved our Magic Bands on our December 2013 trip. Everything that we used them for (PAP, room key, charging, park entry, FP+) worked like clockwork except for MVMCP and photopass.

We were told by a CM when we activated our PAP that they were having problems with linking MVMCP to the My Disney Experience account and that when they were linked, people were having trouble getting into MK prior to the start of the party on an annual pass because it would kick out an error message that entry for the party was not yet available. SO for that, we just used our paper tickets and it was fine. It was no extra hassle for us because the very attentive cast member who we spoke with at the ticket window knew what she was doing, but surely this is a glitch that will have to be worked out at some point.

For photopass, there are two specific instances (Rapunzel at Fairytale Hall and Merry Poppins w Bert and penguins at MVMCP) where I am quite certain that we took photos and I'm 99.9% positive that our bands were scanned, but the photos aren't on either of our photopass accounts. Fortunately, we keep our point & shoot and iphone ready, so we have the pictures, but they never showed up on photopass. All of the others we took were there including the 7 dwarfs picture from MVMCP (taken roughly an hour prior to the missing Mary Poppins photo) and the Snow White photos (take roughly 4 minutes after the Rapunzel photos.) It could just be a fluke or maybe out bands didn't scan properly because I wasn't paying very close attention to the scanning procedure, but all of the CM's who were running the photopass stations seemed to be very conscientious, so I'm leaning more toward technology glitch than toward human error.

One funny thing about Magic Bands that I hadn't considered were the constant "oh crap!" moments when I would lock the car and we would be walking toward the tram and every morning I would momentarily freak out because I couldn't remember what I did with my ticket. Because it was on my arm. Doh! So it's super convenient, but old habits die hard!

Wow, good thing you had those pictures on your camera as well! That could make for some big disappointments if a little kid's favorite character was missing or something

You can buy Disney "sliders " and bling them put. Or even a different band cover. I saw them online and I understand that they were selling them at AKL.

This seems to be a common occurrence on New Year's Eve. We were in MK on our Honeymoon in 2003 and the park was at capacity at 10-10:30 in the morning. We were going to try to make it to midnight, but when the noisemakers were handed out at 4:00, we quit! Our plan was to hop to EPCOT since its a much larger park, but I fell asleep and missed everything!

I had friends that were at Epcot on NYE. They just got back yesterday so I haven't gotten the low down yet on how crowds were.

I saw this and just wanted to inform you guys! More resorts are going to do the no KTTWC test this year.

http://www.orlandoparksnews.com/2014/01/all-walt-disney-world-hotels-testing.html

They make the bands in Kentucky?? How cool!!! Do you know where?

Thanks Mr. Hub, It's still pretty cool to know a little bit of the Magic is being sent from my beloved Kentucky!

I'm not very sure how this is going to work for us coming from the UK, we will have 3week Disney Ultimate tickets, but are only staying onsite at the Beach Club for the last 5 days our tickets will be valid, though we will have MNSSHP tickets and MVMCP tickets for before and after we use our 3wk tickets. And I am planning resort ADRs for earlier and later than that to spread the Disney Magic throughout our whole trip.
Will we get Magic Bands instead of tickets, or will we only get them for the time we are staying onsite at the Beach Club? I know they won't ship them to us as we are in the UK.

As far as the magical express with wrist bands..I'am just off the phone with Disney rep and explained we will be flying into MCO instead of Sanford for the first time..Our wrist bands will be waiting at the resort concierge but you just inform Disney that you will be using the ME and there's no problem with that..They notify the ME bus driver with all the info..

Ok, I have a question about our existing magic bands and the ME. We now have active magic bands from being at WDW in January (since our Canadian address was considered international, we had to wait and pick up the bands at the resort at check in) so logic dictates that we should be able to use them this fall to get on the ME. Has anyone experienced this scenario yet?

Hi JanJ...I live in the states so I don't know if it would be different but I wouldn't think so...so here goes. I went to disney this past October and am going again in May. So I called disney and asked about my MB from October and I was told all I have to do is activate it and am good to go. So now I will have 2 MB as I picked out a new one for this upcoming trip. The person said that this will change down the road where you can active previous MB....but for now you can. Well that is what I was told anyway.

Thanks mrhub and kathys - that is exactly what I thought. MDE still shows our January bands as being active and we also get new ones for our September trip so I will be trying the existing ones to get on the ME!