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A Trip to Disney World, part 2 – Magic Bands and Fast Passes

Disney World has started using things called Magic Bands in lieu of the room key cards that they used to have. The bonus is that these bands (you wear them on your wrist like a watch) are your room key, credit card, park admission, and fast pass access all in one. (The down side might be that if you lose it, someone else has all those things until you get yours deactivated and reissued.) For whatever reason, we were able to customize our Magic Bands online before our vacation, so we each had a different color and our name on the inside. It’s also nice that there’s a grey outer piece that can be peeled away from the colored inset (the default is grey on grey if you don’t customize them ahead of time) to make it a better size for kid wrists without a ton of left over wristband dangling around.

All in all, we liked the Magic Bands. They’re convenient and unobtrusive. And the kids loved scanning them and making the Mickey turn green. My band did pop off twice when it got snagged on the littlest’s shorts (had to hold him a lot) – so you’ll want to keep an eye on them, but they weren’t easy to snag off – I don’t think many people will have that problem.

Fast Passes. Oh Fast Passes…these have replaced the old ticket system. It’s now all electronic. You get 3 Fast Passes per day per guest. You get to schedule them 90 days out (I believe that’s the right timing – they’ll tell you) and if you’re relatively new to Disney World you’ll want to think about that a bit before you get on and start clicking on Fast Passes. The key here is to try and group your Fast Passes in the same area of the park. The first day we were at Magic Kingdom, it felt like we spent the entire day getting to go on our three FP rides and very little else because we were walking from Tomorrow Land to Adventure Land and back again to get to the three rides. Poor planning on my part and our feet paid the price.

The nice thing about the FPs is you get a 1 hour window. So you arrive between, say, 11:30 and 12:30 at your ride. You go to the Fast Pass entrance, scan your Magic Band, and you skirt the line. There are two ways it works from there. On some rides (and on busier days on those rides, I think) they actually have one set of cars/boats/whatever designated for Fast Pass riders and the other load on for the stand by riders (stand by is what they call the just stand in line and wait your turn people). On other rides, you get to the second FP scan point (you scan at the start and then close to the load on area) and they mix you in with the other riders. So you may end up still having to wait in a little bit of a line before you actually get on the ride, even if you have a Fast Pass, but you skip most of it so it’s usually worthwhile.

Theoretically you can change your Fast Passes through the Disney World app. It didn’t work for us the whole time we were there (though the app is awesome for seeing wait times and maps and height requirements for rides), so we fiddled on the laptop back in the room at night after we realized that we needed to group things closer to one another or in some kind of logical order.

That’s the other thing – once you reserve your Fast Passes online, you can edit them and often get better times than the defaults they suggest when you first choose them. This is key for making the experience more useful. Don’t just take what they suggest the first time you make the reservation. Play around with the times after you’ve confirmed them until you get a plan that isn’t going to leave you criss crossing the park every hour.

Finally, some rides just aren’t worth it without a Fast Pass, whereas others are. For us, the Seven Dwarves Mine Train typical wait time was 75 minutes. We couldn’t get a fast pass for it for love or money, so when we saw it at 60 minutes, we jumped on line. Not. Worth. It. The ride is fun, but very, very short and not anything super special (I think the line for it is crazy because it’s new? Not sure, it’s a good ride, but really just not worth those kinds of wait times.) I’d also say Peter Pan’s Flight would be better if you can get a Fast Pass (but they’re hard to come by as well).

There are kiosk areas in the park where you can tweak your passes if the app isn’t working, but the lines for those were so long when we were there we just went with it, losing our FP if we couldn’t get over there in time for a few rides.

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