FastPass+ and MagicBands: A Report on My Field Trip and Other Stuff, Part Two

I’ve been paying attention to MyMagic+ and FastPass+  for years—so far as I can tell, my first post about what we now know as MyMagic+ and FastPass+  was almost three and a half years ago. (Click the link to see how far off I was!)

Invitation-only testing of FastPass+ began late last year, with a particularly large group invited this summer.

I didn’t expect to be lucky enough to be invited—I’d used up most of my luck when I married lovely wife Amy Girl, and the rest at a Stroh’s beer contest at the Pub in Ida Noyes Hall way back in college, where I won 5 raffle prizes, including the Grand Prize, First Prize and Second Prize…

But I really really wanted to test them—the MagicBands and FastPass+, not Stroh’s–both so I could tell readers about the experience, and could form an opinion on information systems readiness.

So I was delighted to read on PortOrleans.org that all September visitors to Port Orleans Riverside with arrival dates after 9/3 would get a chance to test MagicBands and FastPass+!

I immediately booked a later September quick two-night visit to Riverside.  It showed up right away in MyDisneyExperience (I had already linked everything up, including my annual pass, in earlier 2013; you need both tickets and a Disney hotel booked and linked to use FastPass+–see this and this) and I was booking FastPass+ within minutes.

You don’t, by the way, have to wait to be invited.  I’m not even sure invitations are going out anymore—I found out online, then got both email and UPS invites.  See this.

Like an idiot, I did my first round of FastPass+ reservations before I booked my flight, based on the logic at the end of this page. Then I booked my flight, discovering they were unusually lousy and expensive—it turns out a lot of people were going from Northeast Ohio that weekend to a convention in Orlando—then changed up my selections for both Friday (at the Magic Kingdom) and Sunday (at Epcot) to match my arrival and departure times.

The press of the real job and my required professional reading meant I couldn’t stay any longer or get there any sooner, and I was particularly bummed to have to abandon my FastPass+ for Illuminations Sunday—as I would be changing planes in Newark then…

So the way it works is first you pick the people in your party you are selecting FastPass+ for, then pick a date, then a park.  There’s a lot of not-too-obvious “Next” buttons at the top and bottom of the pages, but you get used to these quickly.

You are then presented with a list of FastPass+ you can book in that park that day, and you select up to three—you have the opportunity to prioritize them, but I didn’t test that part.  I (almost entirely) picked stuff that builds heavy lines, especially offerings that aren’t available in the traditional Fastpass program—e.g. Enchanted Tales with Belle, Fantasmic, and the lamented Illuminations.

Disney then offers you four options for these FastPass+ choices—and not all of them may be in all the options.  One is recommended as “Best Match!” and the others are labeled some subset of “Option A” through “Option D”.

Since I wanted late Friday (flight), late Saturday (for a more efficient tour with Fantasmic) and mid-day Sunday (flight) I ended up picking something other than “Best Match” Friday and Sunday.

The offers were pretty tight.  FastPass+ windows are one hour, but there’s no “two hours between Fastpasses” rule when using them.  Typically among the offers two of my three experiences were in consecutive hours, and the third was separated by an hour.

This whole scheduling thing was easy for me, by the way, because it was a solo trip, so I didn’t have to negotiate preferences with anyone. I could focus on my favorites what I thought I needed to test for my readers.  I’m at Disney World 6 or more times a year, and most of those trips are solo. I can’t afford to bring the whole family, and I’m often on so very specific an agenda—like on this trip—that I drive my family crazy anyway…

More boring details on this topic are here… but now that I think of it, I haven’t had all that solo a 2013 at Walt Disney World—

My January/February trip was solo, but the February/March visit included Amy Girl…

…and the Test Niecelets…

… the May visit was partially solo and partially with Son #1…

…and the August visit was partially solo and partially with Son # 2.

Maybe as this site matures I’m less of a pain to visit with….no, that can’t be it.

So anyway by this point I had the hotel and lousy air reservations, the cheapest rental car available in the terminal, and my FastPass+ reservations.

Next was ordering and customizing my MagicBands, which was much easier than I thought it would be.  (FastPass+ was easy but took a lot of screens; the MagicBand was just easy.)

It arrived pretty quickly in a plain brown box, like—I imagine, I have no experience with this—a porn stash.  More details on customizing your MagicBands are here.

Next was on-line check-in.  I went through the screens, asking for a corner room near transportation (most corner rooms at the moderates have two windows).

I got an error message at the end saying that on-line check-in hadn’t worked, and didn’t get the usual confirming email, but when I went back in to try again later, I was warned that “someone else in my party had already done on-line check-in and that if I continued the stored credit card might be changed.”  Or something.  Well, we can’t have that, so I just let it go.   For such a short trip, I didn’t really care where my room was…

At some point in the middle of all this I signed up for twitter for the first time ever (@yourfirstvisit) and promised to tweet my way through my test of FastPass+ and MagicBands.

I had at least 75 followers LOL by the time I arrived!  The best part of tweeting about this—when I remembered to do so—is that I didn’t have to take as many notes…by which I mean I took no notes.

Look, people, with twitter in one hand and the new camera in the other, what more do you want of me? Plus there were Incidents–most involving bathrooms–and even blood. And I printed out all my twiddling as an aide memoire…

The day before departure I checked in for my flight—and there were no free seats available for assignment left, and a notice popped up asking if I could go at another time…

Those together were a bad sign, suggesting that the flight was overbooked.  The worst spot to be in when a flight is overbooked is to have no assigned seats, so I bit the bullet and paid for upgraded seats both ways. This was not a visit where being bumped to a different flight was gonna work! So it was like Universal Express…

Friday morning dawned with thunderstorms rolling across Lake Erie north of the airport. They did not, however, affect the families, conventioneers, and MagicBand testers on the flight.

I was a little bummed that even with the very high starting price and the add of the upgraded seats, I still ended up in Boarding Group Number 5.  Only felons boarded later. But though the flight was full I still found a place for my rolley-bag.

The first ten years of my working life as a strategy consultant at McKinsey, I was on the road 120 nights a year, and airlines and hotels treated me like a god. Lately, not so much.

The usual at MCO, and around noon I rolled into Port Orleans Riverside. It seemed like my on-line reservation in fact hadn’t gone through—though I was there when I said I would be, the stuff wasn’t already printed out, etc.

But I still got a corner room near transportation—in Building 37, which is in Alligator Bayou near the North Depot bus stop.  So maybe it did work…

As soon as I’d checked in I put on my MagicBand (it was a little tricky at first to put on single-handed…most people won’t have to deal with this problem!) and went off to buy something with it!

Specifically, I went to the concierge desk right there in the lobby and got tickets for the Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party that night.

The MagicBand worked like a charm. You hold it up to a reader, wait for the cast member to remember to turn the reader on, hold it up to the reader again, wait for the cast member to remember to tap something on their side, then enter your PIN number (which you will have set before or at the time of check-in).

Everything I  bought at WDW on this trip I bought using the MagicBand. All in it’s faster and simpler than charging to your room and signing the charge slip, even though it doesn’t feel all that fast.  And it’ll get even faster as the cast members get more used to the workflow.

In the applications that you care about, it’s the Mickey head on the MagicBand that does the work, and it needs to be pretty close to the RFID  reader—whether the reader is a park turnstile, FastPass+ return reader, cash register reader, room lock, or resort vehicle gate reader.

I never did quite figure out the best place for the Mickey head.  You want the MagicBand on the opposite wrist of the finger you use for the ticket reader (so you can get both read at once) but beyond that you may be twisting it about on your wrist.

For purchases, it seemed to work best to have the Mickey head at the bottom of my wrist—that is, the opposite of where most people wear their watch faces.

But when using it as a room key, and on the readers that let you back into your resort hotel if you are driving, having it in the outside of the wrist “karate chop” position worked better.

Off to the room, which was about as far as from the main services at Riverside as it could be, but right around the corner from both a quiet pool and bus stop.  The MagicBand worked great at getting me in.

Over the past year, room locks have been replaced with RFID readers across WDW, and they are almost done.  (This really threw off Amy Girl during our Old Key West visit last December—while I was off with the boys, she actually took the lock apart looking for the slot to stick her room key into.)

Since I’ve locked myself out of my rooms at all of the large moderates over the years, and only when staying as far as I could be from replacement keys, I was happy to never take the MagicBand off except when I went off property to work at one of the Starbucks I frequent on such visits.

Others will take their MagicBands off except when they are directly using them. And others won’t wear them at all–it works just fine without being on your wrist—you can stick it in a pocket or purse like an oversized watch, and pull it out as needed.

The first thing I did in my room was take all the usual room shots I do.  I’d just stayed in and rewritten my review of the Alligator Bayou rooms from my visit in November 2012, but the new camera gets such better shots that I took more to replace the phone-camera shots in the other review.  Haven’t gotten to that yet.

Above is an example of Alligator Bayou rooms from the old camera…

…and the new one.

My FastPass+ for Friday were set up as Space Mountain 2-3p, then Peter Pan 4-5, Enchanted Tales with Belle 5-6, and Under the Sea: Journey of the Little Mermaid 6 til park close at 7p.  (The fourth FastPass+ was a bonus offered after I signed up for the other 3; I’d seen it on our December trip, and in Disney’s California Adventure, was underwhelmed, and so planned to skip it.)

So I got on my laptop and logged into MyDisneyExperience and changed my Space Mountain FastPass+ from 2-3 to 3-4, which created enough time to go do some work reading at the quiet pool!

I had no trouble changing the times of such rides on my visit, but don’t expect that it will be so easy once more people are using FastPass+.

Then it was off to the Magic Kingdom!  By bus, as pretty much always, since driving to MK adds time.  I’d planned the trip to miss the tail of the 3p parade.  I didn’t, but made my way to Tomorrowland mostly through the stores on the east side of Main Street, so had no trouble.

Crowds at the Magic Kingdom were light, as they usually are on September days when the Halloween Party closes the park at 7p.

The FastPass+ reader on Space Mountain worked like a charm, and I was on and off the ride quite easily! Of course, posted stand-by waits were only 15 minutes, so I didn’t really need a FastPass+…but this was a test!  And in the interests of science, I rode it again, standby.

Then I grabbed a late lunch at Cosmic Ray’s, then off to Peter Pan and Fastpass+ there, and then Splash Mountain!  FastPass+ worked great on Peter Pan! Like on Space Mountain, standby lines were short—ten minutes on Big Thunder and Splash Mountains!  September is really a great time to go for repeat visitors.

I warn first timers off of the month, though—that whole “peak of the hurricane season” thingy. Not much of a hurricane season this year (so far)—but good planning is based on what reasonably might happen, not what in fact does happen, cause you can’t know that when you plan.

For some reason I hadn’t been to the new Tangled area on my May or August trips, so I checked that out.  It really opens up this corner of the park in an almost unrecognizable way!

I also gave the new Tangled bathrooms a look.  The decorations in them include frying pans!   Kerri wanted me to tweet a photo, but I think taking photos in a Disney World bathroom, besides being icky,  is grounds to be banned for life, so I declined.

Next was the FastPass+ for Enchanted Tales with Belle.  I had plenty of time, so decided to check the bathrooms near Gaston’s Tavern for any hitherto-unnoticed cooking implements.

But my crocs were just about tread-less (I’d planned to buy a new set of Mickey crocs on this visit) and I slipped in the Gaston baths, tearing up my upper arm in a spot I couldn’t see (and I didn’t think to look at the wound in the mirror).  So I grabbed some paper towels and used them as a pressure bandage, which didn’t seem to have much effect on the frank bleeding.  So still holding the bandage, with blood dripping down my arm, I started making my way to the first aid station near the Crystal Palace, glum that perhaps my evening was over.

The bleeding stopped around a hundred feet from the aid station, so I turned around and headed back to Belle.  My FastPass+ was about to expire. Though I looked like roadkill, I really wanted to see how FastPass+ worked in Belle…and see Belle again, on whom I have almost as big a crush as I do on Ariel.  Plus I wasn’t gonna be the center of anyone’s attention, right? So it didn’t matter that my arm was a bloody mess…

The FastPass+ line for Enchanted Tales with Belle goes down the left side and along the building—you enter the ride in Maurice’s workshop—the room with the magic door.

The door did its usual magic, and we went into the room where Mrs. Potts is helped out by cast members in recruiting the troupe for the re-creation of Belle’s tale.

I was almost immediately picked by the cast member to play Suit of Armor.  I didn’t see much value to the yourfirstvisit.net brand (I was wearing one of the “yourfirstvisit.net” t-shirts Amy Girl and the boys had gotten me a couple of Christmases ago) from ducking out…so I didn’t.  So much for not being the center of attention.

So there are now a lot of family videos of the darling playlet that’s the heart of Enchanted Tales with Belle that show a Suit of Armor with an oddly bloody arm…. but a great t-shirt!

I did not do a very good job in the role—there was a cast member assigned to me seemingly full time to keep me on cue, and I believe Lumiere yelled at me at one point—but I still got to do a photo with Belle!

I was by this point a little shell-shocked and very bummed that MK remains a dry park.  At the other parks I woulda had two or three drinks by now.  Instead I rode Splash Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain again, got my Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party wristbands and program, and wandered around taking photos of costumes for the Magical Blogorail Teal post on the topic the upcoming week.

It’d been a tough week on the real job, and I was getting pretty tired. Plus perhaps I was weak from loss of blood 🙂 .  I watched the Boo to You parade, checked out the Woody and Jess dance party, and had myself ensconced in a chair I’d scored at the upper level of the Main Street train station at 8.50p to wait for the 9.30 “HalloWishes” fireworks, which I love and wanted to shoot for the review. I’d never, ever, gotten a chair here before.

I woke with a start at 9.10p.  Perhaps I had been snoring.  I never do that at home, but have been known to purr quite loudly. Anyway I punted on the fireworks and headed back to Port Orleans Riverside and went to bed…

Saturday I slept in til 8.30a and worked on the site until it was time to head to the Studios.

I had  FastPass+ for Toy Story Midway Mania from 4.40 to 5.40p, then Rock N’ Roller Coaster from 6.25 to 7.25p, then Fanstasmic—for an 8p show—from 7.25 til 7.45p.

I saw Toy Story Mania—I’d never seen it after 1p before, this FastPass+ stuff is kinda cool—and then sang along to Mulch, Sweat and Shears, somewhat to my astonishment.

There were thousands of oddly dressed people about—the women were dressed most typically as 20’s flappers or as 30’s femme fatales, the men less identifiably so, but with suspenders—and I couldn’t figure out why…the Studios was an odd place for a themed wedding reception, which was all I could think of.  (Though it’s not clear to me where a good place for a themed wedding reception would be…)

Or perhaps it was a protest over Art of Animation replacing Pop Century’s “Legendary Years” buildings?

Mystified, I then I ate at the ABC Commissary (because Backlot Express closed just when I got there).

Then Rock N Roller, where the FastPass+ reader didn’t work, but they let me into the Fastpass return line anyway, and sitting next to me was one of the oddly dressed.  He told me—before we started screaming–that it was “Dapper Day” at the Studios, and things became clearer.

Or to be more honest, one mystery was replaced with another.

Off Rock N’ Roller I started loitering by Fantasmic, drinking.  Though the Studios weren’t crowded, I’d seen people lining up at 6.30 for the 8p show. My goal—in the service of you, dear reader—was to use my FastPass+ at near the last minute to see what kind of seats I’d get then.   So I went to the return line at 7.40 (my FastPass+ was good til 7.45.)

The Fantasmic FastPass+ seats are in the center section, left, and are just fine (and the Fantasmic Dinner Show seats, just to the right of them, are MUCH better than they used to be). As at Rock N’ Roller, the FastPass+ reader did not read my MagicBand, and as at Rock ‘ Roller, they let me in anyway.

Disney needs to get that fixed…

My seats were just fine, and larger family groups could have easily come in at this time and found good seats, too.

Fantasmic itself was a bit of a disappointment.  The war canoe torches kept going out, the Prince and Princess raft lights did not work—leading to dancing in the dark—and the grand finale found the characters on the island, rather than on Steamboat Willie.  But the crowd was delighted even so.

Back to hotel, and to bed.

Sunday morning I slept in til 6a or so, rescheduled my Soarin FastPass+ at Epcot from 9a til 1p, which moved my other FastPass+ at Test Track and Mission Space (not needed, but I hadn’t ridden it in a while) to 11-12 and 12-1, checked out of the hotel, and worked at the Starbucks in Kissimmee until it was time to go to Epcot.

My plan was to do Test Track at 11.55a, then Mission Space between noon and 1p,  then Soarin at 1.05p.  This almost worked, but something went wrong at Soarin, and the cast member told me that FastPass waits were in excess of 30 minutes and climbing fast (standby waits went from 80 to 140 minutes at the same time).

I didn’t want to risk my flight, so I bought my new crocs and left the park.  Off to MCO, turned in the rental, plane delayed by thunderstorms, off to Newark to change planes, left my Kindle behind on the Orlando plane, Cleveland plane delayed by mechanical difficulties, new plane, home in Rocky River, Ohio at midnight, somewhat cranky but delighted that I’d had a chance to experience MagicBands and FastPass+!

Follow yourfirstvisit.net on Facebook or Twitter!