Disney Review Part 2: FastPass+

If you missed yesterday's post about how we liked the new Disney MagicBands, click here. It's a happy post. :)

Today, I'm talking about the new FastPass+ system (say that three times fast). I can't really talk about FastPass+ without mentioning MyDisneyExperience.com. There are a lot of things you can do on the site and in the app. One of the most important is making FastPass+ reservations. I'll write more about using MyDisneyExperience.com tomorrow, but as far as using it for FastPasses goes, it was frustrating and just plain didn’t work at times.

The biggest issue we had (and warning I can give you) is that I should not have “invited” David to join MyDisneyExperience.com and be a planner on our trip. He had to create his own account, and our two accounts never synced correctly so that his plans and my plans matched. We should have just used one account, and had him use my login when he needed to have access. Anyway, back to FastPass+.

I was leery of using the new FastPass+ system because it is SO different than the old FastPass system.

Here’s how it worked when we went to WDW four years ago in 2010: You went to a FastPass kiosk outside the ride you wanted to have a FastPass for, inserted your room key card, and got a paper ticket stating the window of time in which you could return to ride. Actually, in 2010, they didn’t make you adhere to the expiration on the time windows, so once you got your FastPass, you could use it any time after the return time started. It was easy and the only pitfall was if all the FastPasses were already taken for the ride you wanted.


Braden next to Tomorrowland Speedway in January 2010
The new system requires you to reserve your FastPasses in advance on MyDisneyExperience. You can do this on your computer using the site, on your phone or iPad using the app (I think they have it for Android also), or on an iPad in the park at one of the new FastPass+ kiosk stations. They don't have very many actual “kiosks” yet. We mainly saw Cast Members standing in the area holding iPads. The kiosk stations are located in a few different places around the parks, but not necessarily near the rides you want to get FastPasses for. There were often short lines of people waiting in the kiosk areas. We never used them and always used our iPhones when in the parks or David’s iPad if we were in our hotel room (he left his iPad in the in-room safe when we went out).

There were so many frustrating things about reserving FastPasses that I almost don’t know where to begin! I guess I’ll start at the beginning. ;) Note: the FastPass+ system is still being tweaked, so some or all of the things that frustrated me may be changed in the future (Let’s hope!).

Frustration #1:
The site is buggy and the app is even buggier. When I first logged in to MyDisneyExperience.com (several weeks before our trip) and tried to reserve FastPasses, it did not work. I don’t know what was wrong. Maybe there was glitch. I don’t know. It just didn’t work. I made my choices, clicked confirm, and nothing happened. I finally gave up and tried again a few days later, and it worked.

Frustration #2:
You’re only allowed three FastPasses per day, and you can only use them in one park. So, even though we had ParkHopper tickets, we could only have FastPasses for one of the parks we were visiting each day.

Frustration #3:
You MUST reserve all three of your FastPasses for a given day all at once. If you try to leave one blank, it will make you choose something to fill that spot. This was frustrating because I wanted to make one FastPass reservation for one ride, figure out the rest of my desired schedule, and then come back and reserve another one later. You can’t do that. You have to have your entire day planned out ahead of time, and then go in and reserve all the FastPasses.


Frustration #4:
FastPass times cannot overlap. The times of your FastPasses are very customizable, but it doesn’t appear that way when they are assigned to you at first. The site/app gives you a group of times for the rides you choose. There are usually three groups of times to choose from. My suggestion: Choose a group of times that is completely OPPOSITE of what you actually want. Then, after the FastPasses are in your account, you can go in to each one individually and change the time. The reason for choosing times that are nowhere near the times you actually want is because you cannot change one FastPass to a time that overlaps another FastPass. So, basically, if you want morning FastPasses, choose a set of evening ones, and then move each one to the specific time you want in the morning. You can do this because none of your original choices will conflict with your new choices. Note: This works well when you are still a few weeks out from your trip. I am not sure that I would recommend this strategy once you get there as there may be fewer times available.

Frustration #5:
FastPasses at Epcot are tiered. This means that the most popular things are in the first tier, and the rest are in the second tier. You can choose one thing from the first tier and two things from the second tier. Our experience was that we didn’t need FastPasses at all for anything in the second tier because there was little to no wait on any of them (like 5-10 minutes at most). The only rides that ever had long wait times (45+ minutes) at Epcot were Soarin’ and Test Track. They are both in the top tier, so you can only get a FastPass for one of them. My family loves Soarin’, so we never got a FastPass for Test Track. The line was always long, so we never rode it. Bummer.

Frustration #6:
I felt like I needed to over-plan. I am a planner, but knowing that we could and should reserve our FastPasses days or weeks in advance put me into panic mode. I tried to tell myself that it would all be OK, and that we could always make changes once we got there, but the truth is, we DID need to have everything reserved before we started our vacation. Once we were on property and actually IN the week of our stay, more FastPass times were already booked by other people, and we really couldn’t make changes that easily. Even if there were times available to change our FastPasses to, the app was slow, and we wasted time messing with it all week.


Are you dizzy yet?
That all sounds pretty negative, right? Even with those frustrations, we were still able to ride everything we wanted to ride (without waiting in long lines), and we still had a great trip.

A positive thing about the new system is that we could reserve FastPasses for shows. We used them for Indiana Jones and Disney Jr. Live on Stage. I wasn't sure what this was going to accomplish at first, but it turned out to be a great use of our FastPasses. We got excellent seats, and didn't have to wait in line for more than a few minutes.

Also, even though we had issues with our MyDisneyExperience accounts not syncing correctly, we never had an issue with our FastPasses when we went to scan our MagicBands at the rides. I credit this to figuring out early on that our accounts weren't going to sync, and making the decision to only use my account for reserving FastPasses. Again, we LOVED the MagicBands. It’s the FastPass+ reservation system and the site/app that were frustrating.

Come back tomorrow for my third review post when I'll talk more about the rest of the things you can do on MyDisneyExperience.com. :)

Here are all three posts in this series:
Disney Review Part 1: MagicBands
Disney Review Part 2: FastPass+
Disney Review Part 3: MyDisneyExperience