Disney Review Part 3: MyDisneyExperience

If you’ve been reading this little series of reviews I’m writing, then you know that when we went to Walt Disney World earlier this month, we LOVED using the new MagicBands and had a little less love for the new FastPass+ system (click the linked words to read those posts). We used MyDisneyExperience.com (or the iPhone/iPad app) to make our FastPass reservations, and I wrote all about that in my last post. There are other things you can do on MyDisneyExperience, though, and that’s what I’ll address in this post.

General Observations

It's fun that you can choose a character to represent yourself. Obviously, I'm Snow White. :) Some things about the site are confusing. For example, when you login on MyDisneyExperience.com, you can’t see all the things you can actually do. You have to hover your mouse over “My Disney Experience” in the menu bar so you can see a drop-down menu. In that menu, “My Itinerary” takes you to a calendar page for whatever today’s date is — not the dates of your trip (unless you are there right now). To see your actual itinerary, you have to change the calendar to a date in your trip. “My Reservations” is where you'll do most everything else. Once you have that figured out, it’s not too difficult to get around and do what needs to be done. Note: Disney is still making changes, so any or all of my information could be wrong in the near future. :)

As I said in my FastPass+ post, David and I each had our own accounts on MyDisneyExperience, and they never completely synced correctly with each other (evidence is in the screen shot below -- notice that our dinner reservation is for four, but only two FastPasses are listed next to each ride). I recommend only using one login for your family, and ignoring the prompts to invite your family members to plan with you. So, if you want to plan together, just share the login (at least until Disney fixes it).

Both the site and the app are slow. They're slow at home on fast wifi, and even slower on Disney property with the free wifi. Generally, the Web site worked better than the app, and the iPad app was easier to use than the iPhone app. Note: You have to have a hotel reservation and/or purchased park tickets to be able to access everything. You also need to link your reservation to your MyDisneyExperience account by entering the confirmation number.

Dining Reservations

First off, I cannot express how important it is to make your dining reservations in advance. I knew going into this trip that there was one character breakfast we wanted to do, but that was it. So, I booked that one meal a few weeks before we left. The rest of our meals were booked while we were there. I thought we would be OK making reservations in the morning for an evening meal since we were visiting at a time that is not typically crowded. After the first couple of days, though, we figured out that wasn’t going to work. So, we sat in the hotel one afternoon and booked all of our dinner reservations for the rest of the week. My recommendation is that if you want a sit-down dinner each evening (which I usually do), book those early. I didn’t mind doing quick-service for lunch, and we brought granola bars or went to the little café in the hotel for breakfast (except for our one character breakfast morning).

As far as using MyDisneyExperience to make dining reservations, I had no problems. It was easy and worked very well. The restaurant menus available from within the site/app, however, are not that great. You can’t always read the entire entry for each item (especially on the iPhone app), so I did a Google search to find menus and reviews online before choosing the restaurants. Had I figured all of that out at home before we left, we would not have wasted time in our hotel room making those decisions (and waiting on slow wifi).

Memory Maker

I pre-purchased the Memory Maker PhotoPass card. It’s expensive (though slightly less expensive when pre-purchased). I mainly decided to go ahead and get it because I wanted to decrease my stress level by knowing that we could take advantage of every PhotoPass photographer we saw, and that I could have all those photos at my disposal when making our Disney scrapbook. I haven’t decided yet if it was entirely worth it. I’m somewhat disappointed in the quality of the pictures taken by the PhotoPass photographers, but there are a few good ones that I know I’ll use. I also ordered the WDW gallery disc. At first, I thought it was included with my Memory Maker purchase, but no. It’s separate.

If you click on “Memory Maker” in the MyDisneyExperience drop-down menu on the site, it will take you to a page where you can purchase it… even if you have already purchased it. Confusing. Once again, you have to click on “My Reservations” to link your Memory Maker card or view your photos. I received my card in the mail and linked it to my account online before we left. After our first day in the park (which was Magic Kingdom), I stopped at the PhotoPass desk before leaving the park and asked to see if our photos had all made it onto my card / account. They did, and I was happy. It worked like it was supposed to work. The only thing that didn’t work as expected was ride photos. I had to go scan my MagicBand (not my Memory Maker card) after the ride to add those photos to my account. They were there, though, and I was able to download them when I downloaded all the rest of the photos on my Memory Maker card.

Wait Times

The MyDisneyExperience app has a section where you can view posted wait times for rides. We used this occasionally, but because the app was so slow to load, I typcially preferred checking the Touring Plans Lines app (shown above on the right). It worked faster and shows not only the posted wait time, but also the expected wait time (Disney's posted wait time is almost always longer than what you will actually wait). The Lines app is not free, though, so it's nice to have that feature in the MyDisneyExperience app. I think we probably could have walked to the ride and looked at the sign before it loaded, though (just kidding... well, sort-of). ;)

Well, that’s it. Overall, I was fairly satisfied with using MyDisneyExperience. It has potential. I am hopeful that Disney will continue working on it and making improvements so that the next time we go to Walt Disney World, it will be fast and seamless.

What questions do you have? There is so much that goes into planning a Disney trip, and now that I’m on the back end of it, I’m sure there are lots of things I’ve forgotten. So… if you have a question, feel free to leave it in the comments, and I will do my best to answer it. I am NO expert, though, so I can only give you my Disney experience... See what I did there? Haha. :)

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