Changing a family member's email...

[MiddKid]

OK, I'm going to probably land up calling and trying to talk through this with WDW but just for fun (and since they're closed) I thought I'd lay it out here in case anyone ever had this situation. It's a bit complicated...here we go:

Back in 2013 my family (5 of us) and my parents (2) decided to take a trip to WDW in 2014. All 7 of us stayed in the same 2Br DVC Villa, and I made all the dining and FP+ reservations for 7. Due to my parents' less-than-technical nature, I simply set them up as friends/family and I put in my email address for both of them. So 3 of us had the same email. I knew they'd never register and I'd manage everything. So OFFICIALLY the email is only registered to my MDE account. All worked great.

Fast forward to this year...my family (without my parents) decided to head back to WDW in August. I booked our Villa at BCV 7 months ago. I booked dining for 5 at the 6 months window.

In May my parents decide they DO want to go. Ugh.
- I booked them a room at the Yacht Club using my MDE login but I attached their profiles from 2013 as the guests. Worked fine.
- At the 60 day window I booked all our FP+ reservations for 7. No problem.

But dining is obviously an issue. I originally assumed I could go in and book a few tables for 2 and just have them as the guests, but the system won't let me do that since it knows that I already have reservations at that time. So my Dad called and got a few. Of course now he can't find the confirmation numbers. Before getting to the real question, to recap:

- My parents show up under my friends/family but they don't have their own MDE accounts
- I booked their hotel and put them as the guests
- I booked FastPass for them
- My Dad called and manually booked some dining (which I'm assuming the person attached to his reservation, but I can't confirm that).

I already had a situation where I changed our dinner for 5 one night and re-booked as a dinner for 7. Easy enough to cancel my reservation, but now I need to call and deal with my Dad's. Not ideal. So my solution was to finally register my Dad with an account...

I log on tonight to do so (I have access to his person email...since I'm his tech support) and in MDE I tell it to send an invite to my Dad. Remember what I said at the beginning...that invite came to my email address. I forgot that 4 years ago I set both my parents up with my email. Argh. So I go into the "update" link for my parents and I can change their name but that's about it. Nowhere can I change their email (see attached screenshot). You'll see it says invitation pending. That's because I hit send and that invite came to my email. Despite the fact that the address is registered as my MDE. Ahhhh!!!


I was tempted to just create a new account for him under his email, but since his profile already exists in my MDE (with a hotel confirm, and FastPasses) I don't want to create issues. The last thing I wanted to do was create a duplicate and/or land up losing the FP+ selections I have for him. My thought is that I need to call tech support and get them to change his email in his profile from mine to his. Then I can go through the steps of registering him with a new MDE account and not risk losing the FP+s (and hopefully having access to his dining to help him manage it).

Whew. If you read this far, congrats! If I don't get any feedback on here, I'll come back and post a reply with what happens when I call.

 

[Rob562]

Yeah, you're going to have to call the Help Desk on that one. I don't think I've ever seen one email address linked to three different people before, so I'm not really sure how you'd even start to correct this without having more intricate access to the system like the Help Desk does.

-Rob

 

[MiddKid]

Thanks @Rob562

Called the help desk this AM. Took a little while to work through the details (who is who, which email is which) but the the rep finally got things linked up fine. Turned out my Dad DID have an old MDE account from 2013 that he created but never used. So the rep just linked that with the one on my friends list and we were good to go. But after I hung up things got interesting...

From my account, all looked great. I could now see my Dad's dining and information. Perfect. I logged out.

I logged into my Dad's newly linked account...and got the Stitch error page. Weird I thought. Even weirder was that now ANYTHING I clicked on gave me that error page. Couldn't even click on the help link. I had to clear my cookies to get it back.

I tried on a different browser. Same thing. As soon as I tried to log in as my Dad it completely locked up the whole site. After clearing cookies I could log in fine on my own account, but my Dad's would not work.

I called back. This rep was VERY confused. Landed up changing password, deleting cookies, changing browsers at least 5 more times. She had no clue. She said she saw something "weird" in the profile that suggested it was deactivated...but then was confused since it had active dining, FP+, tickets, and a hotel reservation on it.

After 25 minutes I had to go to a meeting. She was at a loss. She said she would "escalate" the issue but that we may have to create a new account for him and migrate everything over. I came back after 1.5 hours and everything now worked. It did prompt me to re-accept the Terms & Conditions so there must be something that was odd, but now we're good to go. I guess escalating it helped!