It's unfortunate to see that I haven't been the only one bitten by this particular issue of FP+ reservations being lost. Over the last year, I hate to admit that I've spent over 5 hours on the phone with technical support with issues with MM+/FP+/MyDisneyExperience. I'm a firm believer in you either try to help fix the problem or you don't have a right complaining, so that's why I've tried to get these issues resolved. What I've discovered is there is a fundamental flaw in MM+ that shouldn't be there - there is no defect handling.
I've currently got an email off to the management types about our experiences; but, in a nutshell - here's the Reader's Digest version:
- Last October, I tried to get our Premier Passports linked up to MyDisneyExperience prior to a trip and found out that the Premier Passes were in some sort of "nether" world that the programmers hadn't accounted for. This lead to two separate 2.5hr phone calls to get my wife and mine added so we could start making FP+ selections. Eventually, it took some manual data entry to get this particular bug resolved.
- Tried to purchase X-mas party tickets online and get the annual passholder discount only to find that even after the issue above was fixed and our Premier Passes were linked to MyDisneyExperience, they weren't connected to the discount system. Eventually, they had to manually process our tickets.
- After hitting the window to make FP+ selections, I log into MyDisneyExperience to start the process. The first part of the process is to select the members of your group, so I selected my wife and myself. I then proceeded to go from day-to-day for the entire trip and made the selections. A couple of days before departing, I wanted to make calendar appointments in my email for all the reservations only to find out on one day in the middle of our trip, my wife was dropped off. Even though I made all the selections at the same time, it didn't add her for one random day in the middle of all the other times. I called Disney and again go transferred over to technical support only to find out that there was NOTHING they could do to add my wife into the time slots I had already selected. They best they could do was cancel my FP+ times and offer us whatever was currently available. I explained that it wasn't an acceptable solution as exchanging a reservation for something like Soarin' for Imagination wasn't an acceptable remediation. Ultimately, the solution that tech support offered to me was to just show up at the attraction and explain the situation to Cast Member and they would let her ride.
- A week ago, I tried to make a dining reservation. Found a timeslot for one of our favorite restaurants after checking each day for over a month. We selected the time, logged into MyDisneyExperience and started the check out process. My wife noticed that the credit card on file was from last year, so she needed to update it. Tried to add it and got an error saying "there was a problem in updating the card." It said try again, which failed, or call WDW-DINE. We call and they try to help, by seeing if the time slot is open - which it isn't because we are in the process of trying to check out with it. The reservations people can't help since the time is still open and we are reluctant to close our browser or else we would lose the slot. They transfer us to tech support and over the next hour they try to explain that someone else has already taken our time. I assure them that my browser session is still open as it prompts me to click a button or else it will time out. I also explain that using a different PC, I can see where the card DID get added successfully and the issue seems to be that trying to make a reservation and changing in your card in the same transaction seem to be flawed. One of their managers explains that they don't have anyway to get "in progress" transactions and override them. Ultimately, they told us to close our browser and they would try to swoop in and grab the reservation. When it didn't pop back up immediately, they took our contact information and would try to contact the restaurant in question and try to get an override. About 4 minutes after we closed our browser window and about 1 minute after getting off the phone, I tried to pull up the availability for the restaurant and found our original time was available. Since our credit card did update (contrary to the error before) we were able to make the reservation this time.
I've tried to go to WDW twice since MM+ went online fully and as you can see, we've had to spend a lot of time trying to resolve issues. The one thing that jumps out at me (as an IT executive) is that a system as complex as MM+ is bound to have errors/defects. Therefore, the system needs to have defect handling built in and after my interactions with tech support - they don't have anyway to override the system to resolve errors. Everything in MM+, from a technological perspective has to go through the "front door". Have an issue with FP+ times, they best MM+ can do is cancel your appointments and offer you whatever is available. Have a tech problem with a dining reservation, the best that the MM+ system can do is see what is currently open.
My IT background really makes me wonder what sort of methodology Disney is following (if any) in their MM+ endeavors (ITIL, Six Sigma, etc.) because in each of my contacts with tech support, nobody was interested in the chance to capture data about the issue. Nobody asked questions about what web browser was being used, what operating system, etc. Disney was losing every chance at data collection for process improvement.
When you have a complex system, that will have defects, and that system has no methods of handling those defects, and then you compound those problems with the lack of effort to try to learn from those defects - you get exactly the mess that Disney is currently in when it comes to MM+.
As an IT professional this concerns me.
As a Disney Parks fan, this enrages me. MM+ is a heartless automaton that is taking away the greatest strength the Disney Parks empire was founded on - providing world class customer service. Cast Members are crippled in their ability to help guests when it comes to dealing with the technical shortfalls of MM+. This is the greatest harm all this technology is causing.
