Some background first: I have been neither strongly in favor of or against MM+, so I feel like I went in with an open but appropriately skeptical mind. I work in IT, as does my husband, so I feel both sympathy for the huge task they've been undertaking (and God knows I've felt the pain of a rollout where not everything works as it should,) as well as exasperation over some of its poor planning/pitfalls (why oh why has the Disney World website always been so pathetic?). Also, as parents with two very small kids, we don't usually hit up the biggest/fastest rides on our trips lately so I cannot speak to the availability/waits for some stuff like Space, etc.
OK, with that said, here goes.
What Worked:
- FastPasses. I changed them frequently from both the kiosks and my iPad and they always worked. The app is still pathetically glitchy in that it would sometimes take a while to reflect the changes I'd made, but it does appear that they went through correctly as we were always able to get on what we wanted to during our time frame.
- charging purchases/using our PIN. Never had any issue with this (though honestly we didn't buy that much other than meals.) Also did not notice spending more with the bands on -- I think we probably spent less on merchandise and snacks on this trip than ever.
- room key. Never had an issue getting into our room or using our bands to get up to the club lounge.
- DME. Got right through the line without issue and they had our party and resort correctly listed.
What didn't work:
- getting in at the gates. On our first park day all three bands failed, and we had to go to guest relations. They fixed it relatively quickly, and basically told us they had no idea why they didn't work because from their end it looked like I set everything up correctly. Um, OK. This was aggravating largely because the CM helping us didn't seem particularly concerned that they were eating into our time by having to reset all of this. Also, my husband's finger scan never took and so his band failed many more times (with us basically telling them they needed to reset the finger scan every time) before they finally fixed that on like day 4.
All told, the gate issue didn't actually cost us that much time (a few mins each time) but it was annoying.
Crowds were pretty light the first few days of our trip, possibly due in part to the weather, so we found that we had no issue getting to see what we wanted to at first. Standby lines, in my experience, were not noticeably worse (and in some cases were faster,) than I recalled them being last year. A few times I ended up changing our Fastpasses because the rides I chose had 5 minute waits so we just went in the standby line. The last day of our trip the crowds had picked up and the lines grew accordingly, but it didn't seem like it was all that much different than my past experiences. If anything I was just surprised at how many people were there.
The only time we got stuck waiting more than a couple minutes in a FastPass line was at Enchanted Tales with Belle. I think they may have been having operating issues because there were CMs everywhere and we didn't see either the standby or FastPass lines move at all for well over half an hour/45mins. We were just about to bail out when it started moving again.
Wearing the bands was no big deal, and even my preschooler's band stayed on without issue. He liked "unlocking" the rides with his band, heh.
Oh, and we did participate in the beta test of FP Be Our Guest lunch. I pre-ordered but we ended up having to re-order it all when we got there because they were not equipped to handle the fact that we weren't paying cash or on the dining plan (we wanted to just do a room charge)? It was weird, but it was still way better than waiting in that horrible line, which I would not have bothered with otherwise.
Overall, a mixed but somewhat positive bag. I will say that the CMs in general seem under-informed about how a lot of this stuff works (even the people tasked with helping people at the FP kiosks. You should have seen the look on this guy's face when I said I wanted to switch my FPs to a different park because we changed plans last-minute.) The people at Be Our Guest seemed baffled by my request to pay by room charge and had no real idea about what to do with us.
So, my bottom line: I thought things like FP+ either were a neutral to my experience or a moderate positive (I really like not having to run to the stupid FastPass machine at 8am to get into TSMM or Peter Pan without waiting in a 45-minute-plus line, and I do like controlling the time I get to see stuff instead of just taking the next available FastPass window.) I'd be interested to see how much of that was due to the time of year we visited, though. The bands were fine, and I wouldn't mind using them again. They've definitely got some hiccups to manage, though, and I hope they're doing a heck of a lot of prep work with spring break coming right around the corner...
I hope this information is somewhat interesting to you guys! Let me know if you have any questions.
OK, with that said, here goes.
What Worked:
- FastPasses. I changed them frequently from both the kiosks and my iPad and they always worked. The app is still pathetically glitchy in that it would sometimes take a while to reflect the changes I'd made, but it does appear that they went through correctly as we were always able to get on what we wanted to during our time frame.
- charging purchases/using our PIN. Never had any issue with this (though honestly we didn't buy that much other than meals.) Also did not notice spending more with the bands on -- I think we probably spent less on merchandise and snacks on this trip than ever.
- room key. Never had an issue getting into our room or using our bands to get up to the club lounge.
- DME. Got right through the line without issue and they had our party and resort correctly listed.
What didn't work:
- getting in at the gates. On our first park day all three bands failed, and we had to go to guest relations. They fixed it relatively quickly, and basically told us they had no idea why they didn't work because from their end it looked like I set everything up correctly. Um, OK. This was aggravating largely because the CM helping us didn't seem particularly concerned that they were eating into our time by having to reset all of this. Also, my husband's finger scan never took and so his band failed many more times (with us basically telling them they needed to reset the finger scan every time) before they finally fixed that on like day 4.
All told, the gate issue didn't actually cost us that much time (a few mins each time) but it was annoying.
Crowds were pretty light the first few days of our trip, possibly due in part to the weather, so we found that we had no issue getting to see what we wanted to at first. Standby lines, in my experience, were not noticeably worse (and in some cases were faster,) than I recalled them being last year. A few times I ended up changing our Fastpasses because the rides I chose had 5 minute waits so we just went in the standby line. The last day of our trip the crowds had picked up and the lines grew accordingly, but it didn't seem like it was all that much different than my past experiences. If anything I was just surprised at how many people were there.
The only time we got stuck waiting more than a couple minutes in a FastPass line was at Enchanted Tales with Belle. I think they may have been having operating issues because there were CMs everywhere and we didn't see either the standby or FastPass lines move at all for well over half an hour/45mins. We were just about to bail out when it started moving again.
Wearing the bands was no big deal, and even my preschooler's band stayed on without issue. He liked "unlocking" the rides with his band, heh.
Oh, and we did participate in the beta test of FP Be Our Guest lunch. I pre-ordered but we ended up having to re-order it all when we got there because they were not equipped to handle the fact that we weren't paying cash or on the dining plan (we wanted to just do a room charge)? It was weird, but it was still way better than waiting in that horrible line, which I would not have bothered with otherwise.
Overall, a mixed but somewhat positive bag. I will say that the CMs in general seem under-informed about how a lot of this stuff works (even the people tasked with helping people at the FP kiosks. You should have seen the look on this guy's face when I said I wanted to switch my FPs to a different park because we changed plans last-minute.) The people at Be Our Guest seemed baffled by my request to pay by room charge and had no real idea about what to do with us.
So, my bottom line: I thought things like FP+ either were a neutral to my experience or a moderate positive (I really like not having to run to the stupid FastPass machine at 8am to get into TSMM or Peter Pan without waiting in a 45-minute-plus line, and I do like controlling the time I get to see stuff instead of just taking the next available FastPass window.) I'd be interested to see how much of that was due to the time of year we visited, though. The bands were fine, and I wouldn't mind using them again. They've definitely got some hiccups to manage, though, and I hope they're doing a heck of a lot of prep work with spring break coming right around the corner...
I hope this information is somewhat interesting to you guys! Let me know if you have any questions.
