Large Groups & MM+

[VIPguide_2030]

We are heading down next year for the first time with a large group of friends instead of just our family. We will have 12 people one of the weeks and 7 the other week. I haven't used MM+ yet so I am hoping to get some feedback on best practices on using it & planning for large groups. I always do the planning and I am quite good at it but I wanted to make sure with MM+ I do some homework first. Any advice will be much appreciated!!

 

[Rob562]

My #1 piece of advice is to get all of the accounts, profiles and connecting as Friends done *before* you start making or linking hotel and dining reservations and tickets. A little bit of time spent up-front to get everything set up and linked properly makes life MUCH easier down the road.

First, decide who in your group will want/need their own My Disney Experience account. Are you multiple families? Do some have young children? If so, then a "head of the family" person should be designated for each sub-group. Have them create a login account on MDE, and then they can create "managed by them" sub-profiles for those they are in charge of. If there are many adults, it might be easiest/best to have each adult create their own MDE account.

Now, once those are set up, you need to link them all together. Send a friend-request to one of the group heads via your MDE account. Once they accept, you can also add all of their sub-profiles by using the "add by mutual friend" feature. While you should link to everyone in all groups, at the very least people should be connected to those they'll be in WDW with at the same time.

Oh, and for a large group like this, I suggest you set the privacy setting for each person to "can view only shared activities" rather than "can see all". If people can see ALL activities it gets really confusing when looking at your itinerary because you can see things listed that you're not even doing, like other peoples' dining reservations. On my upcoming trip, I have two people joining us for the first part of the trip, two for the last part with a day and a half overlap in the middle. Since they're set to "only shared activities", they'll only see dining reservations for the ones they'll be there for.

Once all people are linked and all friend requests are accepted, you're ready to start making/linking reservations and connecting them to the people who will be using them. For the people who have their own MDE accounts, they can go into the MDE site or app and see all the events they've be linked to.

Also consider using the "Notes" function. You can easily set meeting times and locations, give an overall plan for the day (I have a Note in my profile of "Food & Wine Festival" for the two days we're doing that in November, as well as our water park day at Blizzard Beach). In some places in MDE the Notes get shoved to the bottom of the day's listing of plans, but on the MDE app main page the Notes get sorted properly by time of day.

-Rob

 

[RememberWhen]

What Rob said. We have a trip with 9 people (including 2 2yos) and nobody was linked properly. It was a mess sorting it out. It can be fixed by a CM over the phone, but save yourself the headache and take care of everybody's accounts before you start.

 

[VIPguide_2030]

Thanks for the replies!

Rob, what are your thoughts on me creating all accounts for the other 2 families group heads and then create the other family members under that group head? Both of these other families have not been to WDW and they are basically counting on me to do the planning. I will give the family head their username and password and then if they want to make other plans they can and I can set the preference to view shared activities.

How about maneuvering around the parks with large groups, any thoughts on that as well? We have an autistic daughter that could use the DAS card but that in the past was for 6 people total so I think that would break things up but thankfully she can wait in lines if it is less than 1 hour usually. Any other tips on getting around the parks would be great!

 

[Rob562]

Thanks for the replies!

Rob, what are your thoughts on me creating all accounts for the other 2 families group heads and then create the other family members under that group head? Both of these other families have not been to WDW and they are basically counting on me to do the planning. I will give the family head their username and password and then if they want to make other plans they can and I can set the preference to view shared activities.

How about maneuvering around the parks with large groups, any thoughts on that as well? We have an autistic daughter that could use the DAS card but that in the past was for 6 people total so I think that would break things up but thankfully she can wait in lines if it is less than 1 hour usually. Any other tips on getting around the parks would be great!

I can't help you with navigating the parks, as the largest group I've toured the parks with was about 6 people. But I can say that you shouldn't be afraid to split up, each group do their own thing and then meet up at a pre-determined time and location.

As for MDE, yes you could theoretically set up the entire accounts for the people, but since you use an email address I'm not 100% sure whether you need to be able to access the email account itself to verify during the signup process.

You could theoretically set up profiles for ALL the people and just be the sole "master" of all of them, but if you ever wanted to transfer a "managed by you" profile to be "managed by someone else" (like transferring a child's profile to be managed by their parent), I haven't figured out how to do that yet. Not even sure if there's a way to do it.

So yes, if the other "group leaders" don't want to set up their own accounts, you could set them up for them. Once they're all linked, you could make dining reservations and FP+ choices for everyone.

-Rob