I just had an opportunity to test the bands this week, and I just have to say it was a nightmare experience. The resort and park staff could not get my daughters' tickets to work with their bands so they were denied admittance to parks, they could not fast pass, we could not make dining reservations. I stood in line or sat on phone hold more than four hours during our trip last week, and no one was able to help us. They just kept shrugging their shoulders and passing us off to other people. Or they would stand around in a group and stare at the screen and say, "Wow, we don't know how to fix that. This is a job for IT." "IT will email you when it's fixed." "IT doesn't work weekends." We lost two of our four days on vacation to this nightmare and Disney did ZERO to compensate us for our troubles -- and we paid full fare. They told us that since we chose to use the bands this was the risk we ran. Only, we were not given a choice; we were told this was just the new system.
The website was buggy, and their kiosks were constantly down. My BIL who works in IT Support for a major cell phone company and was traveling with us, commented that he thinks the same people who built the Obamacare site built the mydisneyexperience site -- it was that bad. It was not ready to go live. And Disney had no common sense stopgaps in place for situations that could not be managed. I asked for a business or VIP card I could show at the park to get my kids in. I asked for the bands to be reissued. I asked for escalation in support. I called the internet help line, and I was told by the person who answered the phone that I needed to call the internet help line. Mydisneyexperience was THAT ridiculous. No solutions or compensation were offered or provided. Disney just kept canceling my kids tickets and reissuing them, which never fixed the problem.
Ultimately, the issue was that they could not link the tickets to my children's avatars. So they made shadow avatars, which then made the problem even more confusing and difficult to resolve because the shadows would not link either. And then, in a final act of desperation they told me that this was my travel agent's fault and there was nothing more they could do for me unless I showed up in person with the agent at one of their guest services locations. What are the odds of any guest being able to make a travel agent magically appear? As luck would have it, I actually had access to my agent and drug him to the support counter in downtown Disney. We stood in line and he did nothing but lend me moral support until they completely wiped out both of my children's accounts and reissued their passes in about 10 minutes. When the agent asked if he could have done something different to avoid the issue, the employee said, no this was an implementation issue on our end. So it WAS Disney's problem the entire time. Their staff just passed the buck over and over. Everyone in our tour group had some sort of issue, no one was immune.
I was only able to make fast pass selections for myself, but the rides I wanted to do were already booked. So I what I see coming is the need to schedule rides like dining experiences -- 6 months in advance and after you've already paid the money for the trip. Anyone who wants to attach their credit card to a system so buggy and poorly designed is asking for trouble. I would wait to visit Disney until next year. Hopefully they can get the kinks worked out and actually train their staff on implementation by then. Meanwhile, we repurposed a 1st Visit button we found to a "Last Visit."
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