Just wanted to share my experience with MyDisney Experience tonight.
First of all, I booked my vacation through a travel agent (I'm sure you can foresee problems already). There are 6 of us staying in 2 rooms, so we have 2 separate reservations and confiramtion numbers (more problems). We have already made dining reservations, but through 2 separate online accounts (whole story: we booked with AAA a while ago, then moved to another travel agent).
Tonight, I log onto MyDisney Experience to link my online account with my reservation. I am able to link one reservation, but I am told the other one can't be linked. I assume it has somehow linked to the online account of someone else in my party. After a few hours of disappearing and reappearing reservations on my account, coupled with the impossible task of merging dining reservations between multiple online accounts, I called Disney directly.
Of course the service was quick, efficient, and very helpful (as expected). The vacation agent was very caring, but extremely worried that I had screwed up royally (in a sweet way). She helped transfer my call to IT and stayed on the line until I was comfortable - more great service there. IT quickly explained, however, that we could fix this easily, which was somewhat true.
Through a borderline complex method, I could link other accounts into my account's itinerary and reservations. Unfortunately, there were a few steps, such as checking an item: "this person travels with me often" - I would have never figured this would be necessary. After checking this, that person is listed as a family member, rather than just a "friend." Once a family member, you can invite this account - via email - to view and be added to your itinerary. You must invite them using the email they used to sign up for their Disney account. Otherwise, you will just be making another entire profile, and more problems. Once this is done, that person must accept the invitation. Then, to share their itinerary with you and to add you to their itinerary, this person must repeat this process on their account. So imagine having 6 people in your party with 6 different accounts - I'm exhausted
After all of this, each account had multiple duplicates in their friends/family section (ie John Doe would be listed twice because the invite process created a second profile listing for him on my account). In order to delete the duplicate listing, I have to first remove the original John Doe from all reservations I may have already made. This is not complicated, but time-consuming. All you have to do is go to each dining reservation and change the guests. This step is necessary to delete the original John Doe profile, but also so that John Doe can see that he is a guest for this reservation - otherwise he may be able to see the reservation listed on my account (depending on your settings), but not that his account is linked to the reservation.
I'm sharing all of this because I see it being a major hurdle with Fastpass+. What happens if your accounts aren't linked correctly, but you made reservations for a ride for all of the accounts you thought were linked? Are those reservations going to work? How does the system decide who gets to make/change/cancel Fastpass+ reservations? What happens if my account shows a resort reservation for 4, but I am making Fastpass+ reservations for 6 (2 linked friends)? Seems that there are quite a few holes in the system that could be either frustrating or manipulated easily.
Here are the pros/cons of my experience. Obviously, there are some cons to the pros, and vice versa, but in terms of usability, I think this is a fair list.
Pros:
- Your resort reservation is totally independent of dining reservations. Cancelling/changing your resort reservation does not affect dining reservations.
- It is very easy to link reservations to your online account.
- The system updates very rapidly (within seconds).
- Technical support was great - fabulous really.
- Interface is fun and easy to use. It still is much more simple than it could have been.
- It is nice to have all of your reservations in one place and allow others to view your reservations and help make plans. The experience is fun and helps build excitement for the trip.
Cons
- Reservations can not be transferred between accounts, only linked.
- You can not change dining reservations - only cancel and re-reserve. I booked Hoop Dee Doo before upgrading to the dining plan. In order to place this on my dining plan, I had to cancel and re-book.
- After inviting another party member to view my itinerary, the system created a new profile for me on that person's account - even if they had already created one for me. This caused duplicate profiles and further problems with dining reservations and linked accounts.
- Only once - a linked account went missing from my account. Upon refresh, the account popped back up.
- My biggest complaint: There should be a consistent ID for each person/account using the system. The email invite system is very 2003, and prone to errors. Using a consistent ID for each account, like a Facebook ID, could solve many errors.
- The system doesn't care what your resort reservation is nor how many profiles you link to your account - seems problematic for Fastpass+
- The system/website is slow - holy cow - it's 2013, not AOL era.
- Little-to-no written technical support.
Tips
- Create all of your online accounts/links before making/inputting any reservations.
- Make all reservations on one account. Just do this - trust me.
(Sorry for the novel and/or if this is the wrong place - just hope some might find my experience helpful)
