I’ll have to work on a more creative title at some point! But for now, here’s the background (mostly copied from my last report)…
We decided to make another trip around my husband’s conference this year and invited my parents to join us. Some of you may remember me from last year as the crazy lady who flew with 3 kids, but this time our family of 5 could fly together both ways and my parents met us there.
Our first choice of hotel was 2 connecting “preferred pool” rooms at Pop Century, but they were already unavailable when I booked in April. Since they couldn’t guarantee the connecting rooms anyway, and we weren’t sure which section of Pop we’d end up in, we pivoted a bit. We landed on a Lion King suite at AoA, so we knew we’d all be together and not terribly far from transportation. Being in connecting rooms was our priority because my husband and I were also planning to have a day at universal with just the 2 of us. But we learned there was an Orlando Informer meetup while we were there, so we did that instead of a one-day 2-park ticket! It actually didn’t cost much more and included food & drinks, so seemed like a no-brainer for us.
But 3 or 4 days after we booked AoA, my husband said, “We’re planning our 3rd year in a row at Disney. Should we consider DVC?”
After much research and discussion, we are officially members with Riviera as our home resort! We changed our last 3 nights at AoA to a 2-bedroom savanna view at Kidani Village. We also realized annual passes would be more cost effective if we were already planning two trips within a year, so we did that as well. This also saved us several hundred dollars on the AoA room!
In the planning stages, I did have a bit of a weird interaction around Memory Maker. I had paid for it when I first booked in April, but once we decided to buy into DVC and the Sorcerer passes, it’s significantly cheaper to add Memory Maker to that. It was fairly painless to remove the $185 charge from the AoA reservation. The difficulty came when I tried to add it to my Sorcerer pass. I first had to be transferred from photo pass reps to ticketing. The second person I talked to said he could help and gave me a total cost of nearly $200.
I thought the price was $99, so I wondered if he was trying to add it to both me and my husband. But no, it was the difference in the price of the AP from when I had bought it. I had made a point to buy the APs before the prices increased, so there was no way I was going to pay the difference now, just because I was trying to add Memory Maker. I’m trying to give them the benefit of the doubt that it was just a glitch in how their system works. Because it honestly makes zero sense.
Anyway, it had to be escalated to another CM and he was able to work it out at the correct price for me.
Okay, I think that’s is for pre-trip info…I’ll get into the fun next time!
We decided to make another trip around my husband’s conference this year and invited my parents to join us. Some of you may remember me from last year as the crazy lady who flew with 3 kids, but this time our family of 5 could fly together both ways and my parents met us there.
Our first choice of hotel was 2 connecting “preferred pool” rooms at Pop Century, but they were already unavailable when I booked in April. Since they couldn’t guarantee the connecting rooms anyway, and we weren’t sure which section of Pop we’d end up in, we pivoted a bit. We landed on a Lion King suite at AoA, so we knew we’d all be together and not terribly far from transportation. Being in connecting rooms was our priority because my husband and I were also planning to have a day at universal with just the 2 of us. But we learned there was an Orlando Informer meetup while we were there, so we did that instead of a one-day 2-park ticket! It actually didn’t cost much more and included food & drinks, so seemed like a no-brainer for us.
But 3 or 4 days after we booked AoA, my husband said, “We’re planning our 3rd year in a row at Disney. Should we consider DVC?”
After much research and discussion, we are officially members with Riviera as our home resort! We changed our last 3 nights at AoA to a 2-bedroom savanna view at Kidani Village. We also realized annual passes would be more cost effective if we were already planning two trips within a year, so we did that as well. This also saved us several hundred dollars on the AoA room!
In the planning stages, I did have a bit of a weird interaction around Memory Maker. I had paid for it when I first booked in April, but once we decided to buy into DVC and the Sorcerer passes, it’s significantly cheaper to add Memory Maker to that. It was fairly painless to remove the $185 charge from the AoA reservation. The difficulty came when I tried to add it to my Sorcerer pass. I first had to be transferred from photo pass reps to ticketing. The second person I talked to said he could help and gave me a total cost of nearly $200.
I thought the price was $99, so I wondered if he was trying to add it to both me and my husband. But no, it was the difference in the price of the AP from when I had bought it. I had made a point to buy the APs before the prices increased, so there was no way I was going to pay the difference now, just because I was trying to add Memory Maker. I’m trying to give them the benefit of the doubt that it was just a glitch in how their system works. Because it honestly makes zero sense.
Anyway, it had to be escalated to another CM and he was able to work it out at the correct price for me.
Okay, I think that’s is for pre-trip info…I’ll get into the fun next time!
We had packed up the car the night before, so we headed off to the airport pretty early and security wasn’t bad. We were sitting at our gate around 7:30am. Our flight was scheduled to board around 9, so we had plenty of time to get some breakfast and coffee and for everyone to make trips to the restroom. I also let 2yo out of her stroller to walk around with me a bit, hoping to burn off energy before the flight!
