The website is a free to use portal where you can link and view your reservations, tickets, make fast pass selections, create to-do or wish lists, connect with friends who will be traveling with you, make dining reservations, and discover everything there is to do at the parks and resorts.
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| The My Disney Experience website |
I mentioned in an earlier post that fast passes are like ride reservations: you return to the ride or attraction at the designated time and get to get into a much shorter line than the regular one. This means you could wait say, 5-10 minutes to get on a ride compared to someone else standing in line for 40 minutes. And you don't even need to hire a handicapped person. Nice!
The way this used to work: somewhere near the ride or show there are fast pass machines. You would walk up to the machine and insert your park ticket. The machine would spit out a printed slip showing the time at which you should return to get in the short line (or sometimes right onto the ride). In the interim you were free to go do other things like ride other rides, eat, watch the parade, etc.
You could get more than one fast pass at a time, but every time you get one, it also prints out how long you have to wait before you can get another one. For example, you may get a fast pass at 9:00am for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad that says you can return to the line for that ride between 11:45am and 12:45pm. It also says that you cannot receive another fast pass for any other ride until 10:05am. If you put your ticket in another fast pass machine before 10:05am it will reject it. When 10:05 rolls around you could then get a fast pass for say Splash Mountain to return between 5:30pm and 6:30pm, and so on.
There were a limited number of fast passes available for each ride each day, so if they were all given out before you got to the machine then you were out of luck. About a year after Toy Story Midway Mania opened I was at the gate of Hollywood Studios in the morning when the park opened for the day. About 75% of the people waiting at the gate ran not to line up for the ride, but to line up to get fast passes for the ride. Within an hour all the fast passes for the whole day were gone. Anyone else wanting to ride the ride that day had to wait in a 2+ hour line.
They still have that system of handing out fast passes, but now in connection with the Magic Bands we were able to make 3 fast pass selections per day in advance, and change them on the fly as we went (assuming there were times still available the day/time we wanted). This helped us to plan our days a little bit better (for what little planning we did). Of course, there were some restrictions. You couldn't get 3 fast passes for the same ride in a day, so no back-to-back Test Track rides. In many cases you couldn't get fast passes to 3 E-ticket (major attraction) rides on the same day. So no Splash Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and Space Mountain on the same day (these are just examples - it varied from park to park, and Disney is still testing and tweaking the experience). Most often you were able to select one E-ticket ride and 2 not E-ticket rides per park per day.
The app is a mobile version of the website, with the same capabilities. You can take it with you while you're enjoying your days in the park and look up information related to where you are, view current wait times for rides and attractions, check dining availability, view or change fast pass reservations, etc.
In my opinion having the mobile app is most helpful for 3 things:
1. Checking wait times. We used this the most throughout our trip.
2. Reminding us where we needed to be and at what time if we wanted to use our fast passes.
3. Checking restaurant availability and making reservations. It was so easy. I used the app to find seating for us at The Wave restaurant in our hotel for breakfast, although I think we would have been fine without a reservation for that one, and last minute reservations for the 50s Prime Time Cafe at Hollywood Studios. Without making that last one, we would not have been able to eat there.
I've included some screenshots below to show some of the features of this service. While you could be in danger of spending your whole vacation looking at your phone instead of enjoying the wonders around you, in moderation I think it's a handy tool.
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| Example of a daily itinerary. Lunch reservation at 12:20pm, then 3 fast passes. |
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| Checking wait times at Animal Kingdom |
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| Park map with attraction info. |
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| You can zoom in pretty close |
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| Park hours for all the parks |
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| Character appearance locations and times |
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| Checking restaurant table availability. If seating is available you can make the reservation through the app. |
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