Disney 2018

I booked our 2018 Disney vacation - which means I've paid a deposit through the travel agency.  This vacation is so far away that's about all I can do at this point.  The disadvantage to booking this far in advance is that there's a possibility that we may need to cancel it because I don't know what the future holds.  I'm 99.9% sure we'll be okay with dance.  I'm a little less confident with school as I had to base dates off of prior years.  The real wild card is work for Rich.  And the girls have already exclaimed/announced that they will not go without Daddy because then it wouldn't be a family vacation.  I mean, I think that is beyond sweet and shows how much they love him.

Why did I book so far out and why did I go through a travel agency?  It's all about the special offer.  There are travel agencies with deals outside of those directly from Disney.



Grammy is coming with us again this trip so there will be six of us in total.  If you're familiar with Disney already, you know this means two separate reservations - one for each room.  Disney won't allow me to book two rooms.  When you make your reservation, you need to provide the names of each person who will be included with that reservation.  I decided to include Allie in Grammy's room/reservation so that we would have more than one Magic Band to open that resort room.  If we have connecting rooms, it's a moot point.  But connecting rooms are not a guarantee.

Our two reservations are linked so I entered the confirmation number for mine into My Disney Experience account and Grammy entered hers.  In my account, I could see both reservations, and park tickets for everyone but Allie.  I logged into Grammy's account and found what I believed was the issue but I couldn't fix it.  MDE was giving Grammy sole permission to manage Allie.  I acted like I was going to make FastPass+ reservations and two Allies showed up, along with Richard and Rich.  I flipped back and forth between my account and Grammy's and finally called Disney to ask for help.

The tech I was transferred to was super helpful and operated under true Disney customer service.  I explained the issue and asked if this could cause problems when it's time to make FP reservations.  He confirmed that, yes, it could.  He immediately found the problem and began to clean up my account, Grammy's and even Rich's account.  Control of all the kids was moved under my account.  They were in there as duplicates under Rich from the trip years ago when he made the FP reservations.

If you're a family of five or less who always stay in one room, your account most likely will never have this problem.  Because we had three adult accounts and the kids had been added by multiple people, there were duplicates.  Even Rich was in there twice.  I couldn't figure out a foolproof way of making changes but Disney knew exactly what to do.

Make sure your My Disney Experience account is set up accurately and ready to go before your time to make FastPass reservations.  The tech was funny because he commented on how it was good I was taking care of this early.  Really early.  We are months away from being able to make dining reservations, never mind FastPasses.  Honestly, having something like that (especially the phone call part) on my to-do list would just stress me out.  I can't explain why - that's just anxiety.  

I was thinking about how planning vacations now is so different from three, four, five years ago.  I don't regret for one second pulling the girls from school when they were younger.  Even in the fifth grade, it's so incredibly difficult.  Never mind the commitments outside of school.  So if you have little ones and you're debating over whether or not to plan a vacation during a school week, do it.  They'll never be that age again.