Planning Our Disney Trip: Fast Passes

– Transportation

Fast passes weren’t always a thing. When we went on our honeymoon (back in the year 2000), they had been around for about a year. Throughout time, fast passes have evolved. In Disneyland, fast passes still work like they were created since the beginning – a time window is displayed next to the attraction you want a fast pass for, you insert your ticket into a booth and out comes a fast pass ticket telling you when to return to the attractions. Once the window starts, not only can you go to the attraction’s fast pass, you can also go to another attraction for another fast pass.

In Walt Disney World, it used to work just the same… then the magic bands arrived a few years ago. 

With the MagicBand+ also came the new FastPass+, which allows you to link your fast passes to your magic band. Instead of getting to the park to get a paper fast pass, you would be allowed to log into your Disney account (My Disney Experience) 60 days before your visit (30 days if you’re not staying at a Disney hotel) and reserve three fast passes. These fast passes need to be for the same park on that day. After you have used these three fast passes, then you are allowed to get one more… and so on until there aren’t any available fast passes left to distribute in the park.

I confess we’ve only lived this once. We visited WDW in 2014 and were pretty successful at planning our fast pass and dining selections, but I must say it was time consuming. We would look at the rides we know have the longer lines and then look at the park we are planning to visit that day and then we try to create a path in which to visit the first three fast pass attractions. We also plan for a few rides we could ride in case we have time to spend in the area or between fast pass rides. 

Sounds complicated? It will definitely be if you’ve never been to Disney World, but if you have an idea of where the rides are and how the lines get, then it could even be a fun experience.

Something else to keep in mind is you can’t start your fast pass selection until you’ve bought and connected your park tickets to your Disney account. Also, with all this planning in advance, Disney takes away a lot of your flexibility. With fast pass and dinner reservations, you are basically bound to your schedule – it better be a good one! Otherwise, you’d need to go without reservations, meaning you probably wouldn’t be able to enter table service restaurants or be prepared to wait for hours to sit down for a meal – or go to a fast service restaurant, eat a hotdog or turkey leg from a cart, etc…

Unfortunately, some rides almost require a fast pass (like Soaring, and now the Avatarland rides). 

cheers!