With an influx of guests expected to arrive at the Walt Disney World Resort between this weekend and early April for Spring Break, the Disney Park Pass reservation system is being put through the paces once again.
During the 2020 holiday season, we noticed that most of the Disney Park Pass availability was reserved for Resort Guests. Now, the tables have seemingly turned and Annual Passholders are finding more availability throughout the Spring Break season. Let’s take a quick snapshot to illustrate the difference.
In the scenario above, an Annual Passholder who is staying on site on March 25-27 would not be able to book Disney’s Hollywood Studios or Magic Kingdom because those parks are sold out for Resort Guests. It does not matter that there is availability for Annual Passholders on those dates and at those parks because the Disney Park Pass reservation system prioritizes your Resort status over your Annual Pass status. As a matter of fact, the Resort status effectively hides the Annual Pass status, and guests who have run into this issue have had to have a “shadow profile” created by the IT help desk as a workaround.
Back in June 2020, we documented what was effectively the opposite of the issue above wherein Annual Passholders were not able to make reservations for the length of their Resort stay because the system prioritized the Annual Pass over the Resort stay and only allowed 3 reservations. Now, it seems like the fix that Disney put in is actually putting Annual Passholders who elect to stay at a Walt Disney World Resort hotel at a disadvantage when there is Annual Passholder availability and no Resort availability.
While there is a significant amount of Annual Passholders who stay on-site for their Disney vacation, there may perhaps be no greater group of guests affected by this issue more than Disney Vacation Club Members. DVC Members have disproportionately high Annual Passholder numbers, and they almost always stay on-site to make the most of their timeshare privileges. This combination would likely make them one of the most impacted groups of visitors.
Ideally, Disney would create a cascading, smart ticket prioritization queue that continues to check for availability for all of the qualifying statuses that a guest can have. That said, the last time this was an issue, Disney simply blamed the guest, calling the glitch “user error”.
As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!
That’s actually very interesting, I was wondering how that worked. Thanks for sharing!
We’re staying at the Animal Kingdom Lodge in a couple weeks. We got everything all sorted, but I was nervous about the weather on a few days, luckily it’s looking really nice, although that might change. It’s hard when you can’t shift days around as easily with the reservation system. Luckily, everyone can park hop if a park’s too busy or it’s raining.
Has there been any issues parking hopping since it launched?
Annual passholder here… We had a hotel reservation and couldn’t get MK or HS for the weekend of the 27th. I cancelled my reservation and then booked the MK & HS passes. Then I just rebooked the hotel for the same price. A little bit of a pain but happy to do it to get the parks I wanted.
That workaround worked for me.
You can get around the glitch by calling the Annual Passholder support line or the Internet Help Desk. They can book park passes for you.