Postby KeithS » Sun Jun 02, 2013 10:46 am
Wow - I finally got to see that picture - that was pretty cool! (I usually log on at work and we can't access twitterpics from there).
No, it wasn't me - I did it on the balcony of our ship at sunrise!
On another topic, as today is the annual ticket price rise for Disneyland, I thought I'd go back a bit and tell of our experience in using Premier passes.
As you'd likely know, the Premier Pass is the most expensive Disneyland/WDW ticket option to purchase up front, but it is worthwhile if you intend spending a lot of time at both resorts.
We purchased ours in June 2012 to cover the two weeks we were at the Carsland opening, and to also cover the time we'd spend at WDW in March 2013, and Disneyland in April 2013. So we knew it would be cheaper than buying all those park hoppers at DL and Magic Your Way tickets at WDW. It also came (at the time) with merchandise and dining discounts of 20% at both resorts.
We purchased the tickets at the Disneyland ticket booth and that went pretty smoothly, although it didn't seem that they knew a lot about them. I was also surprised that they didn't come with anything - I mean, these were $900 tickets after tax, yet you didn't even get a brochure of benefits/discounts etc. - they just handed us the plastic tickets and that was that. I also found that A LOT of the cast members at Disneyland had no idea what they were and didn't know what discount to apply (we found this was the same at WDW this year).
But generally, at Disneyland in 2012, these tickets worked well, we got our discounts and they also had a built in Photopass, so that was pretty good. What I found slightly disappointing later was that these tickets were meant to be the same as a Disneyland Premium annual passes, but we never received any of the standard Disneyland annual passholder magazines or emails - not a thing over the entire year. This was also true for WDW, not a single scrap of correspondence came from them either (although at least with WDW, you could download the annual passholder magazine from their website).
Come 2013, WDW pretty much stopped the discounts for Premier passes - restricting the discount to just 10% on merchandise and nothing on food - not a big issue though, as the pass was still better value in regards to admission costs. When we got to WDW however, we started to have a few problems - the tickets wouldn't work. We had to spend some time at Guest Services and they had to buy back our Disneyland issued tickets, then reissue new WDW issued tickets for them to work there - they told us there were issues with how the East Coast system is different from the West Coast system. We had to spend an age as they couldn't transfer our details from the old tickets - we basically had to go through the whole ticket purchase ordeal which was crazy. But once that was done, we had our tickets and they worked perfectly throughout our WDW stay.
Of course, we then returned to Disneyland - and guess what? The newly issued WDW Premier tickets wouldn't work there (despite actually going to Guest Services outside that park on our first day to see if they were okay - which they told us they were!) When we got to the turnstiles, our entry was rejected, so we had to wait while a Lead tried to figure it out. She said she'd get it sorted and in the meantime gave us a one day complimentary ticket for entry, stating that it would be okay the next day. However all that day when we went to purchase something at a register, the discounts wouldn't swipe and a Lead had to be called to override the discount - which was pretty annoying.
Next day, we went confidently up to the turnstiles - and yep, still not working. Again we were given a one day pass and again we needed a Lead called for every merchandise payment.
Next day - again it wasn't working! This time, we were walked to a ticket booth and they gave us a complimentary three day ticket (to the end of our trip) and stated that we should check each day to see if the Premier Pass was working - to cut a long story short, they never did get the Premier pass working and for our entire stay at Disneyland, we needed to have a Lead paged to attend the register to apply our discount - that got so annoying that we skipped the discounts on smaller purchases because it was so time consuming!
So there you have it - that is our experience with the Premier Pass. They are good, don't get me wrong, because the discount on merchandise at Disneyland is 20% and the ticket is cheap if you intend to spend a lot of time at WDW. But there are obvious problems in how the East and West coast ticketing is deployed and a general lack of knowledge about the tickets on both sides of the country - especially around how to fix problems (which shouldn't exist in the first place) with them.
Because of these problems, I'd be more tempted to get normal APs for each park (at least until the park's ticketing systems are amalgamated under the MyMagic ticketing program).
I'd be interested in hearing what other people's experiences have been like with them. I've seen some people on the US boards that have had problems, but plenty who haven't - so it could be that it was a one-off (or a two-off, as we had two cards with exactly the same problem).
Keith
Trip history:
DLR: 2005, 06, 09, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18
DLRP: 2006
HKDL: 2006 (Mar & Sept), 11 (Apr & Dec), 14, 19
SDR: 2017
TDR: 2008, 10, 17
WDW: 2006, 13 (Mar & Sept), 16, 19
DCL: 2013, 15 (Alaska & Hawaii), 18
Aulani: 2015
