Spoiler alert: this post will either make you jealous or make you think I’m an entitled rule-breaker. I debated keeping this whole story to myself, but just in case anyone else can nab these awesome passes from guest services, I wanted to share how awesome they were. I guess if anyone wants to be super ballsy and just say they have a pass and bank on cast members not scanning them, more power to you…
Not a day goes by on social media where someone doesn’t ask the question “I thought there were no fastpasses, why do I see people using the fastpass line?!” While the majority of people using the fastpass line currently are definitely those with Disability passes (“DAS”), I got to be one of the lucky few using the fastpass line during our December 2020 trip thanks to a much, much earlier (pre covid) customer service issue that was remedied by DVC member services giving one “multi experience pass” to each member of our party for each day of our December trip.
Why does a multi experience pass sound vaguely familiar to you? Perhaps you have been on line for a ride and it has shut down, or perhaps you’ve booked your fastpasses 60 days in advance and when your window to ride the ride arrives, the ride you booked is closed for whatever reason. In these scenarios, guests have historically been granted a multi experience pass. It’s basically a fastpass that can be used on any ride in any park, excluding the most in-demand rides (no 7 dwarfs, slinky dog, frozen, avatar, just to name a few). The time window is also wide open typically, as opposed to fastpasses typically being limited to a one hour window. So most of us have used one of these multi experience passes in the past in these isolated scenarios.
At the time of our customer service issue (it was actually a super significant issue that caused our room to mistakenly be unbooked during a peak time that was incredibly hard to rebook), I didn’t consider these multi experience passes to really be adequate remediation. One extra fastpass per day? Meh. Not a game changer. Pretty cool still, and definitely happy to get something, but nothing to write home about. However, the world subsequently imploded and Disney trip planning changed more drastically than I could have ever imagined. I honestly still can’t believe that we are going on 10 months with no fastpasses.
When Disney halted the use of Fastpasses, I figured our multi experience passes probably would no longer be valid. Not only was I wrong, but now they became 1000 times more valuable. The ability to skip a line when nearly no one else is using the fastpass line?! Amazing. The caveat was that we each only had one per day and couldn’t use them on the big rides, or so we thought.
This is where it gets even more amazing. Given that these passes are barely in use these days, many of the rides either weren’t equipped to scan fastpasses (rides that typically don’t merit the use of a fastpass didn’t have anyone at the entrance with the proper device to scan a magic band), or the cast members at the entrances simply didn’t care to actually verify that we had these passes.
Our first experience using our passes was in Epcot at Test Track. I went up to the cast member and said I had a multi experience pass and I wanted to use it on Test Track so that my 3 year old wouldn’t chicken out and change his mind while waiting in the hour-long line. The cast member was so elated to see my happy little 3 year old being brave and trying a big kid ride that she said we didn’t need to scan our pass, she would just take us through to the front. She also said he could ride twice if he liked it (he didn’t like it THAT much, so we did not). Mind blown. I walked away thinking “what the heck just happened?!” We skipped the line, didn’t use our pass for that day, and were told we could ride twice in a row?! I’ve never experienced anything like that. Props to my kiddo for being a cutie I guess (kidding).
So that pixie dust on night 1 was phenomenal, but I figured it was a fluke and we just encountered a wonderfully kind cast member. However, the next day, we encountered similar situations repeatedly in Magic Kingdom and i realized it wasn’t purely kindness from the original cast member, but these passes must actually be a pain for them to scan if they don’t have the proper device handy. First, my son wanted to use our passes on Small World (he kills me man), which was a 50 minute wait at the time. I was not thrilled to “waste” these golden passes on Small World, but hey I guess it’s the kid’s call. So we headed to talk to the cast member at the entrance to the line. The cast member proceeded to give me a look like “seriously, you’re going to use your one pass on THIS?” and then said to just go through the fastpass line without scanning our bands. That cast member didn’t appear to have an iPad that would have been able to scan our passes to begin with, so they probably didn’t want to hunt one down just for one small party of 3. This exact same situation happened again at the carousel, buzz light years space ranger spin, and Astro orbiter. We were fully prepared to use our passes each time, but the cast members never seemed inclined to scan them. Finally they were properly scanned at the Jungle Cruise (now that’s a ride you should always use a fastpass on).
So life continued like this for several days of our trip. Same situation in Epcot, MK, and AK. In AK our passes weren’t scanned for Kali Rapids, but were scanned properly for the Safari. You can tell that they are ready on some of the rides where fastpass use was more common and they probably have more people using the DAS passes.
Then we got to Hollywood Studios…. my plan was to use the pass for the Frozen show because we mostly just ride Toy Story Mania and Alien Swirling Saucers in HS and there were no lines for those, I think the passes weren’t valid on TSM regardless, if i remember correctly. The passes were useless for ROTR obviously since you use the virtual queue. With my 3 year old we weren’t about to use the passes on ToT, Aerosmith, or Star Tours (my nemesis). When we tried to use it at Frozen though they said that there really was no benefit to the passes for that show. They didn’t have any reserved seats set aside for fastpasses or anything. They suggested that I speak to someone under the blue Guest Services umbrella right in the center of the park and ask for a pass for Slinky Dog since there were no kid friendly rides that I could take advantage of the pass on (the pass wasn’t valid for Slinky Dog or MMRR). Since there was no line at the umbrella, I gave it a try. Low and behold, they gave us fastpasses for Slinky Dog in place of our multi experience passes (insert dumbfounded, shocked face). Completely shocked. I would have never even thought to ask! The line for Slinky Dog was 70+ minutes throughout our whole trip so this was a major score. Thanks to that bit of pixie dust, we were able to get my son to try the ride that would go on to be his favorite in all of WDW. No way would he have made it through a 70 minute line without chickening out watching those fast slinky dog trains going by.
So yep, we spent the whole week as little entitled brats skipping a ton of lines. Basically we are the people who would be crucified on social media for breaking rules or working the system, but it wasn’t even our doing. We were given the multi experience passes almost a year ago and had no idea cast members wouldn’t scan them at the entrance of each ride. Total jackpot. If you have any customer service issues in the near future and can get your hands on multi experience passes for your party (no idea if they are granting them currently), DO IT. I can’t overstate how valuable those passes were on our trip. We skipped at least 20 lines on our 9 day trip 🤯, including Slinky Dog and 7 Dwarfs (we asked at the entrance of that line if the pass was valid for that ride, and the cast member said yes, which I am quite sure was an error, but I wasn’t about to correct them).
So yep, that is my glorious story of pixie dust. I’ve never really experienced pixie dust ever in my 30 years of frequent Disney travel (0 room upgrades, no freebies, etc, which is fine because the point is that those things should not be expected), but who boy did this trip make up for it. Now when we return for a few days in May, my son will be confused about why we can’t skip all the lines !!