"Travel Tuesdays"... Disney World Fastpass Tips!

Today's "Travel Tuesdays" is focused on obtaining the Disney World Fastpasses that you want! This is of course based on the current Fastpass+ system. Disney allows you to reserve 3 Fastpasses per day. However, these have to be in the same park. You can't have 2 Fastpasses in one park and then hop over to another park for 1 more. This is something I'm hoping they change. You can get one additional Fastpass at a time after you've used the first 3, but that's a topic for another post. Anyway, here are the strategies I used to get all of the Fastpasses we wanted (including the much sought after...Meet Anna & Elsa).

5 Tips for Booking Disney World Fastpasses

 1) Stay on site & book Fastpasses 60 days before your trip. Disney allows on-site resort guests to book their Fastpasses 60 days before their trip. Not only that, but you get what they call 60 days plus 10. This means 60 days from the start date of your trip you can book your Fastpasses for the first 10 days of your vacation. If you're staying longer than 10 days you'll have to wait until the next day to book more.

2) Plan Ahead. I did a ton of research to decide which Fastpasses I wanted. I had a spreadsheet that showed what days I wanted which attractions and approximate times. You don't have to be as obsessive as I was, but I would definitely have a game plan.

3) Be online before midnight. I was online, and I logged out of my account at 11:50 pm. I then logged back in at approximately 11:55 pm. Right at midnight everything showed up for me. Keep refreshing your screen! I have heard that sometimes they don't show up until closer to 1 AM . Be patient, but keep refreshing!

4) Book the hardest Fastpasses first - for the last day of your vacation. For example, we have park tickets from Saturday to Friday. I booked the hardest Fastpasses (Meet Anna & Elsa and Seven Dwarfs Mine Train) for Friday. This gives you the best chance of getting them because fewer people have had that day available yet.

5) Be sure you have tickets already linked to your account!!!! This is one that we learned the hard way. My husband and I booked our vacation as a package so everything was included and on our account. We had no trouble on our 60-day mark. However, some of my family members live in Florida and wanted annual passes. They got a better deal on tickets by using a website that their employers offer them for travel discounts. They had planned on buying their annual passes closer to our trip. However, we realized they would need these in order to book their Fastpasses. They quickly scrambled to buy them and assumed all would be well and they would receive an e-mail with the needed information. Unfortunately, that's not how it played out. Because these tickets weren't purchased through Disney, they did not have their official "ticket id number" in time. The "ticket id number" was not e-mailed to them, and they were told they would have to wait until they received them in the mail. Please, please, please if you are booking through someone that isn't Disney, give yourself enough time to get the needed information before your 60-day mark. Also, be sure you go ahead and link your tickets to your account before it's time to choose your Fastpasses.