5. Souvenir Pick-Up and Resort Hotel Delivery
STATUS: Slashed
One of the lesser-known services offered to guests at Disney Parks is “Souvenir Pick-Up,” which offloads the irritation of having to carry a bag of souvenirs all day. In practice, guests can send a fragile snow globe, oversized stuffed animal, or awkward poster print to the front of the park for free to be grabbed on the way out of the park at the end of the day instead of lugging it onto rides or storing it in lockers.
For Disney hotel guests, the service was even more beneficial, with “Resort Hotel Delivery”! If you go through the expense of buying a Lightsaber, for example, who wouldn’t want to take some quick glamour photos with it out in Galaxy’s Edge? But naturally, carrying the awkward, padded case around the rest of the day or trying to store it on the Tower of Terror or Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster is a recipe for disaster. Instead, you can drop it off at Dok Ondar’s and pick it up the following day at your resort! Genius, right?
Merchandise pick-up services were among the many services slashed due to COVID-19 to reduce the number of hands touching things. Weirdly, it didn’t return even once Disney stepped back its pandemic-related health policies. In 2020, the front-of-the-park pickup briefly resumed for the holiday rush (December 20 – January 2) but then disappeared again. As of late 2022, both services are still listed as “Currently Unavailable” on Disney World’s website. Since they were little-known services anyway, maybe their loss doesn’t seem so important. But they’re two more free services that have disappeared for guests – absolutely wild considering, for example, that Lightsaber prices jumped $50 across 2022.
6. Complimentary MagicBands
STATUS: Replaced with an (optional) upcharge
PRICE YOU’LL PAY: $80+ (for a family of 4)
In 2013, Disney launched an unprecedented technological reimagining of Walt Disney World – an infamously uneven initiative we explored in our in-depth “MyMagic Minus” feature for Park Lore Members. For guests, that multi-billion-dollar upgrade was incarnate as the MagicBand – a would-be panacea for uniting Disney World’s many dissimilar systems in the user-friendly form of a colorful, RFID-enabled silicone wristband.
In thoery this one, simple, easy-to-manufacture bracelet would serve as a guest’s park ticket, room key, credit card, FastPass+ access card, and dining reservation proof in one, all before the widespread adoption of smartphones. It didn’t hurt, of course, that MagicBands were stylish, customizable, and collectible – a perfectly merchandizable souvenir for a 21st century Disney trip.
Today, it’s almost impossible to believe that MagicBands were free* (remember, read as “included”) for guests staying at Disney Resort hotels… or better yet, that they’d arrive before your visit in an excitement-building box with each guests’ selected color and name. Obviously, manufacturing and shipping MagicBands for free* is an expense it’s hard to imagine today’s Walt Disney Company ever approving… but for a generation, the appearance of MagicBands in the mail was a hype-building, social-media-friendly first-impression signalling the start of a trip, with MagicBand tan lines signifying its end.
Disney officially ended the free* distribution of MagicBands for Resort Hotel guests on January 1, 2021. As with the Magical Express, it does make logical sense. MagicBands were really only needed to bridge the gap between Disney’s technological upgrade and the rest of the world’s. At least as of 2021, 85% of Americans reported owning a smartphone, meaning someone in nearly every travel party can manage park tickets, room keys, credit cards, Lightning Lanes, and dining reservations without a MagicBand middle man. Disney also launched a “Magic Mobile” service, which can allow personal wearables (like the Apple Watch) to do almost everything a MagicBand can.
MagicBands are still available for purchase. The simplest, formerly-free ones retail for $19.99, and Disney does offer “pre-arrival” specials (effectively, $10-off discounts on select designs if you purchase a MagicBand in conjunction with an upcoming stay).
And just when everyone thought the MagicBand was dead, in 2022 Disney launched the MagicBand+ (a rechargable variant that includes color-changing LEDs and “interactive” capabilities for some in-park, app-based mini-games) that retails between $34.99 and $59.99. MagicBand+ even made the unexpected jump to Disneyland! It makes sense – countless trinkets, add-ons, customizable skins, and collectible designs still make MagicBands more fun than using your phone.
In any case, MagicBands are definitely optional, with your smartphone, smart watch, or the My Disney Experience app able to handle everything the silicone wristband ever could. But Disney used to send you one for every person in your party, in a celebratory box, for free. And now they don’t. So in terms of slashed perks, there’s no question that the elimination of this free benefit is frustrating. If you want to recreate the experience, the purchase of four ultra-basic MagicBand models will set our family of four back $80.
7. Extra Magic Hours
STATUS: Replaced with a free* service
Extra Magic Hours allowed guests of Disney resort hotels access to a select theme park each day by tacking on an additional hour before or two hours after the standard day exclusively for hotel guests. It was a major perk in the sense that it gave guests a head-start (or a “VIP” evening), but it also had its faults… like, for example, seemingly every on-site guest opting to visit whichever park offered the perk that day, all but ensuring it would be the busiest park on property, largely negating the “benefit” anyway.
The replacement for Extra Magic Hours comes in two forms. The first, Extended Evening Theme Park Hours leave a park open two hours after its posted closing time, but just for guests staying at Deluxe hotels. (A rare stratification for Disney, who tends to be pretty egalitarian with on-site guests.)
Early Theme Park Entry is for guests staying at any Disney hotel (and participating partner hotels – the Swan, Dolphin, and Shades of Green). Rather than an hour-ish of exclusive access to one select theme park each day, Early Entry essentially opens all four of Walt Disney World’s hotels to hotel guests 30 minutes before its official opening time to the public. Like during Extra Magic Hours, only select attractions are available.
As a replacement for Extra Magic Hours, Early Entry makes a good amount of sense, as it better distributes hotel guests across the property instead of inviting them to descend on one particular park en masse. The people who will be really affected by this “perk,” though, are those staying off-site. Whereas off-site guests could simply avoid whichever park was offering Extra Magic Hours to ensure they weren’t affected in the past, now off-site guests begin every day at every park at a clear disadvantage since on-site guests have already had 30 minutes to surge into E-Ticket lines or gather at “rope drop” points farther in the park.
8. Resort Airline Check-In
STATUS: Slashed
Just as our list of lost perks and new upcharges began with the start of guests’ trip and the loss of Magical Express, it ends with a small but frustrating inconvenience at the end of the trip. Resort Airline Check-In allowed guests of Disney hotels to check-in to their flight (on select carriers) and print boarding passes through their Resort’s front desk – just in time for Magical Express to pick them up and whisk them back to the airport, worry-free.
Just as Magical Express “magically” delivered bags to your room on arrival, guests could check luggage from their hotel lobby, which would then make its way onto the airplane, checked through to its final destination.
Resort Airline Check-In is no longer available. That means that the end of a trip to Walt Disney World is a lot like the end of a trip anywhere else… you need to lug your bags out to the hotel’s portico to either catch a Lyft, Uber, shuttle, or rental car back to the airport, then wait in line at your carrier’s check-in to weigh, tag, and check your luggage. It’s not exactly “magical.” In fact, it’s the same treatment you’d get for staying outside the Disney Bubble. Yep, the end of yet another free* service means that the perks of staying on-site are few and far between.
Bubble, burst
If you stayed on-site at Walt Disney World in, say, 2018, you had a 30-day headstart on off-site guests in booking your free FastPass reservations (yes, free even for headliners like Avatar Flight of Passage and Seven Dwarfs Mine Train); free MagicBands that arrived in the mail; a free ride to your hotel, or free parking at it… Today, that same family looking to merely recreate what they got five years ago would need to budget $118 to replace Magical Express or $90 for hotel parking; $400 for Genie+ and $300 for Individual Lightning Lanes. $80 for MagicBands. And no souvenir delivery, Extra Magic Hours, or Airline Check-In…
In other words, it would cost a family of four on a five-day trip about $1000 just to recreate what used to be included with Disney’s already-premium ticket and hotel prices – and that’s to say nothing of raised ticket, hotel, merchandise, and food prices across the board.
As guests return home from Walt Disney World’s 50th Anniversary, more and more evidence suggests that they aren’t telling their friends and family about Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, or golden statues, or “Harmonious”… They’re talking about longtime perks that have disappeared; about nightmarish Park Reservation processes and ballooned costs for tickets, food, and merchandise; about hundreds of dollars in hidden costs and blatant new upcharges that have changed Disney World forever.
In search of bragging rights on the next quarterly earnings call, Disney seems happy to bulldoze decades of goodwill and earned loyalty without thinking that word of mouth could see a steep drop-off in attendance in long-run. In a corporate culture that prioritizes “up-and-out” executives and Wall Street read-outs, maybe today’s Disney leadership doesn’t mind kicking that can down the road so long as today’s shareholders benefit. And given that current leadership has explicitly stated that fewer guests who pay more is the goal for Disney Parks, maybe this is exactly what the company wants – to weed out clientele who aren’t “income qualified” to survive in the add-on economy of the new Disney Parks.
But can it last? How much longer than Disney Parks provide less while charging more? How can a Disney World vacation get both more expensive, and less easy? Can 6:55 AM wakeups, continuous upcharges, and nickel-and-dimed micro-transactions really become the new standards of a Walt Disney World visit? More to the point, will anyone cancel or change their plans as a result? After all, Disney’s betting that despite what you say on social media, you’ll not only come back to their parks, but that you’ll probably pay for what used to be free, too. So the only question that matters is: will you?