Friday, August 2, 2024

Setting Up Magicband+ For Disney World

Two years ago my wife and I started a tradition with our oldest grandson by taking just him to Disneyland after he turned 5. We found a great deal on the Grand Californian hotel and booked the trip. We had a wonderful time and decided we would continue with the rest of our grand kids. This year we have two of our granddaughters turning 5 and so instead of a trip for each of them, we are bringing the both of them to Disney World. Why Disney World? One lives in Ohio and it is easier to pick her up on the way with the second granddaughter in tow.

Wanting to make sure we maximize our experience in the parks, my wife and I went online and purchased Magicband+ bracelets for ourselves and our granddaughters. Today I went about connecting them to my iPhone where I have the Disney World app installed. For some reason I could not get them to connect. Then I watched a video and saw my mistake.

My Sony smartphones have had Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities for a decade. I didn't think it caught on for other brands but today I discovered it is available in my iPhone. The important thing is to know where the touch point is on the device. For my iPhone it is on the upper-back-right corner. Once I turned the Magicband+ on, all I needed to do was touch it to the right place on my phone. Then I just followed the prompts to connect everything. Before the enlightening video I tried touching every part of my phone with the bracelet except the upper-right corner.

Unfortunately the software engineers that create Disney's theme park apps do an insanely poor job on their user interface. Even though I selected the correct person in the app before linking the Magicband+, the app linked all of them to me. There is no way you can unlink them. I had to call Disney technical support at (407) 939-4357.

Disney is known for having the best customer service and their technical support lives up to that standard. I have to say it is second to none. I quickly navigated the menu to get to the right department and a real human answered the call. Furthermore she spoke English like an American. I don't care if she is in Mexico or India, I just care that I can easily communicate. I explained my problem and she solved it immediately. Furthermore she linked my wife's park ticket with her account. Her help definitely made up for a poor application.

Now we are set and ready to go. The only problem is that the trip is not for a long time. I can hardly wait.

No comments:

Post a Comment