As of January 1, 2019, we have closed our forums. This is a decision we did not come to lightly, but it is necessary. The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk. The server software itself must be updated, and it cannot be without removing the forums.
So it is with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to our long-running forums. They came online in 2000 and brought together so many wonderful Disney fans. We had friendships form, careers launch, couples marry, children born ... all because of this amazing community.
Thank you to each of you who were a part of this community. You made it possible.
And a very special thank you to our Guides (moderators), past and present, who kept our forums a happy place to be. You are the glue that held everything together, and we are forever grateful to you. Thank you aliceinwdw, Caldercup, MrsM, WillCAD, Fortissimo, GingerJ, HiddenMickey, CRCrazy, Eeyoresmom, disneyknut, disneydani, Cam22, chezp, WDWfan, Luvsun, KMB733, rescuesk, OhToodles!, Colexis Mom, lfredsbo, HiddenMickey, DrDolphin, DopeyGirl, duck addict, Disneybine, PixieMichele, Sandra Bostwick, Eeyore Tattoo, DyanKJ130, Suzy Q'Disney, LilMarcieMouse, AllisonG, Belle*, Chrissi, Brant, DawnDenise, Crystalloubear, Disneymom9092, FanOfMickey, Goofy4Goofy, GoofyMom, Home4us123, iamgrumpy, ilovedisney247, Jennifer2003, Jenny Pooh, KrisLuvsDisney, Ladyt, Laughaholic88, LauraBelle Hime, Lilianna, LizardCop, Loobyoxlip, lukeandbrooksmom, marisag, michnash, MickeyMAC, OffKilter_Lynn, PamelaK, Poor_Eeyore, ripkensnana, RobDVC, SHEANA1226, Shell of the South, snoozin, Statelady01, Tara O'Hara, tigger22, Tink and Co., Tinkerbelz, WDWJAMBA, wdwlovers, Wendyismyname, whoSEZ, WildforWD, and WvuGrrrl. You made the magic.
We want to personally thank Sara Varney, who coordinated our community for many years (among so many other things she did for us), and Cheryl Pendry, our Message Board Manager who helped train our Guides, and Ginger Jabour, who helped us with the PassPorter-specific forums and Live! Guides. Thank you for your time, energy, and enthusiasm. You made it all happen.
There are other changes as well.
Why? Well, the world has changed. And change with it, we must. The lyrics to "We Go On" for IllumiNations say it best:
We go on to the joy and through the tears
We go on to discover new frontiers
Moving on with the current of the years.
We go on
Moving forward now as one
Moving on with a spirit born to run
Ever on with each rising sun.
To a new day, we go on.
It's time to move on and move forward.
PassPorter is a small business, and for many years it supported our family. But the world changed, print books took a backseat to the Internet, and for a long time now it has been unable to make ends meet. We've had to find new ways to support our family, which means new careers and less and less time available to devote to our first baby, PassPorter.
But eventually, we must move on and move forward. It is the right thing to do.
So we are retiring this newsletter, as we simply cannot keep up with it. Many thanks to Mouse Fan Travel who supported it all these years, to All Ears and MousePlanet who helped us with news, to our many article contributors, and -- most importantly -- to Sara Varney who edited our newsletter so wonderfully for years and years.
And we are no longer charging for the Live Guides. If you have a subscription, it's yours to keep for the lifetime of the Live Guides at no additional cost. The Live Guides will stay online, barring server issues and technical problems, for all of 2019.
That said, PassPorter is not going away. Most of the resources will remain online for as long as we can support them, and after that we will find ways to make whatever we can available. PassPorter means a great deal to us, and to many of you, and we will do our best to keep it alive in whatever way we can. Our server costs are high, and they'll need to come out of our pockets, so in the future you can expect some changes so we can bring those costs down.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your amazing support over the years. Without you, there's no way us little guys could have made something like this happen and given the "big guys" a run for their money. PassPorter was consistently the #3 guidebook after the Unofficial and Official guides, which was really unheard of for such a small company to do. We ROCKED it thanks to you and your support and love!
If you miss us, you can still find some of us online. Sara started a new blog at DisneyParkPrincess.com -- I strongly urge you to visit and get on her mailing list. She IS the Disney park princess and knows Disney backward and forward. And I am blogging as well at JenniferMaker.com, which is a little craft blog I started a couple of years ago to make ends meet. You can see and hear me in my craft show at https://www.youtube.com/c/jennifermaker . Many PassPorter readers and fans are on Facebook, in groups they formed like the PassPorter Trip Reports and PassPorter Crafting Challenge (if you join, just let them know you read about it in the newsletter). And some of our most devoted community members started a forum of their own at Pixie Dust Lane and all are invited over.
So we encourage you to stay in touch with us and your fellow community members wherever works best for you!
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I should have posted this months ago, but I was promoted to a new role in Administration at the Community College I work at, and with that comes a lot more work. I finally have a moment and thought i'd share the good, the bad, and down right confusion we experienced at WDW. Our party consisted of myself(DM), DS 17, and DD 20. We stayed from Dec. 22 - Jan. 1. at AS Sports & CBR. I think I should start with the confusion. The folks at AS Sports were, in my opinion, complete idiots! Checkin was a hot mess... more on that in a bit...When my son and I checked in I had explained to the CM that my daughter would arrive the following day and asked if they could give her, her band upon check-in. As my son and I may be at one of the parks when she arrives. The CM said it was no problem, no worries! Well turned out it was a huge worry. When my daughter arrived not only did they act like they didn't know she was staying at the hotel on my reservation but they claimed they could not give her, her band because the inscription inside the band was her 'nickname' and not the same as on the reservation (her full name). Luckily, I decided to stay at the resort till she arrived just in case. Glad I did. My daughter was texting me at warp speed, so I left the room to meet her at the front desk. It took 2 CM's and 2 Managers to finally straighten everything out and find her band that the original CM who checked me in put back on the cart behind the front desk under my name. After 30 minutes of this she was finally checked in. When I asked for her band to be tested, it didn't work. Then the 'genius' manager in a nasty tone flat out barks at me 'you should have used the name on the reservation. If you would have read the directions you would have known this." WTF... literally... that's what I thought at the moment. I politely looked him dead in the eye and simply said this is not a magical experience nor is it what I expect form Disney, Please fix the band. Thank God, the CM who tested the band was so polite and kind, she diffused the situation by explaining that the bands are still in the testing stage and there are always hick-ups but she would try to resolve it. After getting another manager they finally fixed the band!
Ok so back to the original check in. I booked the original package under the free dining promo so this gave us free dining from Dec. 22 - Dec . 29. About 3 weeks before the trip I called back to change the ressie, now mind you I had made alot of changes to the original ressie, over the course of 6 months. Yet when I called to make the final change to extend the trip to Jan 1. I was told it was done and charged at the time. Well once I got to WDW I found out that the charge was refunded because at the time of my booking the hotel was already full. Wait..what!! I was so confused. SO now I had to figure out where we would stay for Dec. 30 to Jan. 1. I was also really upset because I didn't realize that I would have to hunt for a room during NYE. Every hotel was pretty much sold out. Needless to say I was highly irritated at the beginning of my trip. Eventually with the help of a CM through the ressie line I was able to find a room at CBR for 2 nights. Very rare to find a room during NYE but they really went above and beyond to help me after I explained the experience at AS Sports. Overall the stay at AS Sports was good. The new food court is really nice and the food was yummy. The folks in the food court were extremely helpful with helping me to understand how many meal credits we had left. The refillable mugs are very cool and we were able to use them at other resorts. With that said I think I love CBR. We never stayed at anything but a value hotel at WDW. I would say that paying a little extra is worth it. The room was bigger, the beds were actually soft, and the service was 100 times better. The only thing that didn't go smooth was the magic band usage after we switched hotels. We still had meal credits that we needed to use up before midnight and the bands didn't work. However at CBR in the food court there is a concierge station. The CM there fixed it and we were all good. Overall I really like the bands- alot! They can get wet, they stay on and can be used for everything. I chose to allow for purchasing on my band only, so I didn't have to carry a wallet and It was really nice. I gave the kids disney gift cards to use for souvenirs so it all worked out.
Ok now to our time in the parks. What can I say Disney is amazing at Christmas and we had a blast at all the parks. We were even able to see the Candlelight Processional without a dinner package. I waited in line for 40 mins then the kids joined me. We lucked up and were moved from the back to the front section. It was fantastic!!
I will say that I don't think quick service dinning is enough food, at least not for my family. This may be because we have fast metabolism and normally eat 4 meals a day (like hobbits LOL ) but seriously we eat alot of veggies and fruit. I ended up spending a bit on food so we could be full and still eat healthy. I was happy to see that at all the parks I was able to find fruit and other yummy stuff. At the same time if you go to the right quick service spots you will get good portions that you could save for later or even share to stretch your meal credits. We did this a few times. For our next trip I will purchase the Deluxe dining plan which will give us more options and lots of food .
Overall we enjoyed Disney and will be back in December because WDW during the holiday season is wonderful!!
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Sorry you had some big issues at check in, but thank goodness you had several great CMs who took care of you all. Otherwise, it sounds like you all had lots of fun during the holidays.
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So I wanted to take a minute and talk about our Magic Band, fastpass+, disney app, and photopass+ experience. I guess I was part of the last group to use the photopass+ because I was told to have the photographers scan the cards vs. scanning the band. After reading reviews on passporter boards I decided to have them scan both. Now all 3 bands were linked to my MDE account but only my band and DS worked for the photos. I didn't realize this till we got home and i was able to access all my photos. If I didn't have the card scanned we would have lost a lot of pictures. I'm sure that's worked out now but it was weird at the time. I found that there were quite a few CM's who didn't fully understand how the bands worked. The one park that was really well organized and ready for the masses of people and questions about the bands and how they worked with fastpass+ was at Epcot. The first 3 days we were there the app kept crashing so I couldn't change our fastpass selections that I made prior to our arrival on my phone. Yet, at Epcot I was able to make the changes using the iPad kiosk that were set up. Plus ask questions to the army of CM's they had on stand-by to help with the kiosk. I was very happy with that because the kids were able to change the fastpasses to what they wanted. Meaning riding tower of terror everyday of the trip. Which made me sick as a dog won't be doing that ride of death again!!
I did like how you could walk up to a fastpass kiosk 2 minutes before your scheduled time and be able to basically walk right on the ride. We did that on Dec. 29 for rocking roller coaster that had a 3 hour wait. We walked right on the ride. Very Nice!! All in all I like the new fastpass+ system. Once the app stopped crashing I was able to schedule fastpasses day of, just really early in the morning before the kids woke up. The only day I couldn't do that was New year's eve.
Getting into our rooms using the bands was a breeze at AS SPorts no issues at all but when we switched to Carribean Beach Resort we were told that the bands did not work to open the doors and was given a KTTW card. I thought that was strange because the doors had the new band reader locks. We had absolutely no problem buying things using my band. Disney makes sure that they get paid...LOL!!
All in all i'm all for Disney Tech!! Makes things easy and fun. Plus Disney has free wi-fi in all parks. We never used our data plan only the wi-fi provided by Disney.
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What a mess at AS Sports! And I seem to recall, despite what the nasty manager said, that the instructions for personalizing the Magic Bands said we could label them however we wanted! At any rate it sounds like you had a great time and managed to work FP+ to your advantage even during the busiest week of the year.
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. I politely looked him dead in the eye and simply said this is not a magical experience nor is it what I expect form Disney, Please fix the band. Thank God, the CM who tested the band was so polite and kind, she diffused the situation by explaining that the bands are still in the testing stage and there are always hick-ups but she would try to resolve it. After getting another manager they finally fixed the band!
LOL ) but seriously we eat alot of veggies and fruit. I ended up spending a bit on food so we could be full and still eat healthy. I was happy to see that at all the parks I was able to find fruit and other yummy stuff. At the same time if you go to the right quick service spots you will get good portions that you could save for later or even share to stretch your meal credits. We did this a few times. For our next trip I will purchase the Deluxe dining plan which will give us more options and lots of food 
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Pixie Dust
Otherwise, it sounds like you all had lots of fun during the holidays. 
but glad you found a helpful CM 
won't be doing that ride of death again!! 
Makes things easy and fun. Plus Disney has free wi-fi in all parks. We never used our data plan only the wi-fi provided by Disney. 
Deb
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