Every December, I take my family to Disneyland.
On our most recent annual trip, we snagged some great dinner reservations and checked into our themed hotel with ease. This time, my granddaughter was finally tall enough to ride more attractions, like Space Mountain and Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.
Soon, though, I realized something: Although our group had never had so much fun at Disney, we’d also never spent so much time on our phones.
I first started relying on my phone at Disney during a 2018 trip to the parks
Our increased screen time wasn’t due to texting or surfing the web — we were just managing our entire vacation on the My Disney Experience app.
Though early versions of the app began making rounds in 2012, I didn’t try it until a trip to Disney World in 2018.
When checking into our hotel on the property, I’d turned down the chance to have our park tickets and room key loaded onto the app because I consider myself pretty old school.
However, I finally caved by lunchtime.
While at Animal Kingdom’s Flame Tree Barbecue, I noticed several people just walking up to the counter and being handed food without ever waiting in the long line I’d been standing in.
That’s when my wife told me about mobile ordering, a new service Disney had rolled out just a few months prior. I was hungry, so I decided to give it a try.
In a few taps, I’d placed our lunch order. The app asked if I was in the area and ready to pick up the food. I answered yes.
Within minutes, I got another alert saying my food was ready. I casually walked past the throngs of guests still waiting to even place their orders and picked up my pulled-pork sandwich.
I felt like I’d been granted membership to a secret club.
My so-called “secret” club didn’t last, as the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new way of life, one where contactless interactions were preferred.
Mobile ordering, both at Disney and other institutions, has become the norm and, in some cases, the default or only option. Contactless check-in via a mobile app also became increasingly popular across various hotel chains, including Disney properties.
Disney’s app has since become a hub for park tickets, room keys, dinner reservations — and even line-skipping features.
By 2021, Disney had completely retired its old line-skipping system that used paper tickets, replacing it with one that could only be used with its app.
There are still paper maps, physical tickets, and room key cards available for those who want them, but now, it feels difficult to imagine a trip to the parks without a smartphone loaded with the My Disney Experience app.
On our recent trip, we used Disney’s app to manage our entire vacation
Though I was once hesitant to use an app as my key card at a Disney hotel, it just made sense during our December trip.
My hotel reservation was linked to the other guests in my party, so they could easily unlock our suite and make room charges using the app. The only time we went to the front desk was to get a key card for our granddaughter because she likes to open the door herself.
When it came time to enter the park, we scanned our tickets in the app and used our phones for entry. The app helped us check ride wait times so we could maximize our day. We also used it to peruse the menus of restaurants we might want to dine at, make reservations, and then receive alerts when our table was ready.
Our biggest use of the app was reserving rides with the Lightning Lane, a service we’d paid extra for so we could skip the lines on popular attractions.
Every time we got off one ride, my wife was on the app, refreshing to check availability while trying to make the next reservation for our whole family.
Though she did miss a few conversations while heads-down on her phone, it felt like a small sacrifice to make in order to efficiently secure seats on popular attractions for our whole family.
With everything we could need in this app, all we really had to do was make sure we had an extra battery and phone chargers in our bags.
My granddaughter’s Disney trips will look different from the ones I remember growing up — and I’m OK with that
Walking around the park, I thought I’d feel sad seeing empty alcoves where machines once dispensed paper Fast Passes or the ticket booths in the process of being removed.
However, I realized I really just feel nostalgic. Any wistful reflections would be a bit romanticized since the past may be simpler, but it wasn’t always better.
When my wife and I visited Disney World for the first time in the ’80s, we picked up our park tickets from our travel agent, flew with physical boarding passes, and carried printed-out copies of our hotel reservations and rental-car agreement.
Times have definitely changed, but it sure is more convenient to travel with a digital boarding pass and the Disney app loaded on my phone instead of carrying a bunch of papers.
And by not waiting in lines to order food or check in at a hotel, maybe parkgoers can free up their time to spend more of it having fun with family.
But if your face is buried in your phone, you’re going to miss a lot — whether the special menu recommendations that come with placing a food order with a cashier or the look on a loved one’s face as they get off a great ride.
Ultimately, the ability to manage your entire Disney trip on an app isn’t exactly a bad thing — it just comes down to how you use it.
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