First, mini-rant: Online check-in doesn’t make any sense to me. The original purpose of checking in was to announce that you’re there and ready to go to your room or board your plane or whatever. Checking in online seems to defeat that purpose.
Okay, so my question is: If I do online check-in weeks ahead of my actual arrival at a WDW hotel, are there any negative repercussions, like making it more difficult to cancel if needed? (I have a room-only reservations so I can cancel 5 days before my start date without penalty.)
Actually, I did have a guest in June who had completed online check-in whose flight was canceled after they sat on board for three hours before leaving their departure airport. She wanted to adjust her dates to arrive the next day, so I happily took care of that for her. But it turned into a very complicated process because, at least according to three cast members that I spoke to, she had completed online check-in. So that the system was seeing her as checked in and that made it difficult to undo everything and modify her dates. It could very well have been because she was checked in and it was her arrival day, but I will say that the experience I had fixing it has made me very hesitant to complete online check-in very much before I arrive going forward. On my September trip for example, I didn’t check in until it was a pretty sure thing that my flight was leaving the ground.
On our recent trip traveling as “Group” with 4 families and 4 rooms who wanted to have rooms as close together as possible, the CM I spoke to on the phone recommended that we not check-in early online as it potentially could disrupt the request in the system to have rooms close together. I don’t know if that would impact other room requests too.
I have a hunch that was more to do with selecting options for room requests as part of the on-line check in process. Selecting any of the drop down options will over-write room requests already in the system.
