So I have a LOT of money tied up in Disney Gift cards from my canceled April ‘20 trip. I want to use them to pay for many extras during our upcoming trip but have discovered that they can’t be loaded into MDE as a payment method. Room is paid for and is offsite so can’t use magic band and then just pay at front desk.
Any work arounds? Could I use a Disney Visa and pay that off with gift cards?
Why not just use the gift cards to pay for stuff directly?
Agreed. We never once used Magic Bands to pay for anything during our trips. Gifts cards can be used directly, or entered into MDE at the time of payment for Mobile Order.
Shouldn’t be an issue.
A hack that some people use is the put all the information you need into a Note on your phone, then copy and paste into MDE whenever you need to use it.
We had the same situation. You can’t store it as a payment method in MDE, but you can still use it to pay for mobile orders and such. Like @Jeff_AZ said, I just stored the numbers in my phone to copy over and used the physical cards for store purchases, etc.
Worked great!
Gift card question…
Is it worthwhile to enter the gift card codes into Disney’s gift card website to manage the cards & keep track of balances, or do you just use the codes and keep track yourself?
One advantage to entering them is should you lose one of the physical cards you can transfer that balance to another card you have stored. Granted you need to have the card physically with you as well.
You will not see the entire card number on the site and it is not like a mobile wallet.
All the cards I have are digital, but seems like it wouldn’t be a bad idea if they are registered.
You can also combine them into 1 or 2 cards too which is especially helpful for tracking balances.
Two out of the three already have pretty amounts and I am wary of them being too high.
If you go to a store and buy the cheapest Disney gift card, you can then register it and transfer balances from the digital gift cards to it so that you can pay using a card directly.
ABSOLUTELY.
What I do is keep 1 physical card on me (and the number in my notes on phone) then continue to transfer the digital gift card balances to the registered physical card so long as it’s sub $1000 on that card.
This allows me to use the same card for mobile orders, and purchases where MDE doesn’t apply (Like festival booths or stores). While it doesn’t help tracking individual purchases, I can at least keep a closer eye on available balance.
I merge anything under the limit of $1000. I would always keep a copy of the numbers and codes though, they do not guarantee backup on the gift card site.
Another good hack is you can use gift cards for parking.
I am glad you mentioned this. Since we decided to partly go off-site we will be paying for some parking.
It would never have occurred to me to use it for that. We have a decent amount on gift cards.
I see the Disney card website allows you to list up to 6 cards.
And you can transfer balances between cards.
I have more than 16 cards for $50 each.
I’m thinking it’d be easier to have 4 cards with $200.
Bearing in mind the 6-card limit, can I load up 4 cards, transfer the value from 3 into the 4th card.
Remove those cards from the website.
Load up another 4 and repeat the process?
Yes you can do that.
I did just that. At Sam’s the smaller value cards were at a greater discount. So, I bought more but of the smaller cards. I think I ended up keeping 5. I think $1000 is the max on each card.
I made sure to physically keep the cards that I used for anything that might get a refund, like hotel reservations.
I miss Sam’s.
Yet another big box that we lost along the way.