This is a weird one but I’m sure others have had this issue. We have a split stay because airfare was actually cheaper moving our trip up. We will be staying at POFQ on the 25th of November and then Poly on the 26th-3rd. Currently our tickets are for the Poly stay and I just want to add an additional day since I can start using the tickets before the 26th. I saw some chatter back in 2015 about a similar topic. Will I be able to make fastpass+ reservations for the 25th or just for my 26th-3rd stay?
Thanks in advance!
Are your tickets part of a package?
Here’s my only experience with this - we were working with a travel agent, and wanted to travel between “x” and “y,” and it turned out there was a deal that only started at x+1 date, so she booked us a package with tickets for x+1 through y, plus a one-night for day x. Of course we had no tickets associated with day x, but somehow an extra day’s worth of tickets tied to the package (which, if we’d activated them on day x+1, we wouldn’t have been able to use).
TA then made a big production out of saying that we didn’t tell her we wanted to use tickets for day x, nobody went to parks on arrival day, that day x+1 should be fine, etc. Made me super angry. After getting transferred away from that agent, her boss said that we should be able to pick up/activate our package tickets 24 hours early, but had no answer on FPP. However, she did something weird where she tied our 5-day tickets to the one-night reservation. It was all highly convoluted and I was very dubious that it would work. Somehow it kinda did, but it did not show up correctly in MDE at any point, and if I called Disney to check on it I got conflicting information. But on FPP booking day, I was able to magically book for the entire trip, and when we arrived we were able to enter MK.
My suggestion for split stays like that would be to book two room-only reservations and just buy the number of tickets you need separately. You might have two FPP days, but no hassles or worries about whether you’ll be able to book FPP for your first day or even enter parks that day. If you have already booked a package for x+1 of your trip, maybe you have a travel agent to sort it out?
I had a similar experience to you based on a free dining window. We ended up being able to use or tickets on X rather than X plus one but didn’t have any fast passes that day. There was a screw up when we got to Epcot with activating our magic bands and for the trouble they ended up giving us 3 fast passes! So in the end it worked out. On this trip I know we’ll be able to activate our tickets early but they are tied to the main reservation, not the additional one day reservation that is for in a sense X-1. I guess I’ll just see what I can do at the 60 day window and will pass along the info!
In every other case the FP window opens for the whole stay, and some liners have reported the window opening even with the tickets associated with the 2nd stay. When you have a package the window at day 60 should open the whole 60 days before that stay…but… there have been recent reports of adding days messing this up- the window after the stay opening but the days before never opening.
Once we’re in the window I’ll post with how it worked out. I can say at the 180 days for dinner reservations, the system would only allow us to book for the 1st day and then the 2nd stay opened up the following day.