Hi All! Heading on vacation soon and need to hear some first hand experiences, as the comments on various sites are mixed. Given that we knew about the trip WELL in advance, we have collected quite a few Disney gift cards from family and friends as gifts and such. I am very concerned about carrying them around in the park, so I was looking for additional options.
One thing I considered is charging everything to my room (via MB) and then paying down the balance each day or at the end of the trip with the gift card. Anyone have sucess doing this?
Any other ideas how to avoid carrying (or potentially losing) the gift cards?
That’s what we did, we kept all our gift cards in the safe and when we got back to the room each evening we went down and paid the balance with the cards. We had no issues at all, in fact, I have been accumulating cards since May for our vacation this August and plan to do the same thing. Enjoy your trip
I always move my gift cards onto one or two cards and keep one completely empty. Having them all on one is much easier for the CMs when you pay. If you keep one empty if something happens to a loadednone you can transfer that balance to an empty one.
Out of our several cards last trip, my wife and I each carried one card each day to use for food and merch purchases.
We used a couple of the larger ones to pay down the hotel bill itself.
If you’d like to minimize the number of cards you have to deal with, you can consolidate them and move funds around at this site: https://disneygiftcard.com/
(People suggest if you move funds off of a card that you keep it for awhile in case you need to return something originally purchased via that card - the funds would have to go back on the same card.)
I also suggest that you take photos of the front and back of all cards and keep them on your phone, so if by chance you do lose one you can have GS move the funds to another card for you quickly.
I don’t know how it works, but when I called and asked, they told me that I could put a gift card on my Magic Band as a form of payment. They said they can help me at the desk when I arrive…so I’m going to give it a try!
Unless something major has changed recently - they cannot put gift cards on magic bands. I think you got some bad CM advice there.
What people tend to do is attach a credit card to the MB, then go down at intervals to pay off the charges with GCs during vacation before the amount hits the threshold and gets charged to the credit card.
How do you move them all into one card? Disney gave me $8300 spread out on 5 E-gift cards after they shut down the vacation account and told me to just deal with the inconvenience
See my post above for link to site where you can manage cards. However, I believe the maximum you can transfer on a card is $1000, so that probably won’t help you dealing with your several thousand $$.
Well most of that will be gone once I make my final payment. Do you know if you can transfer the remaining balance on an E-Gift card to a regular gift card?
I’m not sure on that one at all - my gut feeling would be to say probably, but I Googled a bit and found that someone asked that question in a blog where the person answered you could not. (Of course, would need additional research to find out if that answer is correct.)
Can you add egifts cards as well? I haven’t been able to find that answer anywhere.
Hi Genifer! Great question Disney EGift Cards are redeemable anywhere standard Disney Gift Cards are accepted BUT the EGift Card balance cannot be transferred nor added to the Disney Vacation Account. Bummer right?
In case anyone was wondering about merging eGift Cards onto a normal Disney Gift Card, I’ve done it successful using the Disney Gift Card site mentioned above. You simply add the eGift Card to your list just like any other gift card using the account number and security numbers provided in the email and it loads right onto the list like normal. Then you simply transfer the funds from one card to your primary card, or any other gift card of your choice. I’ve done it with eGift Cards from Target.com and shopDisney. I’m not confirming this to be the policy, just saying it works for me, so YMMV. I’ve ran into some normal Disney Gift Cards that will load onto your account but won’t merge with other gift cards, for some reason.
Disney EGift Cards are redeemable anywhere standard Disney Gift Cards are accepted BUT the EGift Card balance cannot be transferred nor added to the Disney Vacation Account. Bummer right?