Help please - need advice on major ticket issues from expert Liners

Walt Disney World Other
1

Hello - I do not post here much but had a massive problem with tickets not being prioritized correctly, tickets not being upgraded correctly and then falling off of my account. I just need some advice or maybe just reassurance that all will work out properly.
Story (sorry it’s a long one):
I had AP for my family good through 3/14/15. I booked FD in November 2014 and bought the 2-day minimum base tickets for 4 people. This is where the trouble started. I know about tickets not prioritizing correctly and that I should check at at GS. We actually went in first and yep - 2 day tickets were being used instead of the AP - got that fixed.

Next trip was 3/6/15 - 3/12/15. I went to GS to upgrade these 4 tickets to 6-day tickets because we have another trip planned for July of this year and I wanted to be able to book FPP for all days - not planning on getting AP again. Went to GS - paid around $600 to upgrade all 4 tickets to 6-day MYW tickets. No hard ticket given - and receipt has absolutely no details. Checked my account a few hours later and I only see 1 ticket - 3 of the tickets that HAD been in my account and that I had just paid to upgrade were completely missing.

I went back to GS that evening - waited an hour at the Magic Kingdom GS to get fixed. The girl was very nice and finally figured out that somehow the newly upgraded tickets that had never been used had expired - 14 days after my original trip in November??? I could see this in MDE app under expired tickets. She had no idea how they upgraded the tickets and how they were expired and showed surprise that I had not at least been given hard copies. Anyway - she had to cancel out the old and reissue new tickets. She did this, gave me the hard tickets and had me add them into MDE and assign appropriately to make sure all was well. I repeatedly asked her if my APs were prioritized to be used first and she said yes. I left and went on with my trip thinking all was good.

Low and behold - 2 of the tickets were actually being used instead of my AP - so 2 weeks after I get home to Houston - they fall off my account since some days had been used and they have now expired. Needless to say panic set in.

So on Tuesday 3/24 - I finally got a hold of the guest services via phone and talked to someone there. Again very nice woman I talked to - she researched the issue, called me back and said they would be reissuing me COMP 6-day base tickets for the missing 2 tickets. Now if I did not know any better I would have just said “OK, Thanks” and been totally screwed when I went to WDW in July and wanted to upgrade them to add on PH. But as soon as she said COMP tickets - I replied that I needed real tickets that were upgradable - I was not asking for anything free but only what I had paid for originally. She was very nice but said that her department can only issue COMP tickets, not real paid tickets and she had absolutely no way of giving me back the 6-day MYW tickets. What she could do was issue the COMP tickets to me and then turn in a CASE # that has comments about these tickets:

Excerpt from email sent from her:
Due to the error in using your original tickets, I have made notes to
use the value of 6-Day Magic Your Way® Base Tickets towards an upgrade
of your choosing. In order to do so, you will need to visit a Guest
Relations location at one of the four Theme Parks or Downtown Disney to
process any upgrade. Upon arrival, please present your photo
identification, the tickets I am mailing to you, and Case ID …

So my question is will this really work? I am very concerned that I do not have the tickets that I originally paid for and have to wait until I get to WDW to fix it - I am worried that I will get to Guest Services and they will say I cannot upgrade these no matter what I was told. I pretty much have to add PH onto these tickets or my trip with my kids, grandma and cousins will be pretty messed up. I also am a little irritated that the responsibility was completely on me over and over again and not WDW to make sure these tickets were upgraded/prioritized correctly, and even when I knew to ask was not told the correct information. From my end - I did everything I possible could and still the tickets were messed up. My confidence level is pretty low that this will work out smoothly.

Should I be worried, should I escalate to someone else, and if so who exactly do I talk to? Again - I do not want anything free but simply want to get exactly what I already paid for, and just want this resolved smoothly without having to spend even more of my time worrying and dealing with this.

Thanks for your help.

2

With this history, I think we would all be worried too. I do not know who I would go to, but I think I would want something a little more official for documentation.

3

Thanks for your reply. I have definitely decided that these Comp tickets are unacceptable. I do not want to spend the next 4 months worrying about it and am frankly very miffed that once again the burden is on me to fix the issue and waste more of my time. I going to put together a detailed email, send it off and then start calling and escalating. Just want to know the proper path to take if anyone has any ideas. :).

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4

Oh - and supposedly there are notes written in the case file about it, but at his point I have not a lot of confidence that that actually means anything.

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5

Hi! That is a pretty complicated issue. I don’t reliably know how to escalate this issue. One thing you might do when you call back is ask if the CM can see these notes on your file.

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6

I would definitely call
Again to verify that the CM is able to see the notes in your file. Also, when you next call guest services, ask to speak to a supervisor and explain that you’d like a verification letter so that when you arrive in July you won’t have issues upgrading to your PH.

I know it’s a hassle. And I do agree that you’ve had to do a lot of legwork to correct a mistake you did not make. It is very frustrating when that happens.

Keep us posted on how it resolves.

7

Thanks for replies. This sounds stupid - but them sending me Comp tickets to me feels they they are doing me some kind of favor when in reality they haven’t even given me what I paid for :).
I can always get my husband to call - he does stuff like this for a living and will get what I want, but I really don’t want to unleash him on poor Kristin at GS who is trying to do her job. Not her fault that I have absolutely no trust in what she told me.

8

Good luck. I’m concerned our package tickets are going to be used instead of our APs on our upcoming trip. If they have the options to turn bands on and off in MDE, the same should be true if multiple tix are linked to an account.

9

Very curious - after a very long e-mail detailing the numerous problems I had with these tickets, and after saying that they can either change them to MYW instead of COMP ticket, or refund my money and I will buy them myself - the tickets now have magically turned into MYW tickets in my account instead of the comp tickets. I will need to call later to verify this. So I was told over the phone that there was no way for me to be issued the real tickets, but obviously that is not true :). This may be a glitch anyway so I need to check on it. No phone call back from GS yet - e-mail was not mean but very direct about the multiple points of failure.
Excerpt from email I wrote:
It should not be my responsibility to know that your system does not prioritize tickets correctly, I should not have to constantly check my tickets in MDE to make sure they are being used up correctly, I should not have to know that Comp tickets are not upgradable, I should not have to spend numerous hours calling around to try and get these problems resolved, and I should not be told that all I can get issued are Comp tickets and that I have to waste even more of my time dealing with this problem 4 months from now. It also makes absolutely no sense that an Annual Pass is not prioritized to be used over any other ticket. If the IT system cannot handle multiple tickets - then the system should not allow multiple tickets per person. I should not need intimate knowledge of how the WDW IT system works.

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10

I think your e-mail is spot-on: specific & assertive. Keep telling them exactly what you want. And if you haven’t already, tell them how many hours of your time you have spent trying to get them to do their jobs properly.

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11

Success! I got a call from Kristin at Guest Services. Her department cannot issue real tickets, so she had to talk to her manager, then go to a real Guest Relations manager and what they ended up doing was taking my original 6-day tickets that had been used and were expired, set them back to active and put the 6 days back on them. So what I was told they could not do they actually could, and I made them do the legwork instead of me having to do it :).
She said that this is a pretty rare situation - and they normally do not do that. I was very pretty nice - but did say that they were not doing me any favors, but were actually just fixing the problem that WDW created in the first place. She also said most people do not want to upgrade a comp ticket - probably because they are not aware it cannot be upgraded and are disappointed to find out that it can’t. A big shout out to @MagicMN - I vividly remember her issues from a previous trip and her disappointment with the crappy comp tickets she received. I also said that as more AP holders book trips with Free DIning, etc, more of these issues are going to come up and the system really needs to handle it better. I program computers for a living - a simple ranking coded in to always put AP as first used is an easy fix. Again - thanks to Liners for letting me know through Chat, etc about some of these problems with the system. I feel sorry for everyone who does not have this network of people.

12

GraceysButler - after this problem, I looked in MDE on the computer and you can inactivate tickets. Although I am not sure about the package tickets. If I had to do it again I would do this:

  1. Check into hotel activating my package and tickets.
  2. Immediately log in via computer/IPad or get concierge to log into the system and inactivate tickets that you do not want to use MDE -> go to tickets -> click on actual green ticket and you have an option to inactivate.
  3. If for some reason - you cannot do this, go to GS before you enter the park and have them make sure AP is prioritized first.
  4. Don’t believe them - after you enter the park look at every single ticket in MDE under “Tickets and Passes”, click on it and make sure they have not been used (can see days remaining).
  5. If they were accidentally used - go back to GS, cause a stink and they should give you anytime FPP for your troubles - which you are well entitled to!
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