I think a friend made a mistake with Mil Salute Tickets

Odd question for me to be asking as I’m usually the one answering military-related questions, but here goes…

My friend’s 21 year old son, who still has a military dependent card, just bought Military Salute tickets for he and his girlfriend for an upcoming trip. My friend thinks as long as his son has the dependent card, he can use the tickets. My reading of the rules is that only he (the retired military member), or his spouse can activate the tickets.

Does he know something I don’t (personally, I can’t imagine this being the case), or did they make a major blunder?

I don’t believe a dependent child can use these tickets. Per the military disney tips website (and that guy seems to be an expert), the military AD member or the spouse must be there at activation of the tickets. So unless they somehow got the tickets ordered through SOG to get sent the actual RFID tickets? I don’t see how they’ll be able to transfer the vouchers to the actual ticket.

I concur with you and @Peggy808 - that the service member or spouse must be present to activate, and one of those two must be a user of one of that service member’s allocated tickets for the year.

I think it’s possible that @Peggy808 has found a loophole, in that, if they came from Shades of Green, they’re already activated and there should be no trouble at the gate. But I wouldn’t count on that in the future, even if that happened in this case.

I also believe you are correct in that it must be the actual service member or spouse but I wonder how familiar the Disney Cast Members at the gate will be with the nuances of a military ID? It’s been a while since I had my dependent ID card but back when I did have one, they looked pretty much the same as a spouse ID card and unless they are really reviewing the card I wouldn’t be surprised if he was able to get them activated even though it is a dependent card and not an active/spouse.

We got Military Salute tickets for our trip in November. My Father in Law purchased the tickets and will be attending. The RFID tickets were sent through mail directly to him. He passed them off to me and I linked them to My Disney Experience. I had no issues linking the tickets. Now, I’m assuming they are activated. I’m not sure if they will ask to verify again once we get there.

Just because they are linked in MDE does NOT mean they are activated. I linked my Military Salute tickets from Ft. Knox in MDE to make FP selections but still had to activate them at TTC before they could be used.

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Hi Jennifer, Thank you for responding and for your service to the country. Your post got me to do some additional research. I was also worried my father in law tossed the RFID but confirmed he still has them. I called Disney cust service and they said activation would occur once the Magic Band is scanned for the first time at a park but to make sure we had the military ID and RFID’s just incase there were any issues. I think they may have been purchased from Shades of Green, so stopping at the TTC isn’t necessary. I also found the link below that has good information on the Military Salute tickets and the process to activate.

I just bought military salute tickets for our friends that are with me currently. I linked the tickets in MDE but we still had to activate them once we got on property. They took our paper vouchers and had to scan everyone’s band for them to be active.
And it does have to be the military member or spouse. Our friends dependent daughter tried to activate a ticket and they wouldn’t let her. Luckily we were also there and I activated it for her.

It turns out that my friend didn’t exactly know what he was talking about when he first talked to me. His son did not get “Military Salute” tickets; he got a 3 day ticket that had a military discount when purchased on base - kind of like a FL resident ticket. So it shouldn’t be s problem to use them.

Thanks to everyone for their comments :grinning:

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