I reached out to my travel agent about a week ago, as we still haven’t received our yellow luggage tags for Magical Express. She said they were sent to the wrong place and requested to have them sent again.
So, we are now week away and still have not received any luggage tags.
I know, conceptually, that I can just give my claim tickets at the Magical Express, and my luggage will still magically arrive. Have you done this? Did it work okay? Or should I just carry on all my luggage? (Can you bring luggage on the Magical Express?)
You can walk your bags from the airline carousel to the MDE boarding area and have them placed in the baggage compartment. When you arrive at the resort it would be necessary to collect your bags and either handle them the rest of the way yourself, or hand them off to Baggage Services to have them delivered to your room;
Since we landed at 7:20pm, we collected our own bags at MCO baggage claim and then hauled them to ME, and they placed them under the bus we were transported in. At POR, we took our luggage and asked for a cart and transferred the bags our self to our pre-assigned room. The only delays were waiting for baggage claim (MCO is a very busy airport) and waiting for an empty luggage cart at POR since they were all being used by porters. Overall, I just liked the fact that I knew exactly where my luggage was the whole time.
I have handed them my claim tickets and it arrived perfectly fine. I was incredibly skeptical, but really didn’t want to deal with the hassle of moving luggage if I really didn’t need to.
All international guests either have to hand luggage receipts to the DME staff or collect it themselves. Works fine!
Also if there was a problem with the luggage not arriving on the flight, it’s DME who would do all the enquiries and then deliver it once it did arrive.
But it’s also fine to bring it with you to the bus. Remember to tip at the airport and / or the resort (may be different people loading and unloading).
I’m dealing with this exact debate, and we arrive in two days. I made my DME reservation back in May and still have the email. Then, last week, I realized my tags hadn’t arrived. My TA called WDW when they had no help for me, and she was told that it had somehow “fallen off” the reservation. So, I’m in the same boat about whether to do the claim ticket idea. That scares me a bit, but I think it’s going to be a game time decision. We are going to pack carry-ons to prepare as if we don’t need our checked bags immediately so we can go to the pool, but if we land early or something, we may just go ahead and try to grab the bags from the carousel.
I know that MCO is large and bags can sometimes take awhile. We are flying Southwest. Are they better or worse in general, or does it matter? I picked up my sister last summer and their bags came off fairly quickly. I have heard that if there is bad weather, they shut down some ramp that allows the bags to get from the terminals, so if it’s thundering, we would then likely do the claim ticket idea.
Due to late changes in our plans due to Hurricane Dorian, we had to use the baggage claim tickets for DME. We flew Southwest and it all worked perfectly.
IJust did this 2 weeks (ugh it’s only been 2 weeks?) ago.
Gave them the claim ticket, they filled out a form on their terminal, and then handed the ticket back. Bags were in my room later that day. No issues. CM said they’d be in my room by 2:30pm (I arrived at mco at 8:30am).
They said it would take 6 hours? Do you know how long it actually took? I thought the standard was 3 hours, but that it sometimes took a little longer. I didn’t realize they would quote you a 6 hour wait. I was almost off the fence and was going to give them my claim tickets, but I may be back on the fence and leaning towards retrieving them myself.
Afraid not. I was in the parks all day and got back around…7 (i think)? I think if the luggage isn’t initially split off from the rest thanks to the yellow tags, it probably adds a bit of time onto it.
EDIT: It was 8PM when I got to the room. Just looked it up.
If you hand them the luggage tags, they will have to wait until all the luggage has come through onto the carousel and most of it has been collected before getting the luggage. I think after a certain amount of time anything left on the carousel is removed, and it’s at that point they will look for the bags that match the receipts.
That would add quite a bit to the time it takes, rather than the bags with the yellow tags which are pulled before they reach the carousel.
Except for Canada. We pass through customs before we leave Canada.
The same thing happened to us the first time we used MDE. Yellow luggage tags were sent somewhere else.
So now I don’t let the travel agent know that we are using MDE and instead I just phone MDE directly and tell them that there was a major airline schedule change (White lie) They will say that we are not registered with MDE. Play dumb and give them your reservation number and your correct address. Then you have piece-of-mind that they have the right info.
Actually I tried to call to schedule DME for my family last week and they wouldn’t allow me to do it, b/c I went through a travel agent book my resort. They said the travel agent had to call and do it. I didn’t have an issue with that (even though it seems silly and unnecessary), but it had been so long since I had communicated with our TA that it didn’t even occur to me to go through her…
That’s a bummer.