Howdy. My twin DS14s have a band trip to Disney and Universal coming up this week into next. The rest of our family is tagging along and making a trip out of it too. I’ve been trying to help out a handful of other parents in getting tickets set up and people connected and explaining things generally. But I was surprised by one issue that came up when trying to get several of the teens set up with MagicMobile passes. This post is an FYI, a question, and complaint rolled into one.
First the FYI: there is a quirk I was not aware of that the primary account holder in MDE must have an active ticket in order to download MagicMobile passes for anyone. This meant that parents who were not attending could not set up their managed child’s MagicMobile passes for them. (A possible workaround is to reassign the ticket to the primary account holder, download the magicmobile pass, and then reassign the ticket back to the child–but don’t know if this would mess up anything else.) Because of this limitation, some decided to go ahead and create separate accounts for their kids so they could download their own MagicMobile pass. But one parent discovered after setting up separate account for 14-year old that they still cannot download a MagicMobile pass. After lengthy chat with Disney rep, they were told that a minor’s account cannot obtain MagicMobile passes. This was news to me, and is contrary to some info I’ve seen elsewhere, which leads to the question: does anyone have experience successfully with minors successfully setting up MagicMobile for use on their own devices? Is that a real policy? And finally the complaint: if that’s the policy, it’d be nice to have it spelled out somewhere. I think some have decided to just set up the separate accounts and change the birth year to avoid the issue at all, which, of course, also has its own issues.
So odd this is how it works. A group of minors on trips without their parents is not uncommon. I read that you asked chat about the minors getting Magic Mobile passes on their account but did you ask about why an adult can’t add a ticket to a minor that they manage? That seems odd. Is it just for minors that have a Disney user name and password or no user name and password? I wonder how others are doing it.
I didn’t ask specifically about the reason but they made it sound like it was just a quirk of the system (it won’t recognize eligible ticket media unless the primary account holder has one) rather than a safety feature. So who knows if was a deliberate choice or just not thought through. I guess the physical cards aren’t the end of the world but it’s annoying.
I would rather have physical cards (or MagicBands) than having to use MagicMobile. Also, we couldn’t get MagicMobile to work on our rooms to open the doors…neither my wife’s iPhone nor my Android phone. You don’t have to worry about MBs nor the cards being out of power as well!
Magic mobile is a feature of the MDE app that allows you to set up and use your phone or smart device as a magic band/digital pass (for park admission, lightning lanes, photo pass, etc.). If don’t use magic mobile, you have to use a magic band or the plastic card for all the things at WDW. I don’t know if it’s rolled out yet at Disneyland, which may explain why you hadn’t heard of it.
We usually go to WDW and use MBs. We didn’t want to get the newer bands when we went to DLR so we used the app. Linked the tickets in the app and used it to scan it. I’m guessing the difference is MM lets you tap instead of scanning the QR code? I’m wondering if using the app that way works with the minors.