I would be prepared to upload them. Pictures as well. The picture will be used for the key card you’ll use to swipe on and off the ship. It cannot be the picture used for the passport. Best thing is just a cell phone shot in front of a blank wall. I email them to myself so they’re on my computer.
You’ll also need to bring them (the birth certificate or passport) with you - you’ll need them for re-entry to the US. They are required whether or not you’re planning to get off the ship. You never know when an emergency evacuation may be necessary - or if there is some kind of drastic emergency and they have to disembark the ship in a foreign port.
I will note - since you’ve got a large family - that you’ll have to sign a paper that your wife can take the kids staying in (or registered to) your cabin off the ship and vice-versa. Or just remember who is registered to which adult’s cabin and each adult goes through with those kids. Even at Castaway Cay.
We didn’t have passports ready for all of us for the March cruise. For those people I had pics of their birth certificate ready instead for the online check-in. When the passports arrived less than a week later, I was able to go back into the online check-in stuff and change the uploaded documents to a passport and upload the passport. And I’m pretty sure I could’ve changed that up until the app locked (3 days before embarkation). The key thing is whatever is uploaded in the app last is what you bring to port.
If you do get off at a port all you need to get back on the ship is your Key to the World Card (for everyone) and then for adults a government issued ID. However, they never once asked for our ID, just scanned our cards to get back on. But we had our DL’s with us JIC. We left the passports in our room safe the whole time.
If we had planned a more time intensive excursion not through Disney, I would’ve brought them with us somehow, but since we were just going to a beach for a bit and were keeping an eye on the time (and gave ourselves an extra hour to get back from our excursion to the port), I didn’t feel like we needed them.
This. Whatever you upload is what you need to present to DCL staff when you board the ship. It is also what you will show when you get back home. You won’t need to show anything other than key to the world card when getting on and off the ship during the cruise.
Does anyone know what it means by “copy” here? Is like a xerox of their birth certificate ok? Or does it have to be the type of duplicate where you request it from the state?
Sorry, I can’t speak for DCL I know that RCL specifically states they must be “an original, notarized or certified copy” for when you board the ship. In Iowa, that’d be the embossed copy.
One additional thought: You’re in AZ. If you ever want government issued photo ID’s for the kids, you can get them from AZ driver license places for $12 each.
Thanks - I’ve googled it and gotten contradictory information, but most sources seem to agree that Disney accepts photocopies of birth certificates for children. I may get a certified copy just in case.
Not having kids, I don’t know for sure. But I’m of the mind that it’s better to have something official and only need a copy than have a copy and need something official.
My plan is to have a certified copy if possible but if anyone has first hand confirmation, let me know! The problem is that our passports for two children are supposed to arrive 2-4 weeks before our trip, but if something goes wrong, I want to have a backup. The backup would normally be the certified copy of the birth certificate, but we had to send in our primary copy to the passport office! And for security reasons, they send the birth certificate back after they send you the passport. And I’m not sure how long it will take the state to send us a new certified copy.
So it would be nice to know the answer in case everything else goes wrong.
Can you not get an additional official copy of the birth certificate from the state? In Utah we can pretty easily request an official copy from the office of Vital Records and Statistics and they can mail it or if we go in person to one of several offices along the valley we can get them same day. My DSIL needed to do this when she sent off the birth certificates for passports and they didn’t come in time. I have heard that DCL will take a photo copy from not from anyone firsthand so I would personally not bank on that for a cruise.
It took about another 2-3 weeks for the birth certificate to come after we got passports. I think mine and DH’s took even just a little bit longer.
Is this from first-hand experience? I have seen Plan Disney posts claiming a photocopy is sufficient but I know enough not to trust them 100%. But I haven’t seen any definitive claims that it must be a certified copy.
It’s what my TA told me. Our first cruise was October 2021 and we were waiting on passports to be delivered. She indicated if the passports didn’t arrive before check in to use the certified copy with the embossed seal. Luckily passport came in about 2 days before check in.
I guess you could chat and ask on the DCL app or call if you wanted a definitive answer. You don’t have to check in right at 30 days but if you want an earlier boarding time, you would.
I don’t know that customs would accept a black and white photo copy but you would have passports by the time of the cruise.
For the check-in I totally used photo copies of birth certificates for the couple of us that didn’t have passports back yet. I had so many extra copies after getting things together for passports.
The passports came a week (maybe a little less) after check in and I updated the online check-in documents. If I was in jeopardy of not getting passports before leaving for the cruise I would have totally gone and gotten the official copies of the birth certificates with a seal. Well that would’ve been an option for everyone but me. My US birth certificate is a certification of birth abroad and getting a new one of those is a six week process. so I sure was glad my passport came back well before the trip.
We went ahead and ordered birth certificates just in case. They will arrive in like 10 days, and it’s still like 40+ till our check-in day, so we should be good.
@lolabear_la I have another question for you! When we upload our documents, does it have to be in a certain format? Most of mine are in PDF I think. Does it need to be a JPG or image file instead? I noticed that my PDFs were cropped so if they are printed they fill the whole page – is that a problem? Should I rescan them without cropping?
so I sure was glad my passport came back well before the trip.