Split stay dining question

Ok…I am going to try to get used to the forum…Hey everyone!

I am doing a split stay in Oct. I will be at AoA with dining plan for the first 4 nights and then I check out on Monday, Oct 6, and check into a room-only reservation at BC. I was listening to WDW Today podcast “Listener questons” from this past week and there was a split stay question that confused me. The guys were saying that with a split stay you have to physically check out (not express) of the first resort before you can check into the next resort…so I have been assuming that my free dining plan will work through midnight of that Monday (when I check out of AoA and into BC) am I correct, that I will still be able to use my DP off of the reservation when I have checked out until midnight of that Monday? Hopefully that makes sense. Have you done this? Thanks!

My understanding of the physical check out issue is to have your bands switch over to the other room keys.

I’m sorry I can’t answer the dining plan issue. I do know that it’s easier if you check out of the first resort. We did 6 nights at POP, then 2 at AOA LK. When we went to AOA it took longer at check in because we hadn’t checked out of POP. Not a huge deal, but we were in a hurry to get to EP.

You can use your DDP credits until midnight of checkout day, so as far as I understand they should still continue to work whether you go to the front desk to check out or not… We used DDP credits after physically checking out of a room 2 years ago. But hopefully another liner with recent (post-MDE onset) experience with this can comment…

I did a split stay AKL Poly last month. I had express checkout at AKL. I had no problem when I changed. Poly had my online checkin packet ready. I did not change MB, in fact I wore my AP MB the whole trip ( this was actually the first AP MB they sent me but when I discovered a problem with my AP expiration date they sent me a second AP MB). I brought five MB with me but I only wore one.

As I understand it, by 11:00 AM (unless you have managed to secure a later checkout), the system starts moving everyone to the “checked out” status, but you’re still able to use leftover dining plan credits until midnight. When you’re doing a split stay, MagicBands aren’t too happy about having one MB able to unlock multiple doors, so to get access to your new room, access to the old room has to be deactivated. We did a split stay over July 4th weekend (BC/BWV), and it took about a half hour to get us fully checked out of BC in order to be able to unlock our room (which was ready) at BWV.

The only main issue that I foresee as a potential problem for you would be “length of stay” mugs – I have no idea how they code the info into the mug about how long the stay is, whether it is done with your MagicBand or some other way. If you’re not doing the mug, no problem.

The other thing that I wanted to mention, although it may not affect you, when we did BC/BWV, we went down to BC and got our Stormalong Bay wristband before we checked out of BC so that we could use Stormalong Bay that day, even though we were technically BWV guests at that point. Because we had the wristbands, we had no problem going in, although if they had checked our MagicBands, we might have been asked to leave. Still, I think that with what we were paying for Club Level for that stay, they could certainly allow us to have the rest of that day, as that would be something that someone who wasn’t going to another resort would have been allowed.

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Thanks everyone, that makes me feel better! I am not too worried about the mugs. SInce we get them with the dining plan on the first half of stay-I am assuming they will only work for those first 4 nights (at AOA) and we don’t really drink soda anyway- just morning coffee so that’s not a big deal. I just wanted to make sure that if I save TS credits for that Monday night that I will be able to use them for dinner that night and it seems like that will be fine :slight_smile: So excited!

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