I figure I know the answer to this, but thought I’d check just to be sure in case someone experienced differently.
We’ve had a DVC AP off/on for a number of years but let ours expire in '23 with wife and I doing a 3-day 1 park trip last summer as our only WDW fix which felt odd but were planning to purchase for our next trip assuming probably a long trip in summer of '25 with others mixed in. SIL/BIL talked us into joining them this Thanksgiving for our first trip this year, but of course, the Sorcerer’s Pass is blocked out Wed-Sun of Thanksgiving.
Momentarily deterred, I then thought about buying a 9–10-day ticket (more than we need) but upgrading it to the Sorcerer’s on 12/2 when we head home, but several days of ticket still left over within the upgrade window requirements.
Remembered though, you can’t upgrade a ticket if you’ve used it on dates or days that were blocked out by the AP you are trying to upgrade to correct? Have zero desire to buy the Incredi-pass or a 5-day ticket for that matter considering its cost but thinking that’s our only options, short of not going.
I was able to do this but hadn’t used any days (I believe as long as its not the last day, it is omay too) but it makes complete sense you can’t have used it during blackout dates.
FWIW, you could upgrade a day ticket to an annual pass at Disneyland, even if you had used it on blackout dates of that AP. It was a well known hack for getting around blackouts at the beginning of an AP.
It may have been because it was considered an upgrade, not applying the cost. In any case, it’s one of those quirks of the different coasts.
There was a specific example last year when a liner on chat was blocked from upgrading to an AP because the ticket was used during blackout. That new Thanksgiving blackout has messed with people’s plans.
Yep, a pain. Normally not an issue for us as we are usually there in early Dec if we decide to hit the holidays. Wasnt even thinking about it.
Crazy too as its a cash stay (non dvc) for us in Nov and have another 10 day trip for June (6 day cash room then a 4 day DVC) we’d planned to use the AP at minimum, so they were getting money out of us. Not sure we are doing any of it at this point.
Oh, that’s such a shame the hack doesn’t work. Is the trip a full overlap? We had cousins convince us to to for Thanksgiving last year.
We have Sorcerer’s passes and it’s not even a holiday for us (well, actually I have it off but the rest of the family didn’t) and we had to pull the kids out of school. I was pretty annoyed going in but we never see them so we sucked it up and I’m so glad we did. Magical.
I don’t think we’d do it again, but it’s more about the school than the tickets. Long story long, we minimized the cost as best we could. We had them shift their days a bit to come earlier, and we left on Friday (they stayed). We did the Christmas party Wednesday (so no park tickets) and bought Epcot on Thanksgiving. We would have done the party anyway so it was only one day’s ticket out of pocket. If by some crazy chance we were to to it again and stay 'till Sunday we’d probably do the same and add Jollywood nights on Saturday.
Is it 100% a no go to upgrade a date based ticket purchased during the blockout period to upgrade to a Sorcerer Pass? Coming December 29th, I decided not to purchase convention tickets since they were “will call” pickup. I was too concerned we wouldn’t be able to get a reservation in some of the parks. I ended up buying one full price ticket from Disney so I could use my discounted Disney gift cards. $995 for a 7 day PH. I was really hoping we could upgrade to the Sorcerer pass for $100 more and come back in April. Just hoping it might work depending on the person in guest services.
Have you heard this somewhere? It’s been a while since I’ve seen discussions of converting a day ticket to an AP so I don’t know the answer, but I’m curious why you are defaulting to no.
Unrelated to the upgrade question, if you buy convention tickets, even if they only have Will Call listed as an option they still send you an email with a linkable confirmation immediately.
But: while you can upgrade con tix to an AP you don’t get to keep any of the savings, they’ll just credit you the price you paid towards the AP cost, so is not worth using them for that.
Although if gift cards are important we should mention that gift cards can be used to purchase convention tickets and since they are now date based, no reservations are needed.
I’m just not sure why one would buy tickets to upgrade at all these days, bridging savings on reseller tickets is iffy IF the CM even does it correctly and you can use GCs directly to purchase an AP.
OK. Thanks for the tips. I thought I had to make a reservation with Convention tickets. I’m glad I just purchased one ticket at regular price. I thought I’d be able to upgrade to a Sorcerer Pass, so in the end the $ I spent would be put towards that pass. I’ll go ahead and buy the convention tickets now that I know I won’t need to make reservations. JJT, I forgot that they’d send an email for convention tickets. Very helpful. I’m still going to try to upgrade to a Sorcerer Pass.