Disney’s Magical Express

A summary of our experience, with observations, using Disney’s Magical Express service.

The idea of the service is twofold. For people coming to Walt Disney World, it’s meant to be a tremendous time-saver and convenience. For Disney, it’s meant to encourage people to stay at the park and to stay at the park. Overall, it seems to be successful in both goals.

The way it works is this. You contact the DME office when you’re making your reservations to stay at a Walt Disney World resort, to sign up for the DME service (which is, at this point, free). You let them know what flight you’re going to be on, and where you’ll be staying. Well ahead of your flight (you have to have done this within 30 days of your trip), you get a package through the mail, explaining the whole thing, and some bright-colored luggage tags for your checked luggage (they send many more tags than you’ll need).

When you check your bags at your departure airport to Orlando, you make sure the checked bags have the tags on them. When they arrive at MCO (Orlando), they get whisked off by Disney package gnomes, shipped to your resort, and taken to your room, usually within a few hours of your having checked in. Meantime, you’ve taken a special Disney bus to your resort, checked in, and are all relaxed, not having had to hoist your bags from baggage claim, lugged them to a rental car pickup or shuttle service, etc.

On the way back, it’s even slicker. If you are flying with one of several large carriers out of MCO, you can check in your baggage and get your boarding pass at the resort, You get a time when a bus is leaving for the airport, and that’s your ride back. In the meantime, you can check your carry-on in at the luggage service for your resort and spend the rest of the day (until your bus trip) doing whatever your want, even after checkout.

Even if you’re not on the list of carriers, you can still check your bags to go back to MCO on the bus, and simply pick them up on the other end.

And here’s how it worked for us:

1. Though they say the packages will come “several weeks” before the trip, ours were more like 2-3 weeks.
2. Checked in with our bags at DIA with the yellow DME stickers on them without any problem.

3. On arrival at MCO, walked down to the baggage claim area as instructed. A very friendly lady directed us to the DME area, which was over a dozen carousels and down a level.

   On getting downstairs, we checked in at a counter, confirmed the bags we had checked, when we were leaving, where we were going, etc., and were given our bus passes. We were then directed over to a queue area where folks lined up for each resort. There were busses outside loading all the time, and clearly they were trying to group folks onto them most efficiently. We waited about 15 minutes here.

   (Note: My folks and Jim & Ginger, who arrived later in the evening, and on a delayed flight, found this step a bit more problematic. The waits were longer, for one thing, and it seemed a bit more confused.)

4. We were escorted to a nice bus and were on our way. It took about 40-odd minutes to get to the park, along which route we were regaled by a Disney video about DME, about the parks, about etc. This kept us entertained on an otherwise not-terribly-interesting or attractive ride from MCO to WDW.

5. We hopped off the bus, went in, and registered. We went up to our rooms and relaxed a bit. We did have our critical stuff on carry-on, including some swim suits, which we made use of to go swimming.

   When we got back to the room, our bags had automagically appeared, and we got them unpacked and were all set.

   (Note: Getting in later, the ‘rents faced a bit more awkwardness with this stage. Even after registering and going to the local Yahoo Bob show, etc., the bags had not appeared in the room. They called the luggage service, where a gent said they had not arrived yet. When they escalated up to find out what was going on, the manager determined that they had, indeed, arrived, and they were bellhopped up to the rooms forthwith.)

6. Even though my folks and us were on different flights, an hour apart, we wanted to go back on the same bus. We called the main DME number and arranged it, though they did it by sort of spoofing the bus reservation system as to which flight back the ‘rents were on, which is flexible but troublesome.

7. About mid-week, we started getting calls in the late evening from the local DME folks saying that they didn’t have hour return flight info, and we needed to contact them at this toll-free number to provide it to them. And, since it was late by the time we were getting back to the hotel, we’d have to call the DME mothership in the morning, and we’d do so, and, yes, they had our info, no problem, we’re set.

   Ultimately, it seems United having changed flight numbers was probably what was doing it. Our flight number changed, so the at-resort DME folks (who have a live setup) couldn’t find the number we’d given them, but the mothership DME folks (who had the computer records) could see we’d given them a number.

   Didn’t cause any real problems, just annoyance.

8. The day before we were to leave, we received an envelope that should have had confirmation of our flights and our scheduled departure time. Instead, it told us that we still didn’t have a confirmed flight time, etc. Margie called again, and confirmed that we did, and that we were scheduled for the 3 p.m. bus.

9. When all rolled around on check-out day, we had our check luggage and our carry-on luggage. The latter we checked in with luggage service at the resort to be picked up when we returned from a morning park visit. The former we took with us to a ticket counter at the Port Orleans (where we were staying) lobby, and checked in much the same as if we’d been at the airport. They took our bags (baggage tagged and noted with the time of our flight so that they could have it shipped there on the right truck), and gave us bording passes, and we were set.

10. We were back to the lobby of the hotel by 2:20 p.m. or so, and hung out, drank some sodas, did last-second shopping. A bit before 3, a Disney Cruise Lines bus pulled up at the end of the port cocher, where the “Disney’s Magical Express” sandwich sign was. We assumed the Disney Cruises was sharing the same bus loading zone as the Disney’s Magical Express (just as they have desks right next to each other in the registration area; the “land/sea cruise” thing is very popular). A DME bus pulled up behind it for a few minutes, but didn’t open its doors, then moved on.

    Around 3, Margie went out and checked — and found out that the DC bus was serving as the DME bus, and there was a sign to that effect — at the front of the bus, which wasn’t visible from the lobby. Swell.

    We hustled out, checked in our carry-on baggage to be stowed below, and hopped on the bus.

11. Watched another “you don’t have to let the magic end now” video on the way back, which was diverting, even if I am not planning on another Disney vacation in the near future (let alone a Disney Vacation Club timeshare kinda thing). We got let out at MCO just under two hours before our flight — which, since we didn’t need to check in anything or even get boarding passes, was quite nice.

12. Bags were waiting for us at the carousel in Denver. Easy peasy.

Overall? I’d highly recommend the service. There are a few hiccups — but remember all the balls they’re juggling in the air: airlines, bus lines, shipping folks, ticketing folks, loca/resortl DME people, central headquarters DME people. There are a lot of places for sand to slip into the gears, especially since not everyone involved is actually Disney. For most people, in most situations, it will work quite nicely.

If, however, you have a travel profile that doesn’t fit into the norm, you might need to monitor the situation more carefully. For example, when we were checking in to leave, we were right behind a woman whose husband was traveling on from there, on a DME-agreeement airline for an international business trip to Singapore, whereas she was flying back home on a non-DME airline. Common sense would have had her reading the FAQ carefully, calling and checking in with the DME people every few days, double-checking to be sure she, and they, understood what needed to happen, and overall taking a bit of responsibility to avoid being surprised. Instead, she just sort of assumed that something designed to automagically accomodate 90% of the people would work without intervention for something a few sigmas away from norm. Caveat traveller.