Hey everyone, it's Jacqueline for Pixie Dust PhD. This video will be a quick update showing you the
procedures of ordering your MagicBand if you're an on-site guest these days, and then also we'll jump
to the future to show you our MagicBand unboxing. I’m so excited to show you what Adam and I picked,
the process of getting that online, and then actually receiving it in person, yay! Stay tuned.
Not too long ago MagicBands were actually free--they were complimentary for on-site guests.
Those days are now over though. If you do have an on-site reservation you can get a MagicBand
at a slight discount, which is nice. But you don't actually 100% need a MagicBand if you don't want.
MagicBands and Key to the World cards, which you can pick up at the front desk for free,
have the exact same functionality. You can unlock your resort room, you can gain entry into the
theme park, you can link your PhotoPass pictures, and you can charge purchases back to your room.
Disney has now also debuted MagicMobile, which you can set up on your My Disney Experience app.
With MagicMobile you can use that to gain entrance into theme parks and you can also link
your PhotoPass pictures. At this time you cannot charge purchases back to your room, but hopefully
that is coming soon. And then through the general My Disney Experience app, although I don't think
it's quite yet integrated into MagicMobile, you can unlock your resort room. Really all you're
missing is the ability to charge purchases back to your room via your phone. My partner and I
do like MagicBands though; it's very convenient to just have on your wrist or a lanyard or a keychain
that's easily accessible. Arguably cellphones are this way too, but for me in particular I have a
frustratingly large amount of outfits that don't have pockets, so my phone is often tucked away in
my bag and not as easy to get out as a MagicBand would be. The other thing about relying on your
cell phone is I personally am pretty paranoid and get quite nervous that my phone will die, or
the app will glitch, or my phone will glitch, or something terrible will happen and I’ll be locked
out of all that information and access. Basically, with technology I generally prefer to have some
sort of analog backup. So if I were going to rely primarily on my phone I probably personally would
still go and get that Key to the World card from the front desk just in case, And with PhotoPass in
particular I do like having a fresh MagicBand. My partner and I both still have our MagicBands from
2015 and 2017. We did not get new MagicBands in 2019. From that trip I can confirm that the
long-range RFID on our prior MagicBands is dead. It was dead in 2019, so it's definitely dead in
2021. Again, you can use your phone to get those long-range PhotoPass pictures--and for this we're
mostly talking about on-ride photos--but for me, personally, I often have the Bluetooth feature
on my phone off. So then I would need to remember constantly to be toggling it and checking to make
sure that it was on in order to get our pictures. Overall, I’m a very particular person and it's
easy to argue I am a bit fussy. If you've been around the channel for a while you already know
this about me. Obviously, when MagicBands were free that was a no-brainer for us--we definitely
got our free MagicBands. But even at a cost my partner and I have decided that that cost is
worth it for us. I think the convenience factor is just there for me especially.
Plus we don't tend to buy a lot of souvenirs and the MagicBands are fun keepsakes from the trip.
If you are staying on site and decide you do want a MagicBand here's how you will put your order in
in advance. You can navigate to the MagicBand purchasing option one of two ways. First, from
your my plan screen you can scroll down and your hotel reservation should be highlighted. There
will be a notice to the side with a link that will let you choose your MagicBand. Alternatively, from
the My Disney Experience drop down menu you can navigate to my MagicBands and cards. Here guests
linked to an on-site reservation will appear, and the first line in this text reminds you that
MagicBands are no longer complimentary. Scrolling down a bit next to your resort information there
will be a countdown of how many days you have left to put this order in. This opens up extremely
early and if you are sure you want a MagicBand you can do it basically as early as you want. If you
instead wait and put your order in between six to ten days of arrival, your MagicBands will actually
be shipped to your resort and you will pick them up there. Once you're within five days of arrival,
you can no longer do this option and if you want a MagicBand I would suggest probably heading down to
Disney Springs and grabbing one or from a store in a theme park. If you have multiple on-site
reservations--for example, if you're doing a split stay like we are--then all of your reservations
will show up with the option to purchase a MagicBand for each and every one of them.
In my opinion, particularly since the bands aren't free anymore, I think one per person will suffice.
But hey, if you want extra options to match all of your outfits go ahead and take advantage of that!
They are at a slight discount compared to what you would pay rack rate at Disney Springs or
at a theme park location. But my partner and I definitely will only be ordering one each. To
begin your order click get started. Then guests on that hotel reservation will show up, and you will
select whose band you are picking. We are starting with my partner, Adam. Here now I’ve clicked grid
view so I can view all of the available MagicBands at once. Note that the discounted selection for
on-site guests is limited. They vary in price from ten dollars to twenty-five dollars for the
most part. There may be a few bands that will cost more than twenty-five dollars,
but at least today there are none showing up for me. Your plain colored ones are going to be ten
dollars, and then the more elaborate ones with characters will range between $15, $20, $25. Also
while the selection is limited, do note that the selection changes somewhat randomly. For example,
a few days ago there was a plain white MagicBand; that has since disappeared and not come back.
We also do now have two Riviera Resort bands, whereas before when I had the white MagicBand
there was only one Riviera Resort band. If you see a MagicBand you really like you may want to
put in your order as soon as possible, because there's no guarantee it will still be available
for selection the next day. Honestly, I’ve not been able to figure out any rhyme, reason,
or pattern to the changing selection. If you have any knowledge of that please let me know
in the comments down below! Adam decided on this $15 Monsters, Inc. MagicBand, so we went ahead
and selected that. Once you've made your selection you can customize it with an engraving up to nine
characters. For Adam we are just doing their name, “Adam”. Then click complete. Once you're
done with that selection it will take you back to the other hotel guests. I’m the only one left,
so we'll go forth with my pick. Interestingly I did notice for the first time that in this
default view if you hover over certain MagicBands you'll actually be able to see the back side--not
for all of them though. So here's what some of the backsides look like of the various MagicBands that
were available to me on this day. Weirdly this ability to view the graphics on the other side
of the band doesn't happen on grid view, even when you're hovering over them. I don't know why this
is true, but just a heads up for you: if you are interested in both sides of your band, consider
using the default view. Of course, the MagicBands Adam and I are most interested in do not have this
alternate view of the backside, even in default view. So we're taking a little leap of faith here;
the full MagicBand design will be a surprise when they show up, but maybe that's part of the fun.
I chose this Buzz and Woody MagicBand. This is another $15 selection. Unfortunately, my name is
actually 10 characters long, so it won't fit in this 9 character engraving. Rather than my name,
I’ll do the month and the year. I know some folks who travel down frequently and like to do their
resort abbreviation along with the year. So rather than the month like I’m doing, September, you
could do “BLT” for Bay Lake Tower. Once I complete my selection the entire party is now completed.
Tigger pops up and invites us to check out. At this checkout screen you can verify the bands that
you selected as well as the price. You'll note that the total of the price is the price of the
bands combined plus tax--shipping is free. You can also verify or edit your address. I did recently
move so I needed to update mine because I hadn't yet updated it in my My Disney Experience account.
Similarly, you can use the credit card linked to your account, or you can go ahead and use
a different credit card. My account credit card is my everyday American Express, but I decided
I wanted to put this on my Disney Visa Rewards credit card, so I went ahead and changed this
information as well. At the bottom you'll notice that there are terms and conditions you need to
agree to. These stipulate that your MagicBands are non-exchangeable and non-refundable; this
is a final purchase. Then for all online shopping I always triple check my order right at the very
end. Now I’m verifying that the MagicBands are correct, the price is what it should be,
and the address that it's shipping to is where I do live. Then finally purchase your order,
after the load screen Mike Wazowski congratulates you on your order and lets you know that they
should ship within five to seven business days. Once the MagicBand ship I will also get an email
confirmation. If you scroll down on this page you can again verify your MagicBand selection and the
cost. And then you can easily navigate back to your plans page in My Disney Experience, or of
course there's this banner ad for shopDisney in case you want to keep buying merchandise. Back at
my plans now: on the main page, if we scroll down for that first hotel reservation I have, you can
see to the right of the information it says that my MagicBand order is now being fulfilled—hooray!
And if we navigate back to that my MagicBands and Cards page, you can now scroll down and see
that it confirms that we've made a selection. We can no longer go and try to order MagicBands
through this reservation. Of course, again, with a split stay if we want to keep ordering MagicBands
the other reservations are still able to. But at least this first one is done and taken care of.
Very shortly after I placed the order I did receive an email confirmation letting me know
that the order went through and they are working on it. Here the email notes that the estimated
delivery time to shipped to your home is about 10 days prior to your vacation. And finally if
you give the server a little bit of time to update and check back later, back in your my MagicBands
and Cards page you can now scroll down and see the exact MagicBands you ordered instead of some
generic text that they're working on your order. Every step of the way there's plenty of chances to
confirm the MagicBands you ordered. MagicBands aren't absolutely necessary and you certainly
don't need them, but personally I think they're convenient and fun, so it's great to have this
step of ordering my MagicBands done and completed. Two weeks later. Just got my box with MagicBands,
so excited! I just finished working out and showered, and got the text that I had
a package. So I know I look gross and we're in gross elevator lighting, but it's here.
Okay, made it back upstairs to the apartment. And let's do the unboxing. And my dog is here,
as you can see, if you hear her making any little weird noises. She didn't want to be left alone.
They look plain at first, but I promise that they aren't. That's good.
“Let your vacation fun begin—MagicBand”, yay! So we have two MagicBands.
This one's mine, this one's Adam’s. You can tell by the little name thing--mine just has the
date as we talked about because my name's long. And the fronts look plain, but then look...!
They're so cute, oh my gosh, ahhhhh.
Okay let's take mine off. Get a good---so it's this light blue, and then it says--the back side,
which we couldn't see, says “to infinity and beyond” with the little clouds. Oh my gosh.
And then this is the the preview we were able to see online with Woody and Buzz.
Very nice, very excited about that one. And then my partners:
the part we could see online of course has Mike and Sully,
that's fantastic. And then the other side has a scream or laugh canister I guess, I’m not
really sure officially which one it is anymore. So that's so great. Let's see… it says max scream
capacity 84,000 SUV… I’m not sure what SUV stands for, but, so yeah, it's a scream canister not a
laugh canister. So yes, my partner's MagicBand and my MagicBand. I’m so excited. The box also
comes with this MagicBand information pamphlet. I don't think it's anything you couldn't find out
online. It's telling you about the radio frequency technology, which we have talked about previously.
It tells you once you've linked to My Disney Experience, here all the things that you can do.
Here's a cute ad to buy Memory Maker. And then of course, you know, your generic shopDisney
ad… of course they want you to go buy more things. And the back of the little holder
comes with some instructions about wearing the MagicBandm particularly for folks with smaller
wrists--this is really important for kids. But even I have fairly small wrists, and I’ve thought
about taking my other MagicBands the gray part off actually. Let's try it on and see how that goes.
So yeah, you can see there's quite a lot of overlap for me.
Oh, I am fully actually in the colored part--like by quite, quite a lot.
For reference: I ordered these midday on a Saturday just a little bit before noon, and
then they arrived two Fridays later. So almost two full weeks later. I do think there was a hiccup
with shipping because they went from Florida to Georgia, which is fine; Georgia to Pennsylvania,
which is a little bit overshot of where I live in the DC area, but honestly, I mean, maybe there's
a huge shipping facility there so that's fine; and then from Pennsylvania it went to Maryland,
then to DC, which was great, but then it went back to Pennsylvania. Like I think it got put
on the wrong truck or something. So I think we were probably delayed a few days because then it
sat in Pennsylvania for a while before it left and arrived to me. But in case you are curious
about timing: just one day short of two full weeks is how long it took to arrive to me; again
I live in the DC metro area. These are our first character MagicBands or more premium MagicBands;
we just have the plain ones from before when those were complimentary. But we figured if the plain
ones were gonna be $10 why not spend $15 on the character ones? And honestly I’m really glad we
did. They are so cute. I do wish you could see the other side of the MagicBand on the preview online,
but hey, it was a fun surprise to see what they ended up being. I am so thrilled that our
MagicBands arrived on time. We actually still have a full week before we leave, so plenty of time to
spare. We do still need to purchase Memory Maker, but other than that everything surrounding tickets
and whatnot is totally set for our vacation. If you found this video helpful please hit that
thumbs up button to like the video and subscribe to the channel--you can ring the bell icon to
receive a notification whenever I post new videos. Planning a trip to Walt Disney World can be fairly
overwhelming, so it's really nice that this stuff is actually pretty straightforward. If you are
a worrier type like me though I hope this behind the scenes process of ordering MagicBands has been
useful. If you have questions about MagicBands or really anything pertaining to Walt Disney World
definitely leave those in the comments down below. And I’d love to hear your opinions! With the
debut of MagicMobile do you still find value in MagicBands? Do you still purchase a MagicBand even
though they're not free anymore? Or do you think that's a waste of money? I am probably just stuck
in my old ways here, but personally I anticipate using a MagicBand for as long as they let me.
And if you want to chat outside of YouTube we can always talk about all things MagicBands and Disney
over on Twitter and Instagram where you will find me @PixieDustPhD. Ordering MagicBands and
receiving them basically means my trip is right around the corner. I am so excited, and I hope
that the rest of your day is equally thrilling. We'll see you real soon at Pixie Dust PhD!