So the best thing that Disney has done in the past year or 2 is roll out the Magic Bands. This little bracelet is linked to ANY reservation you make - hotel, dining, theme parks, etc. You touch the mickey on your bracelet to the mickey on the key pad, stand, or hotel room and presto! You're in line, in your room or eating a delicious meal. They come with the Magic Your Way package or any ticket you purchase. With the package you get to pick the color you want (I believe they have 7 colors available right now (gray, red, yellow, orange, green, blue and pink)). You have until 30 days prior to arrival to lock in your color choice because they then get sent out to you! That's an exciting day - just take a look.
On the back of them it has your name and number. Take a picture - in case you loose it.
The gray part is also removable to make them fit better on little wrists. Naomae's fit great on the smaller size, I did notice that parents of young toddlers kept their bracelet on their own wrist. I made the remark that if Naomae was that age I'd do the same thing.
Now picking a color of Magic Band is the last and easiest choice you need to make regarding your ticket. First, you need to decide your number of days. Just because you are going on a 10 day trip does not mean, you're going to want a 10 day ticket. 10 days is the maximum amount of days Disney sells. We did 12 days in 2014 and had to make sure we had 2 days where we didn't go in the park. If you are doing a longer trip like that, those are great days to go and explore Downtown Disney (the soon to be Disney Springs) and your resort. For us, this time we are doing a 10 day trip but will only be getting an 8 day pass. Why? Our last day we have a tradition of going to Downtown Disney and having lunch at T-Rex before catching the Magical Express back to the airport. (The mood on that bus is very different from when you first get there) So right there, we could go with a 9 day ticket, however we learned that we need a rest day and want to go exploring with all the resort has to offer (I already can see Naomae going down the sea dragon water slide about a thousand times) so that's how we came up with 8 days. Disney vacations are awesome but they are not restful, you come home needing a vacation from that one so it is smart to give yourself a day to catch your breath and maybe a nap time during the heat of the afternoon.
When you get your ticket - that is a base ticket. You can only do 1 park a day - no switching parks and no water parks. There are 3 options you can add to your base ticket. It sounds weird but we tend to do a mock up itinerary of our trip to see what options we need, if any to add to our ticket. Park hopper has turned into a given for our family. When Naomae was younger we used the park hopper because we did 2 parks in a day. We would go to one park in the morning, go back to the hotel to nap and then go the another park in the evening (the evening park was where extra magic hours would be happening and where we'd be eating that night). We've always seemed to have reasons to hop around so we are picking that option again.
The 2nd option you can pick is called Water Parks & More - this includes the 2 miniature golf courses, Typhoon Lagoon, Blizzard Beach, Disney Quest and ESPN Zone. We did opt for this last time. The number day ticket you get is the number of times you can go to one of these. So if you bought a 6 day ticket, you have 6 times you can pick one of the water parks, golf courses, etc. We went for it last time because of the longer trip and I'd totally do it again, it just isn't right for this coming trip so we are skipping it.
The 3rd option is Park Hopper and Water Parks & More so if you think you'll use both, get this. It's the option we added the last time we went.
Again, I can't stress enough planning and making a mock itinerary. It's not the full blown, written in stone one but think about what goals you have for your Disney vacation (the parks you want to visit, where you want to eat, how you plan to fit it in with the time you have) and that will be the indicator for what ticket and options you should get.
