Disney World Park Pass System

Something new to Disney World since COVID is their park pass system. It was originally put in place to truly manage park capacity in the early days of reopening after COVID. You could not park hop, so this kept Disney World in complete control of where everyone would be. Then park hopping started. They still require that you book a park pass for your first park, then after 2 pm, you can park hop to any park with availability. It looks like the park pass system is here to stay until at least January 2023. So I wanted to do a post about booking said passes. Check it out below.

Checking Pass Availability

Before you book your trip or buy your tickets, it is highly recommended you check if the parks you want to visit even have availability. This can be done via the Disney website. Make sure you check the availability for the type of ticket/package you have. Each group [Annual Passholders; Resort Hotels; or General Theme Park Ticket] has its own set of availability. If you have multiple types traveling in your party, also pay attention to each group and not just yours. When booking, you will have to book by group as well. So that is something else to remember. We also had issues and could not book our room and tickets as a package. This was due to the fact that there was no park availability on our arrival day. Even though we had no intention of going to the parks our arrival day, we had to buy our tickets separate from our room. That altered how I booked our reservations [more on that below]. Another side note - if you are going to buy your tickets and room, but you find that there is not any availability for the resort guests but there is for the general tickets, buy your tickets first. Then book your passes before booking your room. This will pull your tickets from the theme park ticket group where there is availability.

Book a Park Pass

Like I mentioned above, we booked our room and tickets separately. But when linked to our My Disney Experience accounts (MDE), it recognized we had a resort booking, and passes then came from the resort guest group. The exception to this was my dad. My mom booked his room, I bought his tickets. At the time, my dad was not linked to me. So his pass came from the theme park ticket group. So I had to actually book his separately from the rest of us. My screenshots for booking are from when I booked his pass.

Booking via web mobile browser

First go to the Disney website for park pass reservations. Click on Make a Park Reservation. Even if you don’t have tickets, you will be able to do this. The error will come when you create your party and no one has a ticket. It is also key when creating your party to do it by the groups I talked about above. So in this case, I only selected my dad and I unselected myself since my dad was in a different group than us.

On the next screen, you will select the date you are wanting to make the pass.

Then you will select the park.

If it is available, the next screen will ask you to confirm your section.

Then you will have your final confirmation.

As you can see, this is super easy. I really had no issues via the mobile browser when booking passes.

Booking via desktop web browser

So I am going to be honest. It is practically the same, just different shaped screens, ha. I do think it was easier to book them on my computer just because it is bigger and I could see more at once. But both were seamless for me.

Again go to the Disney website. Create your party.

Pick your date.

Select your park.

Review your details and confirm.

And you are all set!

Cancelling Your Park Pass

So this one stumped me. And I really hope Disney fixes it. Maybe they have. But in May 2021, I was confused. So after booking our passes, I decided to do some rearranging after thinking more about our days and how tired we would be after arriving so late. Well I could not figure out how to cancel the passes on the website. Well it turns out they have to be cancelled inside of the MDE app. Now remember, you CANNOT book park passes inside of the MDE app. So talk about confusing, and potentially a hassle. I mean it was for us. I wanted to move things around, but I had to time it right and do it quickly. So I had to cancel on my phone, and rebook on my computer. Cancelling is easy, but it just did not click with me to do it within the app since I didn’t book it inside the app. So beware, ha.

In the app, click on your park pass reservation.

Select who all you want to cancel from the park pass reservation.

Then click cancel.

Then they are canceled and you can rebook another park that day. Like I said, it was easy, just not the same location as booking them.