Today is Thursday, April 20th…a very important date in the realm of Disney World fanatics.
Magic Kingdom
Why is that? Well, today is the day that Disney World annual passes are back on sale! Sales had previously been paused for three of the four passes, but now they’re all available online. However, there’s a catch.
Disney World announced that annual passes would be available no earlier than 6AM Eastern time today, and so several of our team members were up before the crack of dawn to try and snag one. When we first pulled up the screen before 6AM, we got a message saying “Walt Disney World Annual Passes are not available yet” with a note to keep checking the passes page.
©Disney
We opened the screen on multiple browsers and around 6:45AM, the system was finally ready to start forming a virtual queue. We had to refresh our pages, but the members of our team were given various wait times across all our browser screens — some had waits of 30 minutes or less, but most were given an estimation of “more than an hour.”
©Disney
A few members of our team got to go through the process and purchase the passes, but those who were still waiting at 8:20AM ran into a new issue…the “recalculating” screen. Waits disappeared and we were all given a “pardon the inconvenience” message. Sales were paused for about 50 minutes before the estimated wait time screen returned.
©Disney
For those of our team who made it through the process, the purchasing steps don’t seem to have changed significantly. You’ll still need to choose your pass type, and then you’ll be directed to a screen where you select the number of passes, and your add-ons, and then connect those passes to people in your Family & Friends list. You have 10 minutes to go through the whole purchasing process once you make it out of the waiting room.
©Disney
We’d like to note that we also tried calling the provided phone line to purchase an annual pass — but after more than 150 attempts to various phone numbers, we weren’t able to get through to Disney at all.
But even late into the morning, we still have several people in waiting rooms with “more than an hour” estimations left. It’s going to be a long day for some Disney World fans it seems! Thankfully, it looks like no pass tiers have sold out yet, so you might still be able to snag one. We’ll make sure to keep you updated if we encounter any more issues along the way, so stay tuned to DFB.
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I got through the virtual queue four times and all four times my payment would not process on April 20th. After trying once on the 21st, I finally broke down and called. I was pleasantly surprised that my wait time was less than a minute to talk to someone and my purchase was completed quickly. I just wish the online payment had worked and I hadn’t wasted all of that time waiting.