Hello Disney people! We just got back from WDW and experienced a significant change in how we are able to pay for our trips. We thought we would post our experience and see if anyone else has experienced this, AND... Do you know a better way to do it?
Background info... We are DVC members and Annual Pass holders and we do our best to get down to visit The Mouse one to two times a year. One of the things we have been doing is buying Disney gift cards on a regular basis over the course of the year to spread out our cost. At this point in our Disney trips, most of our dollars spent are on sit-down restaurants. We try not to use gift cards for dining because it is very likely that you may not be able to use the full value of the card... Read the fine print on the back of the card... The restrictions are impressive.
The way we had been doing things, as was Disney's policy (as recent as January 2019), was to go down and take advantage of the $1500 credit line they advanced us, then in the middle of our trip, we would go down to the front desk and throw a stack of gift cards at them. Ultimately, by the time we left, the balance charged to our card on file was quite low. Nice, right? We did that for years...
But then things changed in May 2019 (or so we were told). I guess the old way was losing them some cash.
When we came down on July 19, 2019, we already had a pre-charge on our card of over $100. Then, each purchase we would make would trigger a larger hold on our card. $40 shirt purchase with a magic band would trigger a $200 hold on our card! One hold after another began to clog our card until we ultimately had $1500 blocked on our card even though we had only spent a fraction of that, only a few days into the trip!
Then we applied the gift cards... They did nothing to release the holds on our credit card even though they lowered our balance. Ultimately, we had to detach our our card from our Disney account! This triggered a "checkout" process for that card. It took days for the credit holds on our credit card to start to come off! They were still being released after we were off property. And we were heading to another destination after Disney where we needed the available credit!
We were lucky that we had an "emergency card" with us. If we hadn't, we would have been in BIG trouble!
So, either come down with an empty card (with a few grand available) and let Disney have their way with us for a week and trust that it will all come out in the wash... Eventually... Or what? Thoughts?
Background info... We are DVC members and Annual Pass holders and we do our best to get down to visit The Mouse one to two times a year. One of the things we have been doing is buying Disney gift cards on a regular basis over the course of the year to spread out our cost. At this point in our Disney trips, most of our dollars spent are on sit-down restaurants. We try not to use gift cards for dining because it is very likely that you may not be able to use the full value of the card... Read the fine print on the back of the card... The restrictions are impressive.
The way we had been doing things, as was Disney's policy (as recent as January 2019), was to go down and take advantage of the $1500 credit line they advanced us, then in the middle of our trip, we would go down to the front desk and throw a stack of gift cards at them. Ultimately, by the time we left, the balance charged to our card on file was quite low. Nice, right? We did that for years...
But then things changed in May 2019 (or so we were told). I guess the old way was losing them some cash.
When we came down on July 19, 2019, we already had a pre-charge on our card of over $100. Then, each purchase we would make would trigger a larger hold on our card. $40 shirt purchase with a magic band would trigger a $200 hold on our card! One hold after another began to clog our card until we ultimately had $1500 blocked on our card even though we had only spent a fraction of that, only a few days into the trip!
Then we applied the gift cards... They did nothing to release the holds on our credit card even though they lowered our balance. Ultimately, we had to detach our our card from our Disney account! This triggered a "checkout" process for that card. It took days for the credit holds on our credit card to start to come off! They were still being released after we were off property. And we were heading to another destination after Disney where we needed the available credit!
We were lucky that we had an "emergency card" with us. If we hadn't, we would have been in BIG trouble!
So, either come down with an empty card (with a few grand available) and let Disney have their way with us for a week and trust that it will all come out in the wash... Eventually... Or what? Thoughts?