Be Prepared for These COMPLICATIONS When Buying an Annual Pass for Disney World

We woke up this morning with our game faces on and our laptops ready. Today, April 20th, Annual Pass sales for Disney World opened for the first time in FOREVER. Well, just for the first time in a long while — but it feels like forever, right?

Disney had previously announced that you’d be able to purchase new Annual Passes or upgrade current ones “no earlier than” 6AM EST on April 20th. So we went to bed early, got our beauty sleep, and had our alarms set. Here’s what we experienced.

When we hopped on the website to purchase the Passes, we were a few minutes early, so we were greeted with a screen that told us so. Once 6AM hit, we expected the page to change but…

…the page still didn’t change at 6AM. Nope, we were chilling on the “Annual Passes Are Not Available Yet” page and were instructed to keep checking the Passes page for a while.

Finally, around 6:45AM, some members of our team were allowed into a page that eventually turned into a virtual queue.

Our team members refreshed their pages across multiple screens and were given various wait times — some as little as half an hour, and some over an hour. This is where some of our team members have been waiting for more than FOUR hours.

A few members of our team got further along in the process but experienced technical issues that forced them back to square one. Others got through and were able to purchase their passes, and another group is still waiting. 

As of 11:55AM ET, a virtual queue was still in place. One of our members who joined the queue later in the day (around that time) got a wait time of more than an hour.

And that’s just the virtual queue online. Some of our team members also called Disney’s Annual Passholder phone line as well as other customer service lines only to be met with error messages. They hung up, called again, and repeated the process…over…and over…and over again, with no luck. But it seems others were able to get through and get the passes they needed — so it very much depends.

At one point this morning, sales were actually paused, but they quickly resumed. The Annual Passholder website does not yet indicate that any passes have sold out, but we will continue to monitor that for updates.

If you plan on buying an Annual Pass today, here are our tips:

• Open the passholder page on multiple browsers and on multiple devices — you might get a different virtual queue wait time on these and one may be much shorter than the others
• Be prepared to WAIT — the wait times can be extremely long so you will want to pack your patience
• Have your information ready so you can check out quickly once you are able to
• If you have friends trying to buy passes too, communicate with them to see if they have a better virtual queue spot than you — if they get into the system sooner, they may be able to buy the pass for you and then you can reimburse them (this worked for some of our team members)
• Don’t give up hope — some of our members have been able to get their passes but it can take a lot of time (and patience)

We’ll continue to update you with news when we have it. If you’re looking for more Annual Pass information, click the link below!

Click here for more Annual Pass information! 

Have you been able to purchase an Annual Pass yet? Comment down below!

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