The Dark Side of Disney (6 page)

Well, this shuts toupee guy up, and he slams down two vouchers (not even tickets) on the metal table and rust flies up everywhere. “Here’s your goddamned tickets you motherfuckers!” he’s yelling, beet red. “But we’re not driving you back! Read the contract, it says nothing about return transportation! Hahaha! Now get the hell out of my face!” he screams as his toupee flops around, and he points to a door. Him and George are laughing and calling us “motherfuckers” as we walk out of the door, which leads to a rickety fire escape ladder which ends next to a dumpster with what looks like a swamp around it.

So we finally get down there and our shoes and socks are ruined from the swamp mud and I end up calling our resort back at Disney because I have no idea where we are and I’m not sure what else to do. Luckily they know exactly where we are, obviously having received this same phone call many times, and call a cab for us. The cab ends up costing over $120, which is almost as much as the fucking tickets cost (more if you count our ruined shoes). We end up getting back to our resort almost 6 hours after we’d left, so we basically wasted a whole day of our vacation. Plus, we missed our La Cellier reservations. FAIL!

My wife and I laugh about it now, but at the time it wasn’t funny and nearly ruined our vacation. Totally not worth it. Although, from what I’ve been told the DVC tours are quite nice, the sales people are ultra-low pressure, and you even get ice cream and Fast Passes. But they still get pissed if you tell them you’re going to buy resale instead.

Befriending a 15-Year+ Cast Member:

First of all, just finding someone who has worked at WDW for fifteen years is nothing short of a miracle. The pay is shit, the working conditions are restrictive, and frankly they don’t treat their staff very well. But some people just love Disney, and are willing to overlook all of the crap to maintain their dream of working for The Mouse.

Anyway, if you’re lucky enough to find a “lifer”, you should immediately become good friends with that person. Because they are in possession of the coveted “Silver” Main Entrance Pass, which allows them to bring three people a day into the parks for free (some blackout dates do apply)!

An authentic Silver Main Entrance Pass

To be fair, full-time CMs who have worked there for more than 3 months but less than 15 years get “Blue” Main Gate passes, which allow entry for three people 16 times during the year. But my experience is that these CMs are really stingy with their 16 entries, usually because they think that despite their poor financial status and crappy, irregular working hours, they’ll still somehow find a non-staff boyfriend/girlfriend to take to the parks. Think again, losers!

And that’s why I don’t have any friends who are CMs.

Reseller Scams:

Okay, so you’ve decided you don’t want to jump the gates and go to Disney Jail, and you don’t want to waste a day doing a timeshare presentation and possibly getting stranded in a swamp. You also either live nowhere near the parks or you’re a big loser and/or an insensitive and cruel person like me, and thus you have no CM friends to get you into the parks for free. So you’ve given up, and are ready to hand over your wallet to Disney so it can make sweet love to your cash and leave some tickets on the nightstand when it’s done. Not so fast! Why are you giving up so easily? Why are you so eager to prostitute out your hard-earned cash?!

It turns out that there actually are reputable ticket resellers who will sell you WDW tickets for moderately cheaper than the standard gate prices! My authorized reseller recommendation is Undercover Tourist (
http://www.undercovertourist.com
). I’ve used them multiple times and have always received friendly service and the correct tickets, which show up in an unmarked envelope and come wrapped in plastic. These are actual WDW tickets, not the vouchers you’d get at a timeshare presentation, and they work perfectly.

As of this writing, the standard Undercover Tourist discount on a 6-day Adult Park Hopper is $16, which isn’t bad, especially if you have a large family. However, you can get an even bigger discount ($22) from them if you sign up for the MouseSavers newsletter at
http://www.mousesavers.com/newsletter.html
. This monthly newsletter is a great compendium of current discounts/closures/news for both WDW and Disneyland, but more importantly, it contains a secret “newsletter only” link to Undercover Tourist that will give you bigger discounts!

As an aside, another cool thing about Undercover Tourist is that they offer the UK/Ireland-only 14 or 21 day “Ultimate Ticket”. If you’re going to be at WDW for two or three weeks (you lucky bastard!) this might be the way to go. The 14-day Ultimate Ticket gives you two weeks of park hopping, plus Water Park, DisneyQuest, and Wide World of Sports access. Right now after converting pounds to dollars the adult 14-day Ultimate is going for $373, which is actually $2 cheaper than the 10-day Park Hopper + Water Park ticket! So you’re getting 7 more days for $2 less. What a bargain!

However, you might be thinking that these are pretty tepid discounts, and I can’t argue that they only amount to a pair of mouse ears for each member of your family, or a few harf-and-harfs at the Rose and Crown. If you’re like me, you’re still looking for even bigger discounts, and have drooled at the signs all around the Kissimmee/Orlando advertising ultra-cheap tickets. These resellers pawn their wares in booths, gas stations, and even in reputable hotels. And lo and behold, if you go into one of these places they actually are selling tickets for dirt cheap. We’re talking up to 50% off the gate price! Now, that’s a discount!

One of the many ticket reseller booths in Orlando

But as the old saying goes, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. After doing extensive research on these resellers, I’ve found that literally 100% of them are illegal scams, and if you buy tickets from them you will likely not be able to use those tickets to gain entry to the parks.

Here’s how the scam works: a departing vacationer is offered a decent amount of cash ($20-$50) to sell any ticket with unused days on it to one of these illegal reseller operations. Maybe the tourist accidentally bought too many days and can’t use them all, or maybe their vacation got cut short; the reasoning behind the confused mind of a tourist is unimportant to the scammers. So now the reseller has a ticket with (for example) two days left on it, and those two days expire in 10 days (Magic Your Way passes are good for 14 days after first being run through a turnstile). The scam reseller can turn around and sell this as a two-day ticket to unsuspecting tourists looking for a big discount over gate prices. Furthermore, they actively encourage people to add days to the used Magic Your Way ticket (which can be done at greatly reduced rates, as low as $5/day) so that they can come back to the booth at the end of their vacation and sell back any unused days for an even bigger overall discount. Brilliant!

There are four big problems with this, from the perspective of someone looking to purchase a used ticket:

1. It’s illegal. It specifically says on the tickets that they can’t be resold. In fact, it’s a felony. However, it’s not necessarily illegal to buy used tickets, just to resell them, so from the tourist’s point of view, it’s a legal gray area.

2. There’s a signature on the back of the ticket. No biggie, the resellers usually get these off prior to selling them by applying a special acid to the signature strip, although observant CMs can spot this a mile away.

3. All of the parks in WDW use biometric finger scanning. This measures the length of your fingers from knuckle to knuckle. If your finger isn’t the same size as the one already recorded on the ticket, chances are you’re not getting through the gate.

4. This is the real kicker: There’s no way of verifying how many days are on the ticket until you’re actually on Disney property. So you might get there and find that there aren’t any days left on the ticket, and you got totally scammed.

It used to be that if you bought a phony or used ticket that didn’t work you could go to Guest Services and they’d be really understanding and nice about it and give you a new one, but now they’re wise to the whole underground reseller racket and are completely unsympathetic to the plight of scammed tourists. How do I know this? Because I took one for the team and bought such a ticket. The buying part was easy: I went into a gas station, made sure there weren’t any cops around, and paid cash for a Two-Day MYW base ticket. Using the ticket at the parks was where the whole thing fell apart. Here’s how it went down:

The crowds are light as I approach the turnstile at The Magic Kingdom, put my used ticket through the slot, and place my finger on the scanner. It doesn’t work. The CM tells me to do it again, with the other hand. Still doesn’t work.

Me: “Huh, that’s weird.”

CM: “Are you sure this is your ticket?”

Me: “Uhhh…..”

CM: “Sir, you’ll need to go to Guest Services to get this resolved. Have a magical day!”

Me: “Okay. Thanks”

So I go to Guest Services and hand over my ticket.

Me: “It doesn’t work when I put my finger on the thingy.”

CM: “Did you use the same finger you used the first time you went through the gate with this ticket?”

Me: “Not exactly.”

CM: “Sir, where did you purchase this ticket?”

Me: “From a gas station.”

CM: “We’re sorry, but we’re not able to accept tickets purchased from unauthorized resellers. Unfortunately you’ll need to buy a new ticket. I can help you with that now, if you’d like.”

Me: “So I just lost a bunch of money, right? And there’s nothing you can do about it?”

CM: “That is our policy, sir.”

Me: “Bummer. Can I get my ticket back, so I can at least sell it back to the gas station?”

CM: “Unfortunately since it was resold illegally I will need to confiscate it. However, here is a collectible “What Will You Celebrate” pin. Have a magical day!”

The CM gives me a little pin and I smile weakly and walk away. I lost money so you don’t have to!

However, I’ve been in line during busy times of the day, and a lot of times if the finger scanner doesn’t work the CM will punch in some code at the turnstile and just let the guest through. I gather the scanners aren’t wholly reliable, and most CMs don’t care enough about resold tickets to hold up the line and incur the wrath of impatient guests. But this is the exception rather than the rule.

If you’re a real sleazeball, there is one surefire way to get around the biometric scanner: act like you’re disabled. Borrow a wheelchair and have a friend push you to the gate and say that you can’t lift your arms up to the scanner. The CM will run the used ticket for you and let you through the handicapped gate, no questions asked. But that’s some super-bad karma to pull down just for discounted theme park tickets!

Another way to save money on tickets, if you don’t mind possibly going to jail at the end of your vacation (real jail, not Disney Jail – big difference), is by taking advantage of the other side of the resale scam: sell your unused days. The easiest (and cheapest) way to do this is to buy more days than you know you’ll use from Undercover Tourist. That way you’re not only getting a discount for the days you will use, but your unused days are also discounted, which means you have a larger profit margin when you go to sell those unused days. And the more days you buy, the cheaper they are, to the point where after the 4
^th
day each additional day averages out to about $5.

So say you intend to stay 7 days at WDW (a regular 7-day MYW costs $263 at the gate). You’d buy a 10-day MYW base ticket from Undercover Tourist for $266, only $3 more than Disney’s gate price for a 7-day. At the end of your vacation you drive over to one of the reseller places on your way home and sell your remaining 3 days for $50. Now your 7-day MYW ticket has ended up costing you only $216, which is a $47 discount from the gate prices! There are also ways you can work out even bigger discounts by purchasing and reselling the various water park, park hopper, and non-expiration options, although the combinations of Undercover Tourist prices vs. reseller buyback prices are so numerous that finding the sweet spot of maximum profit might take a fair amount of calculator action.