I love “My Disney Experience.”  What I’m talking about is the “My Disney Experience” app.  It’s a great tool for helping you navigate your Walt Disney World experience and making it even better.  Since according to Disney’s own stats, 75% of WDW visitors are not local, most of us coming to the parks are planning for our trip to be a multi-day experience.  You’ve invested a lot of money, you’ve planned in advance where you are staying, and if you’re reading blogs like this one, you have also had to plan a rough itinerary of what you want to do and see.

The cool thing is that once you are on the Disney World site, you can create an account (if you didn’t already have one) and do pretty much everything from the comfort of your computer.  You can buy tickets, order and customize a MagicBand, make reservations at a Disney resort, reserve seats at your favorite restaurants, plan out your attractions with FastPass+, find out about special events and tours, and save all of this to your “My Disney Experience.”  The app allows you to access all that information without the hassle of having to print out, write down, or otherwise record all this information.

But perhaps the best part about it is the additional information you can glean from this cool little program.  If you allow it to use your current location as a reference point, you can find out about places to eat that are closest to you including viewing their menu, the type of cuisine they offer, the hours they are open, and even the price range you can expect to pay and if they are on the Disney dining plan.  It even has a map to show you where it is.  You can find out about recreation opportunities near you, it lists the shops that are closest to you (and if you have the Shop Disney Parks app can even help you with buying what you want).  And maybe my favorite little bonus, it locates all the closest restrooms to your location.  How cool is that?

What makes your “My Disney Experience” app even more invaluable is that it has wait times for current attractions along with the ability to change FastPass+ attractions without waiting at one of the available kiosks all around the parks.  When I was walking past the FastPass+ kiosk there was a line of probably 15-30 minutes long of people waiting to add a FastPass+ attraction to their MagicBands when I could do it as I’m walking on my phone.  And when Test Track went down right when we were supposed to be able to ride it, my app updated almost instantaneously.  Not only that but it let me know I could use my FastPass+ slot for nearly every other attraction in Epcot because of the closure (or just come back and use it on Test Track when it came back up).

But for me, because we had free Disney Photo Pass downloads as an option (included with the new Premier Annual Pass), I was able to instantly download our photos that Disney photographers took of us.  Instantly!  Well like a few minutes, but we didn’t have to wait long or go to a photo store and look at them on a screen.  I could just download them directly to my phone and/or share them on social media (which of course I did).  This even holds true for attraction photos (which makes Memory Maker even more enticing).  They even have cute little photo enhancements of your pics and offer various styles all right away.  I had this cute one of my daughter Emma holding digitized balloons and they were not only able to download the pic quickly, but the balloons were already added to the pic!  The ONLY downside to the app is that sometimes it doesn’t load everything right away.  Usually, just refreshing it will bring everything back, but it does happen about once every other time.

Our whole family loves the new My Disney Experience app and we hope you will too.  It’s just another way that Disney looks to make your vacation experience into a great one!

• Find out more about MagicBands and how useful they are!