I make no secret of the fact that I refuse to carry -- or even own -- a full-on smartphone. I carry a clamshell. An advanced 4G clamshell with a rudimentary browser, but still a clamshell. It can display pictures, but not PDFs. This past Spring, when I was already on the train for my day-trip to Sacramento, and realized that I'd forgotten my ticket for the new MOSAC science museum, I ended up finding an online PDF-to-PNG converter that my phone browser could actually deal with, which saved the museum people from having to look me up. What do you actually get with DL tix and reservations? Something that can be printed out? Something my clamshell can display?
I was hoping someone would still be around that knows this stuff. I have the same questions myself. February will be interesting.
I'm guessing that it's more-or-less the same as Hollywood Bowl tickets, MOSAC tickets, and E-vax-cards: as long as either (a) you can show a hardcopy of the bar code, or (b) your phone can display the bar code (thankfully, I had the whole train ride to find an online PDF-to-PNG converter my cell phone could access), you're in. After all, they eventually opened up RotR to non-smartphone-users.
So far, I have printed a bar-coded ticket to a PDF, which I have emailed home, along with PDFs of two different web pages showing the reservation dates.
It works very well. The ticket barcode pulls in the reservation from hardcopy and could have probably also worked on a clamshell screen.
This information will come in handy. I want to have down before we go. I would normally depend on kids/grandkids for tech stuff but they won't be there. And the friends we are going with are as clueless as we are.
Just print out the tickets, making sure the barcodes are readable. If you're paranoid, print out the pages giving the dates and times of your reservations as well. They issue you a hard ticket at the gate, and take your picture, on initial entry on a multi-day ticket. My previous post was a bit terse because I was banging it out on my clamshell phone, while standing in an attraction queue. BTW, they no longer appear to be setting out racks of printed entertainment schedules, but I found that if I did a Google search on "Disneyland Schedule," I could reach the day's "daily schedule" page, and it would actually render, in a readable form, in the rudimentary browser on my clamshell, so evidently they go out of their way to make at least that page as "Any Browser" compatible as possible. (And yes, my own web site still has an "Any Browser" logo on it.)
Sounds a lot like what they were doing before with the addition of reservations. We are really hoping that won't be a big issue in February. Of course I am thinking of the olden days when there was an *off* season. The whole idea of Disneyland on a schedule rubs me the wrong way. It is nice of them to make sure most everybody can get a schedule but I cannot help but be irked that there is one more thing that requires a phone. What if I don't want to carry a damn phone around all the time?
Note that a reservation for park entry is for any time during the specified day. And if you have park-hopping for a given day, then you can begin to do so freely, starting at 1 PM. As to "Disneyland on a schedule," well, parades and other shows (down to and including school and other amateur groups under the "Magic Music Days" program) have always been "on a schedule." And FastPass always had a specified return window, even if it wasn't always enforced. "Lightning Lane" is my pet peeve. Over a decade ago, when other theme parks introduced paid priority access, Disney steadfastly stuck with the free FastPass, not allowing guests to buy their way into priority access (other than as part of a guided tour group), thus asserting that all guests are created equal. The idea of buying one's way into priority access sticks in my craw, even more than policies (Disney or otherwise) that discriminate against those who choose not to carry (or own) a full-on smartphone. I did not even consider ROTR; my idea of an immersive experience runs more towards booking a night in one of CW's historic house accommodations, or booking one's WDW hotel reservations at, say, the All Star Music. When the "Star Trek Hilton" was still set up in Las Vegas, I really liked the Klingon attraction, but found the Borg attraction to be, in a word, "meh." And ROTR looks an awful lot like the Borg attraction. On the other hand, I *did* do Smuggler's Run. Being alone, I did single-rider, and ended up as engineer, sitting alone behind a family of four. I will note that my one previous Smuggler's Run experience was as a gunner; engineer suited me much better. Single-rider on Smuggler's Run was almost a walk-on.
Yes, there have always been some timetables that need to be adhered to but I am thinking more along the lines of planning the whole day on your phone. Specific times for each attraction and meal. When we went to DCA during lockdown we made our lunch and dinner food orders but found we were not at all hungry when it came time to get our dinner. I did like the old FP when they did not actually expire and once you had one it was good all day (even though many people did not know that). It got a little tougher when it became electronic but at least it was still free. Charging to cut in line along with turning Christmas and Halloween fireworks into hard ticket events stole a big chunk of magic for me. And we can afford it! But I have memories of how hard it was even back in the day to get the whole family to Disneyland. (My kids still resent the fact that we would go out to the car for lunch.) Now they would be complaining about all those kids that get to go in ahead because their parents have more money. Less and less of the family experience that I envisioned when I heard Walt's interviews about his dreams for a Park where parents and children get to do it together.
Yes. But looking up the day's entertainment schedule on a web page, while it discriminates against those not carrying cell phones, or carrying cellphones without web-browsing capabilities, who didn't have the foresight to print the entertainment schedule in advance, is not the same thing as being forced to book reservations for everything from show seats to attraction seats to meals via a mobile app. Which irritates me more because it inherently discriminates against non-smartphone-users.
