Heritage House Reopens as MyMagic+ Service Center
As we mentioned previously, Heritage House, the former gift shop for Hall of Presidents, closed back on January 4 with little explanation on its closure. We now know that the former gift shop in Liberty Square has reopened as a new MyMagic+ Service Center.
The location is currently available for guests to stop in and make their FastPass+ reservations and ask Cast Members questions.
As a reminder, Magic Kingdom is now FastPass+ only for both onsite and off-site guests, so these MyMagic+ Service Centers, as well as MyMagic+ kiosks, are where off-site guests currently need to go to make FastPass+ reservations.
The merchandise previously found in the gift shop can now be found in other locations throughout the park.
Also, it appears that additional MyMagic+ Service Centers, as well as stand alone kiosks, are continuously popping up throughout Walt Disney World as the full rollout of MyMagic+ moves forward.
People need to stop dissing on the magic bands and FP+ I found it super easy and fun to plan ahead of time… and I was able to change several reservations on the fly while in the parks. With so much to do at Disney if you don’t plan ahead you are going to be overwhelmed and potentially have a terrible time.
As an annual passholder who always plans ahead, I am very disappointed with the program. We are never overwhelmed by the parks and we know exactly what we want to do and when we want to do it. With the legacy FastPasses we were always able to tour the parks the way we wanted to and get everything done we wanted to do without long lines. The FP+ system has actually made that far more difficult for us on our last two trips.
Hi everybody. Isn’t that “clear as water” to all of you that:
1) Fastpass plus will be the Express pass for Disney; That means more money to Disney and “benefits” for those staying in property;
2) Once it is fully implemented, those who ara in-property will have it free and more options than 3 will be available ( if not all),Those who are off site and willing to pay, will be able to ( there should be packages of 3 atractions, 5 , 7 or all in )depending in how much you wanna spend…
That may reduce the need of extra money spent with early or late entry to in-site guests….think about it.
Looks like to me almost like pay per attraction , back there in the 70′s !!!! ( but now you pay big to get in !!!! )
Here’s what I don’t understand about the FP+ concept…. Put simply: the “Legacy” FastPass system didn’t require any “Service Centers.” Is it just me, or does FP+ seem to way over complicate a system that seemed to be doing just fine the way it was? What is Disney’s grand scheme with FP+? What is to their advantage by switching? Are they going to start charging people to use FP+? Are they going to give On-site guests X number of free FP+ attractions, and charge for extra? Are the going to charge off-site guests to use FP+ for even a single attraction? What is their “End Game?”
At a recent conference a WDW exec said that one of the big drivers of NextGen is to get guests to better plan for their vacation. A major reason many people have a bad WDW vacation (and consequently will not return) is that they did very little planning and ended up stuck in huge lines and had no dinner reservations. NextGen incentivizes planning, as you get your Magic Bands in the mail in advance of your vacation with instructions on how to use them and make FastPass+ reservations.
The “end game” here is more guests having a good time at WDW and wanting to return. Increasing return rates is probably the easiest way for WDW to increase attendance and therefore increase profits.
That may be what they were hoping for, but what they have essentially done at least so far is made it more difficult to plan. Since the new system, I’ve had 3 families go to WDW and they didn’t preplan their FastPass+ selections and as their agent I couldn’t get them to provide information on what they wanted FastPasses for so I could go in and make those selections. Every single family did it at the park and was disappointed when they couldn’t get them for the rides they wanted.
The end result was the same, the guest didn’t plan and was disappointed. Besides, the way the system is setup now everyone I talk to says I have no idea what park we will be in or what mood my family will be in until we get there.
In fairness, the legacy FP system DID require a service center (aka bank of paper FP machines staffed by a CM) at every single attraction that used them. FP+ replaces those machines with a few kiosk clusters spread throughout the park.
I used to like the fact that this particular gift shop only returned $1.00 in the form of a coin instead of a bill. Do you know if there are other gift shops in Liberty square that will continue to do this?
Oh! That’s so cool! I didn’t ever know that. What a unique touch! Unfortunately, I don’t know myself if any other gift shops in Liberty Square will do this. 🙁
Wow! I had no idea about that and I actually worked in this shop once.