Sharing Disney World Plans With Your Group

Do you sometimes feel like organizing a Disney World trip is easy, and answering questions about the plans is the hard part? If you have ever been close to ripping the head off the 5th person who asked where you were eating dinner tonight (or the same person asking it for the 5th time), if you have ever wished that you could put your Cirque du Soleil reservation or your Cocoa Beach day into My Disney Experience with the rest of your plans, then this is the article for you. Here’s what I’m going to talk about:

• Strategies for sharing plans with a travel party
• The My Plans page in My Disney Experience
• Adding Reservations and Tickets in My Disney Experience
• Adding Entertainment to your itinerary in My Disney Experience
• Adding custom activities to your itinerary in My Disney Experience

Strategies for Sharing Plans With a Travel Party

I didn’t begin planning my Disney World trips in advance until my kids got old enough to have an opinion. Having more than two people involved in real-time decisions turned out to be a recipe for a bad day. Maybe your family is more civilized, but if you’re making plans beforehand you still have a problem: communicating them to the rest of the party. The larger the group (15-person multi-generational trip?) the more important it is for everyone to be able to see the plans without needing to ask a coordinator.

In the past, I made looseleaf binders with a day-by-day rundown of the trip. Or I shared my own planning spreadsheets or documents using cloud-based services such as Google Drive. These methods weren’t always effective—there were members of my family who asked where we were eating that night with the binder sitting on the desk right next to them. But you may need to use similar strategies if your kids are too young for smartphones, or you aren’t willing to give them access to My Disney Experience. (Should Your Kids Have Their Own My Disney Experience Accounts?)

However, using the app at Disney World is pretty commonplace these days. If everyone is good with a smartphone, then using the Itinerary feature to share plans can be easy and convenient. As a bonus, I’ve found that it’s a method the share-ees will actually look at.

The My Plans Page in My Disney Experience

I’m going to use the web browser version of My Disney Experience for screenshots in this article. But all the entries you make will be visible in the mobile app.

To get to My Plans in the web browser, open the Disney World website. Then tap on the dropdown on the top right and select “My Plans”. You’ll see two selections, “Daily Itinerary” and “Tickets, Passes, and Memory Maker”. When Daily Itinerary is selected, a little scrolling will show you the button labeled “Add More Plans”. This is what we’re going to focus on. Note that this Daily Itinerary is the same as you will see in the app under Future Plans.

Some of your screens may look a bit different from my pics, depending on how wide your window is. But they’ll be pretty similar. You can click into the images below (not the ones labeled Advertisement) to expand them and browse through as a workflow.

Adding Reservations and Tickets in My Disney Experience

Reservations that you make through the Disney World website (or app) will automatically show on your Itinerary. The dropdown that you’ll see when you click “Add More Plans” is divided into two parts; the top part is devoted to these kinds of reservations. The last entry, “Link Reservations and Tickets”, allows you to add reservations if you have a Disney World confirmation number but they aren’t showing in your plans. (If you don’t have a Disney World confirmation number, you will be excited to see the adding custom activities section below.)

Most of the actions in this area of the menu can also be done via the hotspot icons at the top of the My Plans page. Those icons are much more visible. But the Add More Plans button has an advantage over the hotspots, which is that it stays visible as you scroll down.

I’m not going to walk through this part of the menu. For many people, these kinds of reservations will already be showing. Instead, I’m going to focus on the entries in the bottom half. These are the ones that you might not find if you didn’t know about this feature.

Adding Entertainment to Your Plans in My Disney Experience

Most Entertainment – an attraction that happens at a scheduled time – can be added to your Itinerary. Big-ticket Entertainment like parades and fireworks can be planning pillars that everyone wants to keep track of. Other than that, you may not want to add much Entertainment in advance.

Entertainment is broken out by category: Fireworks, Parades, and Shows. In the example below, I selected Fireworks, and the Attractions and Entertainment page opened to fireworks shows. I chose Happily Ever After, and set the date as August 4. I also need to select the specific show I want to see, but in this case there is only one. (That last “Add to Plans” button will stay grayed out if I don’t pick it though, be careful about this.) The last step is to choose who I’m going to share this with from my Family and Friends list. Anyone I check off will see the event in their Itinerary, the same as they would a dining or resort reservation that they were included in.

When I’m all done, I can see the event in my Daily Itinerary. And the 5 people I’m traveling with will know that even though our dining reservation that night is at the Grand Floridian, we’re planning on heading to the Magic Kingdom afterward for the fireworks.

You might have noticed that selecting these Entertainment options simply takes you to the attraction list with a filter for that attraction type. Clicking any of the entries in the list takes you to the page for that attraction, where you’ll find a button to add it to your plans. So you don’t need to start on the My Plans page to make these additions, and you can also make them in the app. Just remember that if it doesn’t have a specific showtime, you won’t be able to add it this way.

Adding Custom Activities to Your Plans in My Disney Experience

The fact that so many things appear automatically in your Daily Itinerary or your My Genie Day tab makes it natural to want to use it as a planning hub. But lots of “Disney plans” don’t show up there. If it’s not a reservation, you won’t see it. And if it doesn’t have a Disney World confirmation number, you can’t link it. Here are some examples of Disney World activities that won’t show up on your Itinerary or your My Genie Day tab:

• Hard ticket events like Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party, Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, or After Hours. These are ticket purchases, not reservations, so they don’t show on your Genie Day
• Restaurant reservations made through Open Table. These might be for Disney World restaurants, but they don’t have Disney World confirmation numbers so they won’t show in your Plans
• Cirque du Soleil tickets. You buy them on the Cirque’s site, not Disney’s, so they’re not in your Itinerary automatically
• Extended Evening Theme Park Hours

If you want to use this feature as an organizer, you need these events to appear in your plans. The answer is the Notes option. Unlike adding Entertainment, you can only add Notes from the browser version of My Disney Experience. But activities added this way will appear in your Daily Itinerary (in the browser), your Future Plans (in the app), and your My Genie Day tab (in the app). You can use Notes to add Halloween and Christmas Parties, Extended Evening Hours, Open Table reservations, and more to your My Disney Experience plans.

Start with Add More Plans as usual, and this time select the Notes option. When the form opens, fill in the date and time — the time will be used to put the Note in the right sequence of events. Add the location, a subject, and you can also add an optional description. When you view the note in the My Disney Experience app, only the subject will show and you’ll have to tap it open to see the description. As before, select who you want to share with. And you’re done!

In the example above, I created an entry for Cirque du Soleil on August 16. You can see the entry in my Daily Itinerary above. Below, you can see how both additions that I made here look in the app when I select the Future Plans tile. And when the day of those plans actually arrives, I will see them on the My Day tab in Genie.

The best part of using Notes to add items to your Daily Itinerary? Since they’re mostly freeform, you can use them for anything at all. Want to take a couple of days to explore Universal? You can still show those days in My Disney Experience so the rest of your group knows what your plans are.

How do you share Disney World plans with your traveling party? Have you ever used the Notes feature on the Daily Itinerary? Let us know in the comments!