The Dark Side of Disney - Leonard Kinsey [14]
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