Here's a interesting quirk in Disney's Fastpass system. It's more specifically a potential bug (or feature, depending upon your point of view) in Disneyland's Maxpass implementation of Fastpass.
A Reddit user reports that he used this bug, or loophole, to amass more than 150 Fastpass reservations at the resort in one day, using the Maxpass system. Maxpass is Disneyland's upcharge version of Fastpass, which allows visitors to manage their Fastpass reservations for Disneyland and Disney California Adventure via Disneyland's smartphone app.
There's no Fastpass+ system at Disneyland, so the entire inventory of Fastpass reservations is available at the start of each day at Disneyland. Maxpass doesn't allow a visitor to hold any more Fastpasses than the traditional system, but since you can see what's available, for what return times, and claim a Fastpass instantly via the app whenever you are eligible (instead of walking to dispensing machines through the park), you can churn through Fastpasses much more quickly using the service than you could the old way.
But 150 in a day? That's unreal. How can anyone do it? Here's an explanation from the thread:
"Goofys Flight School at DCA was closed all day and giving out Fast Passes 5 minutes out. Thunder Mountain at Disneyland was the same thing in the evening. So every time our Fastpass time would come up we would get another multiple experience pass. And then repeat."
The bug would seem to be that the system continued to dispense Fastpasses for an attraction that was down. I haven't confirmed whether or not this happened, but it is at least an interesting hypothetical. Maxpass allows you to collect Fastpasses for return times as close as five minutes away, and using the service to see which rides have short return times is the primary tool that Disneyland visitors can use to get on just a crazy number of rides in one day without ever waiting in a queue.
When a ride for which you have a Fastpass is closed, Disney's apps typically convert that Fastpass into a "Multiple Experiences" one, aka the "Golden Fastpass" that is good for any other attraction in the parks.
So if you know that a ride with a short return time is about to go down, then you can use that Fastpass instead to get on any other ride in the parks with next to no wait when it does. That's why any attraction that goes down needs to stop issuing Fastpasses immediately. Otherwise, it becomes a free "ride anything now" pass-dispensing machine, as allegedly occurred here.
Have you ever used this bug/feature before? Even if you haven't, what's your favorite Fastpass or ride reservation hack? Please share it with us (if you dare) in the comments.
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Good lord Disney, sell the passes already! There's clearly a market.
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Yes! I was visiting the Disneyland Resort a couple weeks ago and Grizzly River Run was "temporarily closed" for almost the entire part of the day. It reopened a couple hours before park close, though it was like 50 degrees out. Anyways, it would allow to reserve MaxPass FastPasses on the app and they'd turn into "multiple experiences" fast passes. It was a glitch I didn't catch until the last day of my trip, but we did use it a couple times for re-rides on Guardians.