If you are considering going to Shanghai Disney then there is one critical thing that I would encourage you to avoid at all costs, despite how tempting it might be at the time. Don’t buy your tickets directly on the Shanghai Disney APP!
Shanghai Disney Fastpass
So while I didn’t want to dwell in our main blog post on the disappointment my wife and I felt when we discovered the biggest issue with buying our tickets on the Shanghai Disney APP, we definitely don’t want others to make the same mistake we did if it can be avoided.
Normally I try to leverage the benefits of doing everything with my phone here in China, whether that be ordering groceries, paying my phone bill, or settling a check. So when I saw that there was a Shanghai Disney APP that would let you buy tickets and better plan your trip, I downloaded it immediately and started exploring. It was extremely easy to buy tickets and the instructions were quite clear that all you needed to do was to bring your passport to the entrance and pick up physical tickets immediately upon arrival without any separate wait at a ticket window. Unfortunately, this minor convenience was substantially offset by the subsequent inconvenience of having to wait to buy our Fast Pass until we had the physical ticket in hand and had entered the park.
At the time I didn’t think it was that big of a deal, we’d show up and scan our tickets as soon as we arrived and then buy our FastPass. Well, as you can see from the phone screen shot to the right, this was not possible. All the Fastpass for the day had been sold out so we were out of luck and had to wait in the insanely long lines for all the best rides. Normally I wouldn’t complain about having to wait in line as this is often better than the chaos you can find in absence of proper lines here in China, but we had only bought a single day pass and as a result we couldn’t go on nearly as many rides or activities as we had planned. The lines ranged from as short as 30 minutes to well over 2 hours for a single ride. We managed to ride the honey pots and dumbo but waited for a combined 2 hours for the 5 minutes of ride time between the two attractions.
Although we still made sure to have a good time by spending more time just exploring the park and seeing how much there is to do, next time we will go for more than 1 day and make sure to get there early in the morning so that we can activate our FastPass before they run out.
