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Offsite guests can now buy MagicBands for use in the parks. You’ll pay $12.95 for each band, which will store your fastpasses and your tickets, but they won’t have charging privileges. We were in the parks the first day they were offered and saw plenty of middle management standing around in their always-sensible black heels watching for guest reactions to this new offering.
Of course, once you have the MagicBand, there are now countless accessories you can purchase to plus it with.
Having a MagicBand is beyond convenient, but would you pay $12.95 for each person in your party to have one? I don’t know if I need to spend that kind of money. What do you think? Is paying $50 for a family of four worth it? Or will you just stick with your RFID enabled park ticket, since it does the same thing?
Christina Wood of 
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I think it’s fun for children to have the colorful bands and to be able to use them during their stay at WDW. I booked a one night stay at a value resort for our upcoming 7 night trip because our usual off-site location was not available for the first night of our trip (Wyndham Bonnet Creek). I wanted to have access to early fast pass plus and get two free magic bands in the mail as well as the advantages of two days worth of free parking and extra magic hours until 1 am at the magic kingdom.
I think Disney is over-estimating the popularity of the magic bands though, because off-site guests for the most part are not going to be paying the $12.95 just to have the band. A lot of people who stay offsite will probably have a magic band from a previous trip anyways. Those stores that are stuffed and stocked with endless supplies of magic bands and accessories will NOT be selling as many as they expect.
I think you’re right. I don’t see most people wanting to purchase them. They are a very nice add-on for onsite guests (and frankly, I think they made me spend more last week because it’s so EASY to buy things) but as others have noted, it’s going to really add up if you’re buying multiple bands.
I don’t think I would unless it had the convenience of the charging privileges (which, as you said, it doesn’t)…then you could leave pretty much everything behind and just use the band all day. I do think they are cool and convenient…but as a family of four, that would be expensive (not to mention the price of the inescapable add-on accessories) when the RFID park tickets do the same thing.
Agree–it’s very expensive. Although if you want to add accessories, just look at the ground. The little “jibbitz” fall off easily and they’re all over the place! Okay, an understatement, but I won’t be buying them.
I’ld argue on the flipside, I know in the past my family’s always made sure one parent had the tickets on hand, which meant everyone had to stop at the ticket gate to get out the tickets. Having a MagicBand means just making sure everyone has their Band for the day, and not having to worry about tickets getting lost.
I don’t know if people will pay $12 for what is basically a ticket replacement, but then people pay double that for the Pin starter sets (heck a single pin usually costs like $9) and vinylmations, in comparison to those, a Magicband seems a slightly more useful and affordable souvenir for your visit + is reusable I assume?
(also find it weird how people assume offsiters will have visited recently and therefore everyone already has a magicband and so on. not everyone gets to visit WDW even once a year, let alone on any real regular basis)
I was actually expecting upwards of 20 – 25 for it. Personally, I think it’s not too bad for something you can use over and over again.
We’ve been wondering how Disney would deal with the guests who don’t stay on property, since these bands do cost Disney money to make and distribute. The $12.95 seems like a nice compromise; if you want one, you can buy one, and if you don’t want one, you don’t have to have one.
An interesting aside — we’re headed back to WDW shortly for our second trip in a couple of months, and we just received new MagicBands in the mail. Since we’re DVC members and annual passholders, we had been wondering if Disney would issue us new bands or expect us to use our old ones, and we got our answer. New bands for every resort stay, apparently.
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