Guest Experiences Shady “Early Entry Panhandling”

There are a lot of perks that come with staying at a Walt Disney World Resort hotel. Not only are the hotels all gorgeous, each has its own unique theme. Guests also get free transportation to and from the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, the water parks, and Disney Springs. One of the best perks of staying at a Disney World hotel is getting to enter the Parks early. And if you are staying at a Deluxe Resort, Guests can even get to stay a couple of hours past closing. All Disney Resort hotel Guests get to enter the theme parks thirty minutes early every morning.

One Resort Guest recently visited EPCOT for some solo Park time and encountered something extremely shady and uncomfortable. According to Redditor u/r1ngx, they were waiting for EPCOT’s early theme park entry when they were approached by a man. The man asked her if she would scan her MagicBand and get his party into the relatively empty Park.

So when I rope dropped EPCOT (alone), [and after entering the park], I was making my way to the right for the Early Entrance, and some dude approached me and asked if his group/family could enter with me. I said “won’t help, they scan your magicband”, his reply was “only one person gets scanned, we do it all the time”. I gave him the “of course not, that’s fraud” and continued on my way. It pissed me off but I didn’t rat him out as I did not want to cloud my day.. Has this happened to anyone else?

Early Entrance Panhandling. Has this happened to anyone else?
by inWaltDisneyWorld

Many fellow Redditors commented that the person should have reported the group to the nearest Cast Member. The OP (original poster) said that they didn’t want to say something and then possibly run into the same party later. They also didn’t want to worry about running into them when they came back later with their family.

Some pointed out that, while a Disney Cast Member may only scan one band, they do ask how many are in your party/room, and then confirm that in the system. It is possible that sometimes that procedure is not always followed, which is why the unnamed party was able to do it before.

Overall, Redditors were shocked by the brazenness of the man to ask a complete stranger to break Disney’s early access rules for them. While Disney may be understanding sometimes, they do reserve the right to remove anyone who breaks the rules. That means that, if the Guest did try to sneak the family into Early Entry, they could have been caught and asked to leave the Park. If Disney was upset enough, they could have even revoked the person’s ticket and not let them into the Parks at all.