The Duck Call: DisneyMania! - Disney Photo Pass+

Disney is smart. The second you book a room with them, they send you a brochure about what you can expect on your trip, what special events are going on while you are there and any special offers you might want to take advantage of while you are there. We knew we were going at Halloween time and we purchased tickets to the Mickey's Halloween Party. This is when you have to have an extra ticket to this event, that includes trick-or-treating, special parades and fireworks and more. But I'll get to that in another post. What I want to focus on today is the DisneyPhotoPass+.

Basically, for a set price (cheaper if you purchase it at least 14 days prior to your trip) you can get a CD of all the photos park staffers take of you throughout the two parks as well as all the attraction action shot photos from such rides as Twilight Tower of Terror, Cars Racers, Space Mountain and Splash Mountain (there are a few more, too).

For this trip, I thought I would give this package a try. See how it works and determine if it would be worth purchasing for future trips. I'm happy I did. While I know the Photographers stationed around the park will take photos using your own camera, it was so much easier to have someone all set up with one do it for you and have them swipe a QR code on the back of card versus fumbling for your camera and explaining how it works, plus risking a blurry picture if the settings accidently get changed. (We've had this happen!)

When I ordered the package, within a few days I received a CD in the mail, with a voucher for our PhotoPass+ card, a code for ordering the CD after our trip and a CD full of Disneyland stock images. As soon as we got to the park the first morning, we went straight to the Photoshop to get our card. And man, do they make sure you can get your images, even if you lose the card. Between the code written on my receipt that they recommended tucking into a safe place, and taking a photo of it on my phone, they wanted to make sure we got our pictures. Staffers even suggested coming in a few times to see our photos to ensure everything was loading. Plus, the card comes on a handy lanyard so you can wear it around your neck, and has a list of all the attractions and dining locations that you can use it at.

I'll admit, we used it to our advantage, getting almost every attraction photo we could, as well as stopping and having pictures taken every time we saw a staffer set up, as long as the line was short. In all, we received 115 photos total, which meant that each photo cost me about $0.61 cents. And when I went to order my CD within 30 days of our trip, I found I could actually use the code to get digital downloads instead of the CD so I got my pictures immediately! I'd have to say I'd likely buy a PhotoPass+ package again since we don't go very often. We took pictures with our own camera too but I really liked this option. We even chose not to carry our camera around 1 day because of it. Here are the best of our PhotoPass+ photos:

Day 1