WDW may get rid of the No Expiration option on Magic Your Way tickets

A few weeks ago when Walt Disney World rolled out their new web site (at least to North American U.S. visitors), people noticed that when purchasing Magic Your Way tickets online, there was no longer a No Expiration option. It was first thought to be an oversight or bug in the new site – but when guests called, they were told that the no Expiration option would only be available on the phone or in person, not on the web site.

I’ve now recently heard that signage at WDW is being changed and the No Expiration option is not listed at all. You need to explicitly ask for it.

This is leading to speculation that they may in fact be removing the option altogether in the near future. I have no confirmation of this currently.

Note that No Expiration tickets already purchased will still be honored no matter what changes may occur.

There could be a variety of reasons for at least bringing No Expiration under cover at least. I can think of a couple (I have no info that these reasons are in fact the cause, only my speculation):

First, the option confused a LOT of guests, and they may want to cut down on the confusion by preventing people from getting it without thinking it through. It is rather expensive, and even if you used some days on the ticket and then wanted to add the No Expiration option to save the leftover days, you had to pay for the entire length of the ticket, not just the unused days. Also, you couldn’t then add days down the road – the ticket could not be modified after 14 days of first use – so adding No Expiration to save one day on a 7-day ticket and then hoping to add 3 more days on a later trip didn’t work either.

In a lot of cases as well, it doesn’t make much sense and could cost you more if you didn’t do the math. Saving three days off a 10-day ticket, and then needing to buy another ticket because your next trip needs 4 days ends up costing you more than if you just got a 7-day ticket. You had to fit two or more complete trips within the 10-day maximum for the ticket, or it didn’t make sense. Although some people would do what I call “chaining” the tickets – keep getting 10-day No Expiration tickets over and over, which is fine. Although if you could get more than 12 days or so within a calendar year, an Annual Pass was often the better deal.

Another possibility is that with the way the new MyMagic+ system appears to be headed, having these No Expiration tickets presents complications in to how the tickets themselves might be managed, when guests can reserve FastPass+ experiences, etc. So they might want to get rid of the option to solve the issues. How they’ll handle current tickets I don’t know. But a lot of changes are happening very rapidly to bring out MyMagic+, so the timing is interesting.

More info when we have it.