Birthday’s, For Our Guest, Cinderella Castle Suite! OH MY!

This will mostly be a photo dump of the past few days that I have been missing from my past posts. January 25 was my birthday and I spent the whole day in my ATS class but then I treated myself to a day to Magic Kingdom. My wonderful training group made this day so special and magical and even my parents surprised me with beautiful flowers and balloons and treats!

So last Saturday, January 27, Rodolfo and I started our afternoon at the Polynesian Resort. We checked out the resort and ordered a Lapu Lapu which is the big, beautiful pineapple rum drink! We checked out the pools and the lobby and the different buildings I could be staying in this week. After finishing our drink, we walked over to the Grand Floridian. You get to pass right by the Wedding Pavilion and we got to see a bride and groom! We then walked around the Grand Floridian a bit and headed to my favorite lounge to grab a drink! We got the two “Grand” inspired drinks and shared them.

After finishing those, we boarded the monorail and headed to the entrance of the Magic Kingdom. We started our MK Adventure in…..ADVENTURELAND! I rode many Jungle botes including Taylor’s last one! I got to see so many old friends working including TORY! She was one of my Jungle trainers!!

We had so many good Fastpasses, but the moment we were ready to use our Seven Dwarfs Mine Train it went down. So we used our Fastpasses instead at Space Mountain and Buzz Lightyear. Oh! I forgot to mention that Dustin joined us around 6 after his shift at the Emporium.

We ended the night before the park closed so we could get back to the car before the mad rush of people also tried to leave. We just had such a magical time in MK and I even got this cute photo to celebrate my time in GR!

Yesterday, I had my final “dressy” training day called For Our Guest. It was less of a walk through of Magic Kingdom and more of a walk through of the transportation side of how our guests reach the MK. We visited Fort Wilderness, Poly, Grand Floridian, and the Contemporary! We made a stop at the TTC and I got to see a few parking familiar faces as well as stopping by the Lost and Found center at TTC. We discovered the many modes transportation that our guests use to get to us! We also got to visit City Hall and meet a few new faces within our line of business. We even got to lunch at Casey’s Corner! A rare treat for us!

 

After everything, we had heard little rumors about going to a surprise place but as hard as we tried not to get our hopes up, we couldn’t help but hope and dream to get to go to Cinderella Castle Suite. One of our own, Chelsea, threw us off the scent by telling us we *might* not get to go and *probably* won’t be able to because our group was so big. And we were all devastated. We couldn’t help but think even though it IS a magical moment, we still DREAMED of being able to experience the most magical moment of all.

AND……OUR DREAMS CAME TRUE! The last hour of our class, we DID get to visit the most magical suite of them all! So without further ado…my magical photos!

Day 4 in Plaid: Cast App Training

Day 4 in my training consisted of a pretty extensive look into My Disney Experience (MDX;the guest view) and Cast App (the CM view). A basic overview is the app where you control your itinerary including Fastpass+, hotel reservations, and wait times (as well as many other resources). Although I did learn a few things about MDX that I had no idea about, most of the interesting training took place in the Cast App side. This is just the cast member’s view of guest’s MDX, we can see modified fast passes, hotel reservations, managed magic bands, and much much more. It really helps us do our job!

I forgot to mention that I got my Plaid the other day! It fits SO perfectly and I can’t help but say how adorable I look! I’ve heard that some leaders can be pretty strict on your Disney Look in the Plaid so I’m hoping I got everything right and didn’t forget any part of it and it fits the right way.

Day 2 and 3 in Plaid: ATS and More

Day 2 at DU was another day of just a guest relations general overview. We explored the Hub much more in-depth, which is our Disney Internet, and found all the different ways we could use it as a resource! It has A LOT more information than I’ve ever given it credit for. But, it will also be home to a lot of the apps we will be using in GR that you don’t use anywhere else on property. So we got to have a crash course on the Hub and then did a fun scavenger hunt on where to find some common and not so common questions we will almost definitely run into while working in MK, we did some D-learning which is basically like interactive slideshows that do the teaching for the facilitator, and learned about one of the applications we will use to book dining reservations!

On Day 3 is where we started really getting into our hands-on training! Today and tomorrow is our ATS or Automated Ticketing System (if you haven’t noticed, Disney loves acronyms) and there is a LOT to remember. And for the most part, it’s all pretty straightforward so far, but there is just a ton of different options someone could want to do! And it’s our job to know the difference between all of them. So yeah, that’s going to take a bit of practice. It was cool to start the day off because we learned about the timeline of our ticketing! When Disneyland first opened, all of the tickets were weighted the same (so there was no A-D tickets until 1956) ad the E ticket was actually didn’t come until later on. Then when we built more parks in 1982, we introduced a multipark ticket! There was even a time when tickets included a photo of the guest to use as a security measure of not sharing tickets! It wasn’t until mid-90s that we switched to our current system (ATS) yep, we are STILL using that system! We then went into great detail of acceptable forms of payment and miscellaneous add ons to your vacation.

After our learning, we got to do “real-life” scenarios using ATS to print a paper ticket and also adding them to media like magic bands! There’s a lot to the system and i’m grateful we get two days to learn it all. There just doesn’t seem like enough time with all the different options and things that could go wrong!

But so far I am LOVING my training and the people I am training with! There are 5 of us total (Chelsea, Raevon, Katie, and Mohammed)! It’s like we were meant to train together because we all get along soooo well! I mean, there’s always that bond when you go through life milestones together and I think we were all just lucky that we have such a small group that we really get to know each other! And we are all heading to MK so it’s fun!

Day One in Plaid: Guest Relations Overview Day 1

As of today, I am officially in training for that Golden D pin and pretty Plaid vest! I have been searching the WordPress universe for months for something to prepare me for my next two weeks of training. But nobody documents their time in Guest Relations apparently. People going through the training could be super excited or not really into writing about their experience or some other reasons! So I am here to up the post quota!

So Day One: here it is.

I started off the day at 6:30am! TWO hours before my clock-in time, I had my business suit and heels laid out and my hair and makeup done and left the house by 7:40. I had my coffee in hand and I was getting SUPER excited driving to DU (Disney University). I wasn’t even tired even though I was on like 5 hours of sleep. Once I got to DU, I followed a small group of people into DU who either knew each other or made friends really fast. Either way, I walked in solo and waited behind the bffs group and they checked into the ladies handling the welcome wagon, they were checking into their day one class of Club 33!! AND they had GOLD NAMETAGS! I was sooo jealous. I want fun name tags! Anyway, back on track.

I was given my room number but still had about 15 minutes, so I decided to find the room and then maybe sneak a few pictures!

We had a small, “candle-lit dinner” size of class as my facilitator called it and we all started feeling like a GR Fam very quickly. Most of the class was a general overview of the role description and learning about a few in-depth details to our Disability Access Service (or DAS) pass and dealing with difficult situations. For the most part, I felt as if I could handle what is about to be thrown at me these next few months!

We had to read OG (operating guide) about the DAS and I would say that was the only part that made the day slow down, everything else we talked about was super interesting and I am just so excited to learn more about the role! We even got to learn a little bit about the history of the Guest Relations role and who the first GR cast member after Walt was and she has a window on DLR Mainstreet!

Tomorrow will bring even more overview of GR but more in-depth on the applications we will use as tools in our everyday tasks.

Oh and here is our GR Training Fam Photo:

Until tomorrow! TTFN, ta ta for now!