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[king_spoon_ian]

In part three of the Tower of Terror Prize blowout, I'd like to talk about an unusual incident that happened just after the party, as in all my time of going to Disneyland, I've never experienced anything quite like this.

To give you a bit of background information about this incident, the prize we won was for two nights accommodation at the Sequoia Lodge for up to twelve (!!) people. We chose to add an extra three nights onto this, to turn our holiday into a week long break. To their immense credit, Disney UK agreed to arrange this for us, and it appeared to have been pulled off quite smoothly.

As part of the arrangement, we'd been informed to pick our park tickets up from the Guest Relations booth when we arrived. However, when we turned up, the poor chap behind the counter didn't have a clue what we were talking about. After going back and forth with him for quite a while, and explaining our situation, in the end, we managed to persuade him to have a look around for our tickets, and he phoned his manager, who must then have told him the tickets were in an envelope to his left, with my name on, in big letters.

Bit of an awkward start, but at least now, we finally had the tickets, so we headed off towards the park as normal, and entered through the turnstyles. We noticed the tickets only had three days' worth of admissions on them, but as the man hadn't said anything as we collected them (even though we'd explained the situation in detail), we presumed the printed dates were typos, and that the dates on the cards were a mistake.

Come the morning of our fourth day, we came down to the park, and entered our tickets into the machine with great trepidation - if it were going to go wrong, in our reckoning, this is when it would happen. To our surprise, it all worked fine! It looked like Disney had got everything right, and the holiday was going to go as smoothly as we could have hoped.

The day after, day five of our holiday - two days after the ticket should have expired, we come down early in the morning with the intent of making the most of the Early Magic Hours. We did this as we now knew the tickets were going to work - they'd let us into the park the day before, so we had no reason to presume they wouldn't do the same today (do you see where this is going?)

So we stroll down to the park, put our tickets in the machine, and BANG, red light. The lady behind the turnstyle looks at us in an confused manner, takes the ticket off us, and puts it in again. Again, red light. Looking at the screen, she tells us they've expired, and therefore they can't be used.

Of course, this then triggered another somewhat lost in translation discussion, as we tried to explain our situation, as we'd been assured the tickets had been extended for the duration of our holiday. She pointed to the date printed on the card, and said it had expired. We told her it had let us in the day before, which was a day after the card was meant to expire. "It couldn't have", we were told. After several back an forths, we were taken to Guest Relations, who we were promised would sort our problem. To put us in the right mood to deal with this, the cast member mumbled something to the lady behind the Guest Relations desk about us being unagreeable. Not exactly the best introduction we could have been hoping for...

However, all joking aside, from here on in, things quickly began to get a lot worse. First, we tried to explain what happened, as our seven member strong party stood around in the freezing cold (it was July, but it was damn bitter on this morning). The woman was having none of it. "It's expired" was all she said, whilst shaking her head at everything we said.

Eventually, we manage to make ourselves understood, and explain our situation, but she refuses to offer any help or explanation to what's happened. As she gets increasingly agitated with us, she says she's going to call her manager. Which we agree to.

A few minutes later, the manager arrives, but does little other than stand around looking menacing, frowning at us in a disapproving manner. At around this time, the Guest Relations lady actually makes some progress, and informs us that our tickets were actually at the hotel, and that the hotel reception had phoned us several times to let us know we had to collect them.

In actuality, this simply wasn't true. Someone had called each of our rooms, as we each had a message left on our answerphone. But when we picked up the phone, and listened to the message, all that was there was someone saying, in French "Hello. Hello, reception? Hello? Hello?" and then putting the phone down. On three separate phones.

Seemingly, this was meant to tell us that we had to go down to reception to pick up the tickets for the rest of our holiday. And, somehow (!) we hadn't quite realised that...

So then, we tried to explain that no-one had phoned us, whilst the lady behind the counter just sat there shaking her head, and saying "No, no, someone phoned you. Someone phoned you" whilst we stood there saying "No you didn't.".

This was a discussion going nowhere fast, but in the end, she offered to phone the hotel, and let us speak to them. So we phone them, and the people there are really apologetic. They say they phoned the rooms, that they do have our tickets, and that they're sorry we didn't get the message.

In the end, as the hotel agreed that it wasn't our fault, we made the case that we probably shouldn't really be expected to make the trip back to our hotel with our 80 something year old granny in tow. I asked if they could print out some more tickets here - I've read on this very forum that they've done it before - but for some reason, they refused. Finally, they agreed that someone from the hotel would bring the tickets down to us, but that didn't seem very fair on the hotel staff either - it would have much easier for everyone just to print some new tickets here.

The woman then asked us to move out of the way so as not to hold up the queue. As we were concerned that if we weren't standing by the Guest Relations office, the man from the Sequoia Lodge probably wouldn't be able to find us, we said we'd prefer to wait here. Then, the unbelievable got even more unbelievable.

She threatened to call security on us.

We said we've done nothing wrong, we're simply waiting for our tickets, which we haven't got, through no fault of our own. And she threatened to call security on us. Somewhat taken aback, we thought our only real option was to call her bluff - to explain why we needed to hang around here, and say if they did call security to drag us out of here, well, we wouldn't be going quietly, as we hadn't done anything wrong?

Thankfully, this was enough to make her see sense, and she scrabbled for the "position closed" blind, flung it down, and sat and waited for us to leave.

To make matters worse, we actually had my 80 year old gran with us on this trip, who had grown so tired of standing up, she'd had to go a find a seat to sit on. Only problem was, it was freezing, and raining. Rather than being courteous, and offering to find her a seat somewhere warm and dry whilst they dealt with our problem, the guest relations people were perfectly happy to let her sit out in the cold, wet rain. This doesn't seem very fair.

I've been going the Disneyland Paris for over ten years, and not once have I encountered something like this. Still, in the end, it's a good story to share if nothing else!

[lil-shawn]

Oh wow, i fell so sorry for ya, this story is so bad...

i don´t wanna sound racialistic but thats the problem with french peeps,
they are so harshly (not everyone!!), and make u feel not welcome...
as i always say they have to change a lot, i was a lot in WDW and the cast members,
are so friendly, always smiling, try to help, and welcome u with a warm welcome home....

why they can´t do this in paris too? why they are so harshly, when they dont wanna work for disney and don´t have fun to help guests then they have to stop to work there.

so i hope my trip in september will work nicly without any problems in the sequoia lodge....

[MinniesBestPal]

I remember when I was 4 (I think...) my grandma entered me and my brother into a disneyland contest, and I won, and we stayed at the sequioa lodge, for this winnie the pooh show or something, and we had trouble when we stayed there too. Something to do with tickets.

[SophieD]

thats so terrible! I cannot believe what they did to you! Especially your 80 year old Gran. Not telling you about the tickets is one thing but being completely disrespectable to your family is just horrid.
Have you tried to talk to anyone at Disney after your trip?
After reading your other trip reports it sounds like you had a great time in the park and this is a sad way to end your week!
I hope this hasn't discouraged you from returning back to Disney?

[Aveen2008]

Hi,

that sounds really awful and must have put a dampener on the trip. I agree they were in the wrong but you can't say the hotel didn't try to contact you, they did, which is evident because of the phone messages, not in spite of them, it's just that no one was there when they rang. However they still should have made better effort to contact you and let you know, infact the tickets should have been sorted before you went.

It isn't a good way to treat anyone, never mind prize winners!

Aveen x

[Pete's Dragon]

What I cant understand is , if they tried to ring your room and got no answer, why didnt they send someone to your room with the envelope and deliver it to you in person ??

[king_spoon_ian]

I agree they were in the wrong but you can't say the hotel didn't try to contact you, they did, which is evident because of the phone messages, not in spite of them, it's just that no one was there when they rang

I know what you mean, but they were taking issue with us, because, according to them, someone had rang our rooms to let us know to get our tickets. They were quite plain about the fact that "we were told", when we actually really weren't. I still don't understand why the message didn't tell us to go and get our tickets, actually - surely the reception should understand how to use the hotel's own answering machine.

What I cant understand is , if they tried to ring your room and got no answer, why didnt they send someone to your room with the envelope and deliver it to you in person ??

I'm not really sure either. Just slipping it under the door would have sufficed, but I guess they probably didn't do that for security reasons or something?

I remember when I was 4 (I think...) my grandma entered me and my brother into a disneyland contest, and I won, and we stayed at the sequioa lodge, for this winnie the pooh show or something, and we had trouble when we stayed there too. Something to do with tickets.

Hey, maybe it's just prize winners bad luck?

After reading your other trip reports it sounds like you had a great time in the park and this is a sad way to end your week!
I hope this hasn't discouraged you from returning back to Disney?

It definitely hasn't discouraged us - I'm a huge Disney fanatic, and I guess you've just got to take the bad with the good. Luckily, the quality of the Tower of Terror party by far overshadowed this event - I just wish the other threads were be drawing as much activity as this one!