Last week I was lucky enough to be able to grab a spot for the Epcot V.I.Passholder night. I am going to go through the goods and bads of the event as well as how I think you can get the most out of the time allowed.
Let’s just jump right into it.
Check in for the event started at 4PM and went until 9:30PM. So you have plenty of time to get there and don’t have to rush. After event check in it’s basically like a normal Epcot experience. You still have the normal park guests their until about 9:30. Luckily because these are on weeknights Epcot isn’t really busy, even with Food & Wine happening.
When I got into the park they handed me a little leaflet with the information about what food options, attractions and shops would be open during the event.
Food Options:
Fountain View
Sunshine Season Terrace
Refreshment Port
Rose & Crown Pub
Select Food & Wine Booths:
Craft Drafts at the Festival Center
The Festival Center Wine Shop
The Almond Orchard
New Zealand
Australia
Hawai’i
Islands of the Caribbean
Greece
Thialand
Mexico
France
Ireland
Canada
Attractions:
I was going to list the attractions but then as I was typing them all out I realized it’s basically everything except for the circle vision theaters. So there you go!
Merchandise:
Same thing goes for this one. All the main shops were open except for the shops inside of the pavilions around the showcase.
The only areas open during the event were the whole front of the park and then the front half of World Showcase. So from the Norway pavilion to France pavilion. It’s important to note that only Frozen and the beer cart were open in Norway. The bakery and booth were both closed.
So now that I gave you the basics, I wanted to share just my thoughts on the event. It was cool, but it was basically just extra magic hours for Passholders. It wasn’t anything really all that special. I didn’t really expect it to be more than that to be honest. The only difference was they had a dance party and special Passholder cupcake for the event, which was just a normal looking cupcake with the Passholder logo on top of the icing.
The event starts at 9PM. So does Illuminations. So you will still have all of the normal park guests watching Illuminations in the park until about 9:30ish. We decided to watch Illuminations but I would assume they stopped letting normal park guests on the rides pre 9 o’clock and only let those with the Passholder wristband enter the queues.
Which brings me to my next point, because we watched Illuminations, we lost about 30-40 min of the time we had to get on attractions. Our first stop was to Frozen but it had a 30 min. wait, so we decided to head somewhere else. The thing about these events is, nothing is special so I didn’t really mind missing Frozen since I can just grab a FastPass another day.
The rest of the rides had zero wait. We walked onto the Grand Fiesta Tour, Soarin and Test Track all within maybe 40 min. And I am sure if we managed to make it back to Frozen it wouldn’t have had a wait either.
Overall it was fun and If you go with the right people you can really just hangout and have a great time, which I did and we had a great time lol. It’s nice to see these extra events happing for Passholders and I hope they keep having them in the future!
jessamack.com 