11 May 2008

All passengers boarded, sir

In today’s Walt Disney World Resorts the Key to the World is the only key you need. It can be utilized as not only jut a room key, but for theme park admission, charging privileges, resort identification card, and even as your Disney Dining Plan card. As well, today’s transportation in and around Walt Disney World, ferries, monorails, busses, trams, etc., is complimentary to any guest to anywhere on property, regardless of whether or not they are staying on Disney property. For many years though, your Walt Disney World Identification Card was not even a room key. It did not contain park admission, dining options, or even charging (this did change before some of the more recent options, as we will see). Instead, the Identification Card was strictly used to identify you as a guest and provide all of the various means of transportation, as listed above. Here are a few family Walt Disney World ID Cards for the early 80s.

The back to both cards is identical, though I imagine they were changed shortly after October 1982 to include mention of theme park admission and EPCOT Center. Below is a card from a few years later, after EPCOT Center had opened and charging privileges had become a standard element of the ID Cards.

2 comments:

Princess Fee said...

Wow - those are fantastic, thanks Ryan! I love seeing things from the Disney that I never got to experience... Do you know when they changed to the plastic version that we have nowadays? I remember going back in the middle-late 90s and they had the plastic room cards then...

Greg said...

Good stuff Ryan. I wish I had a few items from my earlier trips. If I knew that I would turn out to be the geek that I am now, I would have insisted on holding onto things. Alas, but I now keep every little thing; even receipts.

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