How to link your wife, husband or friend in My Disney Experience — and what that lets them do

How do you add someone to your Family & Friends list?

Open My Disney Experience, go to your Family & Friends list, and tap "Add a Guest". Which of the two routes you take depends entirely on whether that person keeps their own Disney account.

If they already use a Disney account for planning, you connect to them. Disney gives three ways in:

• Search for them and invite them to connect
• Look for them under "Guests You May Know"
• Connect through a shared Walt Disney World Resort hotel reservation

An invitation has to be accepted by the other person. Until they accept, the connection does not exist and you cannot plan for them.

If they do not have a Disney account, or have one but do not plan with it, you create a profile for them instead. Tap "Add a new Guest who doesn't have a Disney account" or "Add a New Guest".

Disney's terms are precise about what this is: "you are not creating a Disney account for that person; instead, you are providing information about that guest in order to add him or her to your family and friends list so that you can book activities on that person's behalf."

Choose the right route the first time. Creating a profile for a spouse who already has an account is the single commonest way people end up with the same person listed twice, and untangling it later needs that person's approval.

Why linking has to happen before you book anything

The Family & Friends list is not a social feature bolted onto the app. It is the list of people you are permitted to make plans for, and almost everything Disney sells is booked against it.

Once everyone in your travel party is on the list, Disney states you can link tickets, make park reservations, link resort hotel reservations, share photos, and plan together. Before they are on it, you can do none of those things on their behalf.

That matters most on one specific morning. Dining and Enchanting Extras open 60 days ahead at about 6:00 AM, and Lightning Lane and park reservations run on their own windows. A booking morning is the wrong time to discover that your partner's invitation is still unaccepted, or that their ticket is attached to a profile you cannot see.

Do the linking days early, not the night before. An invitation needs the other person awake and willing to tap accept, and a duplicate profile can need a phone call to Disney to resolve.

What can someone see and do once you connect?

More than most people assume, and this is the part worth reading before you accept an invitation from anyone outside your household.

Disney's My Disney Experience terms set out what a person sees once they accept your invitation. Your full name and character photo. Your entire trip itinerary — or, at your option, only the activities you have in common.

Your Disney PhotoPass photos, videos and other digital content. Your age, up to "18+". And the names, ages and character photos of the people on your own Family & Friends list, which is the one item you may keep private.

And the line almost nobody quotes. Disney's terms say family and friends "will have the ability to plan activities for you and modify activities, without notice to you."

Read that plainly: a person you are connected to can change or cancel a reservation you made, and Disney does not undertake to tell you. That is fine for a spouse. It deserves a moment's thought for an extended family group of fourteen people, or for a friend you connected to once for a shared dining booking two trips ago.

Disney does state that you can change your sharing permissions at any time, and the itinerary setting — everything versus only what you have in common — is the one worth setting deliberately rather than accepting by default.

What is a managed profile, and how do you share one?

A managed profile is a person on your list who has no account of their own — most often a child, sometimes a grandparent who does not want the app. You control that profile, and by default only you can plan for it.

That becomes a problem the moment two adults are splitting the planning. If both parents want to book for the same child, one of them has to share the child's profile with the other, and Disney has a specific mechanism for it rather than expecting you to hand over a password.

To share a managed profile: open your Family & Friends list, select "Settings" beside the other adult's name, select "Connect My Managed Profiles", choose which profiles to share, and send the invite. You can also do it at the moment you send or accept a connection request, by tapping "Connect My Managed Profiles" straight afterwards.

The practical version for a two-parent trip: connect the two adults to each other, then have whichever parent created the children's profiles share them across. Skip that second step and one parent will be locked out of booking for their own children on the 60-day morning.

Why does the same person appear twice on my list?

Duplicate profiles are common enough that Disney flags them automatically. When you are connected to multiple profiles with the same name and age, the app marks them on your Family & Friends list.

Disney lists the reasons, and all of them are ordinary: you created more than one profile for that person, you and somebody else each created one, or you created a profile for somebody who had already made their own.

Combining them loses nothing. Disney's wording is unambiguous — when two profiles are combined, all reservations, tickets, plans, purchases, MagicBands, cards, PhotoPass photos, affiliations and Family & Friends connections transfer onto one profile and nothing is lost. This is the reassurance people most need and least often get.

Two things about combining are worth knowing before you start.

It may need somebody else's approval, and you are half-frozen until you get it. If one of the profiles is managed by another person, they must approve the request. While it is pending you can still make plans for the profile you manage, but you cannot edit the name, birth date or settings of either profile.

To get that back you either cancel the request or wait for approval.

Whoever ends up managing the combined profile is in charge of it. Disney states that person handles editing the profile, adjusting settings and approving connections from then on, and that their settings carry over to the combined profile. Decide which of you that should be before you send the request, not after.

What if a ticket is linked to the wrong person?

Tickets attach to a profile, and attaching one to the wrong profile is easy to do when several look alike on a list. Disney's own troubleshooting for a linking failure covers most cases before you reach for the phone.

• Check the code length. Valid ticket codes are 12 digits. A code that will not take is very often a mistyped or wrong-format one.
• The ticket may already be linked to somebody else. Check under "Tickets & Passes" in the My Disney Experience app before assuming it is broken.
• A package ticket goes somewhere different. If the ticket came as part of a vacation package, the code belongs in the "Resort Reservation" section, not the ticket section. This one catches a lot of people, because the code looks identical.

A ticket that has not yet been used to enter a park can be matched to the right person, provided that person is already on your Family & Friends list — which is the other reason to get the list built first.

If none of that works, Disney's ticket line is (407) 934-7639. A guest under 18 needs a parent or guardian's permission to call.

How do you remove someone from your Family & Friends list?

The path differs depending on whether the person is a connection or a profile you manage, and Disney publishes both.

For a connection — someone with their own account: open your Family & Friends list, find them, select "Edit Settings", then "Remove", and confirm with "Yes, Remove".

For a guest you manage — a profile you created: select "Manage", then "Delete Profile", and confirm with "Yes, Delete Profile".

Removing a connection is reversible. If you want them back later and they have their own account, you invite them to connect again.

One case will not let you. Disney states you cannot remove guests who have active entitlements, such as Disney dining plans. If you need to remove somebody and the app will not allow it, the number for that is (407) 939-4357. The general Walt Disney World line is (407) 939-5277, open 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM Eastern.

Deleting a managed profile is the more consequential of the two, because that profile may be holding tickets and plans. If the person actually exists and is coming on the trip, combining a duplicate is almost always the right move instead of deleting one.

What order should you do all this in?

Six steps, and the order is what saves the booking morning.

1. Everyone who wants their own account creates one first, before anybody starts adding profiles for them. This is what prevents duplicates rather than curing them.

2. Connect the adults to each other and wait for the invitations to be accepted. An unaccepted invitation does nothing.

3. Create managed profiles for anyone without an account, children included. 4.

Share those managed profiles with the other adult using "Connect My Managed Profiles", so either of you can book for the children. 5. Link every ticket and resort reservation, checking each one lands on the right person, and remembering that package tickets go in the Resort Reservation section.

6. Set your sharing permissions deliberately — full itinerary or only shared activities — rather than leaving the default in place.

Finish all six before the 60-day mark, not on it. Steps 2, 4 and any duplicate-combining all depend on another human being tapping accept, and two of them can need a phone call. None of that is a thing to be doing at 6:00 AM while dining availability disappears.