When buying gift cards, always remember: Look carefully at what you are buying and make sure you are getting exactly what you want.
One Illinois family learned this the hard way. In a viral TikTok video, Andrea Coston details how her family has been waiting for years to go on a Walt Disney World Vacation.
“In 2020, my parents were planning a big family trip, but the pandemic happened,” the video’s captions read. “We finally planned it for this Christmas. All 16 of my family members are going. To save some money, my parents bought 10k of Disney gift cards to purchase our tickets and restaurant reservations.”
Can you guess where this is going?
This poor family bought $10,000 worth of Disney+ gift cards — gift cards that are specifically and only good for the Disney+ streaming service. They have no value at Walt Disney World or anywhere else in the physical world; they can only be used to subscribe to Disney+.
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At the going rate of $7.99 for a month of Disney+ with ads, with $10,000 worth of Disney+ gift cards, a family could comfortably subscribe to the service for the next 104 years. Like they’ll never have to buy a Blu-ray of The Little Mermaid ever again — but riding the Little Mermaid attraction at the Magic Kingdom is now in jeopardy.
In fact, the video goes on to say “We need help. We leave in 6 days and the parks are selling out of tickets because it’s Christmas.”
(I don’t know why you would wait until the week before your 16-person family trip to Orlando to book tickets to Walt Disney World, but hey, I also wouldn’t buy $10,000 worth of gift cards to “save money,” so what do I know?)
Hopefully someone at the Disney company takes pity on these folks and sorts it all out for them. (Disney customer service will probably let you exchange $10,000 in gift cards over the phone, right?) Let this be a lesson to the rest of you: Read the fine print. (And make your Disney reservations well in advance.)
Don’t have $10,000 in Disney+ gift cards? Sign up here.
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