Hi Mark,
My family and I have been Walt Disney World Annual Passholders for many years. We often spend the morning at a Walt Disney World theme park and then the afternoon relaxing at our resort, knowing that we can do this as many times as we want to throughout the year.
You do need to visit Guest Services at one of the Walt Disney World theme parks or at Disney Springs in order to activate your annual passes. You should be able to link your annual passes to your
My Disney Experience account even before you have activated them. If you purchased your annual passes online, they may have already been linked to your My Disney Experience account at the time of purchase. If not, you can look on your annual pass vouchers for a 12-digit confirmation number, which is four letters followed by eight numbers. You should be able to use this number to link the vouchers to your My Disney Experience account. In either case, you will need to assign each annual pass to someone in your party. Once that is done, when you customize your MagicBands in My Disney Experience, they will already be linked to each person's annual pass. If you did not get a chance to do this and instead are picking up your MagicBands at your Disney resort, I suggest that you take them with you to when you are activating your annual passes, and the cast member should be able to help you. I spoke with a wonderful cast member at the Annual Passholder information line at (407) 560-PASS (407-560-7277), who was able to help me with information about this. If you have trouble linking your annual passes to your My Disney Experience account, I suggest giving them a call and they can help with your specific circumstances.
I hope that this information is helpful for you, Mark! Have a great time planning your magical vacation.