Hi Linda! Welcome back to the Disney Parks Moms Panel! We love it when we get to help our good friends again and again to have their best vacations ever. This is a great question as allowing charging privileges is my favorite feature of MagicBands; I LOVE how freeing it is to spend a day park hoping or pool floating without worrying about a purse or where to put my credit card or not having enough cash.
When setting up your
MagicBand's purchasing power, you will need to supply a regular credit or debit card for a pre-authorization charge. Similar to a car rental process where the company swipes your credit card to ensure that you can cover any damage, yet they'll release the funds back to your card once you turn the car in, Disney's credit card 'pre-auth' total won't be charged to your card just yet. Rather this amount will be held in your resort hotel room folio (folio is hotel talk for total bill) until you have reached that pre-auth amount, or you check out and close your tab, which ever is first.
The good news is that you can use
Disney Gift Cards, cash, or prepaid branded gift cards to pay down your balance before the pre-authorized amount is officially charged to your credit card. You can go to the front desk and do this nightly, or you can swing by every few days. But once you go over that initial amount it will hit your credit or debit card, and a new pre-auth will start to accrue. You'll be told what the hold amount is at check-in when setting up your PIN number, so just keep a running tally in your head and you'll be good to go.
I hope this helped with your Walt Disney World Resort planning, Linda, and we'll see you real soon!
~Kristen