A New Character Meet & Greet System at Disneyland Paris Is Launching Soon

Meeting the characters is the best part of visiting any Disney park, including Disneyland Paris. After all, it’s not Disneyland Paris without Mickey Mouse! The boys love to meet the characters, counting how many they see during their trip (something we love even more than counting rides)

If you love character meets too then you’ll be pleased to know that there’s a new way to meet characters in Disneyland Paris coming soon.

From 18th April 2025, the way that you meet characters in Disneyland Paris is changing. Here’s everything that you need to know:

A New Way To Meet Characters In Disneyland Paris

The Disneyland Paris park team have just announced that you will no longer need to stand in long queues to meet SOME of the characters in the Disneyland Paris parks. This won’t apply to all of the characters to start with, and the random pop-up meets across the park will still have the same long queues they’ve always had.

But from the 18th April you will need a virtual queue reservation to meet Stitch at Videopolis (a limited edition meet as part of the Disney Music Festival) and then in the weeks to follow it will apply to the following characters too:

• Mickey Mouse at the ‘Meet Mickey Mouse’ meet and greet spot
• Olaf at the Animation Celebration spot
• One of the Disney Princesses (you don’t get to choose which one) at the Princess Pavillion
• A Star Wars character (you won’t get to choose which one) at the Starport.

Planning a trip to Disneyland Paris? You can read my full one day itinerary here.

How Will The New Disneyland Paris Character Meets Work?

The new meet and greets will use a virtual queue system. To access this you will need to use the Disneyland Paris app, and then you will need to link your park ticket to your account. If you don’t have a park ticket then you can also link your annual pass or your hotel package details to your account: you’ll need this to make a reservation.

Once you have your ticket information in the app you can reserve a time slot to meet a character as soon as you’re in the park and your ticket has been scanned at the park entrance. You CAN’T join the virtual character queue if you’re not in the park.

Once you join the virtual queue, you’ll get notifications from the app on where you are in the queue and when your time to meet the characters is approaching.

At this point you can head to the specific meet and greet spot, and get that all-important photograph and autograph with the character without any long queues. The idea is that the waiting time for each character will be minimal using this new system.

Queues are a reality of all theme parks! Here are my top ten tips for visiting Disneyland Paris in August.

What If You Don’t Have A Smartphone?

If you don’t have a smartphone (or if your smartphone isn’t working in Paris for some reason) then you can request a time slot from the cast member at each meet and greet spot.

However Disney haven’t released any details about how this will work, and getting a meet and greet this way is “subject to availability”. You can get free wifi in the Disneyland Paris Parks, so I would recommend trying to have smartphone access to make this as smooth as possible.

How Many Characters Can You Meet?

You can reserve up to 5 meet and greet experiences in any one day. But this is subject to availability. Although Disney haven’t said so, I imagine that during peak periods these slots will go very quickly, so book your preferred character first, and then see how many of your secondary characters you can get slots for before they all run out!

Make this the first thing you do as soon as you scan your tickets into the park!

You can’t book the same character more than once in a day. Each guest can meet each character only once with each days entry to the park, so if you want certain family photo combinations, book everyone’s tickets for the character at the same time.

Everyone in your party will need a reservation ticket, including children with park entry tickets. The only exception to this is children under 3, who don’t need park tickets OR their own reservation tickets to meet the characters.

How Will This Impact Disabled Guests?

All guests, including guests with disabilities, will have to use the virtual queue reservation system to meet these characters. This is because there will no longer be a standard, physical queue for these character meets.

In real terms this probably means that guests with disabilities will meet fewer characters under this new system than they did before. But the positive is that their waiting time may well be reduced.

What do you think of this new system? Do you think it will make meeting characters in Disneyland Paris easier or harder? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Comment below, or join me on instagram @thatmumtravel to continue the conversation!

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