Aloha Aulani

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Character Meet and Greets

Being a Disney property, Aulani brings the character experience to guests with scheduled meet and greets throughout the resort daily.  Among the characters you may see are Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, Goofy, Pluto, Chip ’n Dale, Max, Angel, Duffy, Shellie May, Old Mel, Moana, and Stitch.  Not all characters will be out every day.  Mickey and Minnie are pretty much guarantees daily, but they rotate through all the others, so ones you don’t see today may appear tomorrow.

Character meet and greets take place in multiple locations throughout the resort. 

  • The Halawai Lawn, a big open space behind the Ewa tower.
  • The front of the Ewa tower.
  • In front of the Koi Pond overlooking Makahiki and the Olelo Room.
  • Manawa Island.
  • At the entrance to the Waikolohe stream, across from the wrist band and towel station Kawele Korner Ekahi.
  • On rainy days, characters may be in and around the convention center and ball rooms.  

The schedules are only available for the current day and are available a few ways:

  • The Disney Aulani App.
  • The Daily ‘Iwa, the Aulani Resort Daily Activities Schedule, on the Disney Aulani website.
  • The digital billboard across from the front desk in the lobby, which rotates through information about the day’s events, including the list of characters and their times.  
  • The character hotline from your room (“chip”: 2447).  If you aren’t in your room you can call the Aulani Front Desk at 808-674-6200 and ask them to transfer you to the Character hot line.  This hotline plays a recording that lists out each available character along with their times and locations.  A warning though, a cast member told me they don’t typically update the hot line until 9AM, so if you call before then you may be getting yesterday’s list.  The recording goes pretty fast for the amount of writing you need to do, so my attempts at this were practically illegible.  
  • If you pass by one of the character meet and greets ask a cast member if they have a character list.  95% of the time they do, and while you can’t keep it, they’ll let you take a picture of it.  When I did this, the cast member pulled out this little pad of paper and I took a quick shot.

If there’s a character you really want to see, make sure to arrive early for their scheduled meet and greet.  Sometimes the lines can get long and they will station a cast member at the end of the line to stop anyone else from joining the line. 

Meeting the characters is restricted to hotel guests, so it’s a good idea to bring your room key with you if you aren’t wearing a pool wrist-band.  Cast members are inconsistent, but sometimes they check and will not let you meet the character if you don’t have one or the other.

Photopass photographers are there about half the time, but whether they are or not, the cast members are happy to take pictures for you using your own camera.

For better interactions with characters, consider bringing something the character can play off of such as a play figure or stuffy of themselves or other characters they interact with.  We showed a Minnie doll to Mickey and he hugged and kissed it.

If you really want to meet characters, but don’t want to wait in line, consider doing the Makahiki Character breakfast.  Typically they will have 3 characters wandering around, but the characters can change, so don’t do it to guarantee a specific character.

You may be tempted to go to the firepit storytelling to see Moana, as she frequently joins Uncle to tell the stories, but be warned that she doesn’t stick around for pictures after.