My Disney Experience and website to become the only way to make most Disney World dining reservations

Oct 12, 2019 in "MyMagic+"

Forum Forums Tweet Share Tweet Share

Posted: Saturday October 12, 2019 7:50am ET by WDWMAGIC Staff

Beginning October 13 2019, Walt Disney World will move to online-only for making most dining reservations.

My Disney Experience apps and DisneyWorld.com have been in use for making dining reservations for several years now, and Disney will be discontinuing dining reservations via the Disney Reservation Center.

Phone bookings will continue to be available for group dining of 8 guests or more however.

Disney's restaurants will be available to book exclusively online

Discuss on the Forums

Get Walt Disney World News Delivered to Your Inbox

ninjaprincesstOct 17, 2019

Yeah the same thing happened to me with Droid Depot for December everything was showing gone for out entire trip, the best i could do was 11:50 for my daughter and 9:50 for me, then all the sudden boom, we both have the earliest spots available, the same with Oga's nothing then boom tons of availability.

MrPromeyOct 17, 2019

It's hard to say. They probably also don't want to give the impression that you have to have all this stuff booked half a year in advance to have any sort of chance at getting to it because that is in itself a bad consumer experience, too when you're talking about a premium product and potentially turning high value customers away by doing that, too. If they were to offer a "notify me if this becomes available" option, that might give them the best of both if this is how they want to do it. ... Or it could have just been a problem with their system and the default in that instance was to return a response that there was no availability rather than that it couldn't connect to a database or was having trouble in some other way. Whatever the cause, if you find it frustrating, I'd contact them and say something because negative guest feedback is likely the only thing that will result in a change or fix to this kind of issue.

VacationeerOct 17, 2019

The same type of thing happened while I tried to make Droid and Lightsabre build reservations for December. I continued checking availability over the upcoming months to gauge my expectations and there'd be weeks and even whole months booked solid. I'd come back to see blocks of days within those open again with any choice available for time slots all day (including the entire day I wanted to visit that had previously been booked tight along with the surrounding days). It's frustrating enough to plan a trip without them manipulating the systems. Many people would've just given up after seeing it booked solid for weeks and weeks, surely WDW can't want that?

ninjaprincesstOct 17, 2019

I was told a couple of years ago that they don't release all the dining packages at once and I have noticed nearer to my travel dates I can almost always switch to a time that works better for us.

bunnymanOct 17, 2019

Not sure if this was covered, but I noticed in the recent past that if you were within an hour or less of your desired time you couldn't always see open reservation availabilities on the App. I.e. staying at the Yacht Club and was looking for a last minute reservation in the area, and the app showed nothing, but I was able to call the reservation number and get something.

DisneyJoeOct 17, 2019

They're not related, just happened to be released within a few days of each other.

ImperfectPixieOct 17, 2019

Thanks!

Dr.GrantSeekerOct 17, 2019

Yes you may!

ImperfectPixieOct 17, 2019

INTERESTING!!! Mind if I share your screenshots?

Dr.GrantSeekerOct 17, 2019

This could be old news, but it is new to me. Maybe this has something to do with making the MyDisneyExperience the primary way to book and modify dining reservations. I just logged onto Disney's website to view an upcoming reservation and noticed that under our guest names there is a celebrations option. Has this been an option for a while and I'm just noticing it? I don't recall seeing it the last time I logged in which was only a week or so ago. After clicking on "Add" it took me to the following page. So I guess in theory any dining reservations linked to your reservation the celebrations would link to the dining?

LittleBufordOct 16, 2019

What I mean is that the service you received from the CL concierge doesn't seem to be the same as what the dining-reservation line offers. The person you spoke with was able to access the restaurant directly, which is as good as asking at the podium yourself (though I understand this happened months in advance of your visit). The agent I spoke with, however, was simply looking at a computer screen and seeing the same options I was. It makes sense that the CL concierge would offer a higher level of service. Perhaps it's possible to have the regular dining-reservation agents call a restaurant on one's behalf, but the person I spoke with didn't offer to do so, which leads me to think that what you experienced was a CL perk not available to the rest of us. Again, others may have had better luck than I did!

LetsTalkWDWOct 16, 2019

I agree you can do that at the restaurant podium, but this was done over the phone for a reservation that was months away, (at the time)

DisneyJoeOct 16, 2019

Many locations are on OpenTable or take reservations outside of the Disney system ie Rainforest Cafe, T-Rex etc

LittleBufordOct 16, 2019

But what you had the concierge do is the equivalent of going up to the podium yourself, which can indeed get a different result. For what it's worth, I called the dining-reservation number the other day based on what was being said in this thread, and they had exactly the same times as I was finding online. That's not to say that others haven't had better luck, but for me at least, calling yielded nothing new or different.