Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Disney Dining Adventures

So today was THE DAY.

Today was the 180 day mark for making Advance Dining Reservations for our Thanksgiving week vacation at Walt Disney World Resort.

For those of you who are wondering what the heck I'm talking about...if you want to eat at a "table service" (sit down) restaurant during your Disney vacation you better call at 180 days out to make a reservation or you'll go hungry.

Or something like that.

So being the good Disney planner that I am...I was up at 5 a.m. 5:45 a.m. ready to attempt to use the online booking system to make ADRs for our party of 10.

Notice that I said "attempt" -- this is because the online reservation system is a hot failure. I spent an hour online trying to book ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING and I got nowhere. Every time I found something and tried to choose that time frame the website did nothing.

And so...I had to call the phone reservation system at 7 a.m. - and sit on hold for 20 minutes.

Thankfully the agent I finally spoke with was Disney-smart and very helpful and we managed to find good dining options and times for the Chaos Party of 10 vacation.

We didn't get everything we wanted. 'Ohana was booked until our last day when I managed to get an early dinner. Thanksgiving dinner will be at Chef Mickey's (instead of Whispering Canyon Cafe) because that's all I could get. There was NO HOPE of getting into Be Our Guest so I said "screw it."

All in all it was a less-than-magical morning but at least it's done and we have reservations.

Now to wait until September to make our FastPass+ reservations - I'm sure that'll be just as insane.