by Beth Keating
News
DisneyBizJournal.com
March 13, 2024
Anyone who has tried to make Advanced Dining Reservations (ADRs) for a family or group of friends traveling together knows the frustration of trying to find reservations at coveted restaurants at the 60 days out booking window. Even more challenging is when the clock is ticking, and your visit to Disney World is getting closer. In the past, we’ve spent literal hours trying to track down tables at various restaurants, checking first by dates, then by time of day, and when that didn’t produce results, starting the process all over again with a new restaurant or day. And all that when the booking windows open at 6 a.m., when our eyes are barely open and the caffeine hasn’t kicked in yet!
The process became a little easier a few months ago when Disney first updated the My Disney Experience (MDE) app, allowing guests to search open reservations for an entire day, showing more than one open reservation at a time, displaying a greater number of meal times at once. It made the booking simpler. But you still had to work a day at a time, and if your chosen day was already closed out, you had to begin again with another date. Trying to coordinate that with various family members’ availability was sometimes daunting.
This week, a new update to the app (and to the online version as well) went live, and it will make the gathering of dining reservations infinitely smoother. You can now look at available reservations for up to ten days at a glance.
The steps are relatively straightforward, though you do have to be paying attention to the details. The options won’t automatically pop up in front of you. You’ll have to click into the fine print under the restaurant’s name in the MDE app.
For argument’s sake, let’s check reservations at ‘Ohana at the Polynesian, a reservation we were able to get for our family reunion group of eight only after days of searching last fall. We spent a good number of hours, refreshing searches, and going online each and every morning for weeks trying to find a table for any time during the six-day visit. We finally got one, several weeks before the trip, owing to someone else’s cancellation most likely. The openings hadn’t been there at the 60-day booking window – they were already snapped up.
Here's what the same search looked like today, after the new option in the app kicked in. (We used the phone version of our app). Start at the little circle with the + sign at the bottom of your app, then select “check dining availability.” Sign in with your password, and select your party size, date, and potential dining time. At that point, a list of available restaurants will open up.
For our upcoming trip, we first plugged in a party of 8, and selected the first day of our potential trip (May 1, in this case). Then we chose “all day” as an option, and the restaurants with current availability came up. In this scenario, two seats, with 9:30 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. showed up, okay for the older adults in the group, but waaay beyond the tolerance of the kiddos in the party. We needed to search again. In the old days, that would mean going back and starting over with a different day.
But, with the new app update, you’ll notice that underneath the available times for that particular day is a small blue notation that reads “Check availability for multiple days.” There’s a miniature icon of a calendar to draw your attention there. Bingo! What a great update. Click into that, and you’ll be able to check for any additional seatings for up to ten days in a row. Once again, tell the app what time of day you are looking for, and which ten-day segment, and it will spit back any times for the dates in question. (You can also filter the options by certain parks or resorts.)
In our hypothetical situation, we received 15 different seating options over the ten-day window. What took less than 30 seconds in the new app update would have been at least an hour of plugging and chugging dates and numbers before. Unfortunately for our circumstances, all the options were still after 9:00 p.m., but that’s what you get when you are trying for one of the most popular restaurants on Disney property!
Disney isn’t known for the smoothness of its technology, so we’re sure there will still be some bugs to the new system, but for now, we’re thrilled – and we just gained back all sorts of planning hours!
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Beth Keating is a theme parks, restaurant and entertainment reporter for DisneyBizJournal.
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