Advance Dining Reservations

You’ve been counting down the days until your next trip to Walt Disney World. More specifically, you’ve been counting the days until it’s 90 days prior to your next trip to Walt Disney World. Why? What’s so magical about a date that’s roughly 3 months before your vacation?

As most of you probably know, that 90-day mark is when you can begin making your Advance Dining Reservations (ADRs) for table service restaurants during your stay. In fact, Disney will allow you to make reservations for up to 10 days after your arrival date so, as long as your vacation is 10 days or less, you can make your dining arrangements for your entire trip. This is typically referred to as the “90 plus 10” rule.

Author’s Note: The preceding paragraph is true as I write this. The lead-time for Advance Dining Reservations was once 180 days and there are rumors circulating that it may return there soon. I include this note to save myself embarrassment in the event they make change after I submit this article for publication but before you read it.

Do you need to make ADRs? If you desire to have at least one table service meal at Walt Disney World, the answer is “Probably.” However, if you’re like me, the thought of making dining reservations 90 days in advance is a foreign concept. At home, we rarely make dining plans more than a week in advance. Typically, we choose our restaurant just before leaving home—sometimes while we’re in the car.

So why are things so different at Walt Disney World? First, because of the ability to make reservations this early, many of your fellow guests are calling. This puts you in direct competition with everyone else to snag a meal at your favorite restaurant at the time you want. If you’re attempting to get a seating at one of the more popular venues, say breakfast at Cinderella’s Royal Table or dinner at Le Cellier, the competition will be fierce. You’ll need to be on the phone at 7:00 AM (Eastern), or on-line (after a recent change you can now make your ADRs on-line via Disney’s Web site) at 6:00 AM (Eastern) when things open up.

There’s a second and more significant factor that can complicate your planning as well—free dining! Periodically, to boost resort occupancy during slower periods, Disney World will offer packages with the Disney Dining Plan free of charge. The Dining Plan includes that one table service meal each night of a stay and guests on this plan are wise to make an Advance Dining Reservation for each day to ensure they aren’t shut out. I’m on record with my opinion that the Dining Plan is not for me but I know a lot of you out there consider it be the best thing since the first person took a knife to a slab of pumpernickel. Speaking of that, I never quite understood that expression about something being the “best thing since sliced bread.” Is sliced bread that huge an innovation? It must be because I can’t imagine what a sandwich looked like before it.

Where was I? Oh, yeah… the free Dining Plan. That will fill up the restaurants’ availability quickly, so if you’re calling inside the 90-day window, you may often find many of the more popular restaurants are completely booked. So what are you to do?

This is an example where the single best piece of advice is to plan your dining in advance. Plan, plan, and then plan some more. How do you do it? What is the best planning process to use? I’m sure there are others but my advice is to employ a three-step process:

• Step 1 – Choose your restaurants;
• Step 2 – Lay out a park touring schedule;
• Step 3 – Make your reservations.

Step 1 – Choose your restaurants

As I mentioned previously, trying to decide what you feel like eating on any particular night is difficult for many of us. Making that decision three months in advance is downright impossible. Nevertheless, it has to be done. There is a side benefit to this planning stage: as I’ve often said, the planning of a Disney World trip is just as much a part of the trip as being there. We’ll typically get together with everyone coming on the trip to discuss dining plans. For a trip with just the missus and me, we’ll do this over a quiet dinner at home. When our trip involves our kids and the extended family, it’s usually a more boisterous pizza party.

In either case, we’ll have some Disney music playing as background. Everyone brings a list of his or her favorite restaurants and we, collectively, decide which ones will be part of this trip. Your strategy may differ but our list always seems to include an old favorite or two (or three) along with a restaurant we haven’t tried yet.

You may want to have some reference material with you: a good Disney World Guide book is useful but even better would be a computer or laptop to be able to bring up restaurant menus when needed (MousePlanet’s menu archive). If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, there’s a Disney World Dining application, called WDW Dining Disney, now available via the iTunes Store. It costs only $0.99 and operates standalone—no network needed. I’ll stop short of giving it a glowing endorsement but so far I’m calling it a great value.

Here’s another interesting bit of research you may want to use: Len Testa, co-author of the “Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World” and Webmaster of TouringPlans.com has done some research and published a table on the Mousesavers site showing how many days in advance (on average) that a given restaurant filled up for various meals. Some of the results make me scratch my head, but Len is basing his calculations on empirical data so I’m sure the estimates are mathematically sound.

Now that you’ve selected your restaurants, the next step is to…

Step 2 – Lay out a park touring schedule

Before anyone gets their dander up, I’m not suggesting you lay out a minute-by-minute, Commando-style schedule of your entire trip—I would never advocate that. If, however, you expect to call in advance for dining reservations, you need to have some idea of where you’ll be at meal times. As an example, if you decide to book a dinner reservation for 7:00 PM at the Coral Reef restaurant in Epcot’s Future World, you’d better plan on spending that evening at Epcot. If it happens to be the last night Spectromagic is running at Magic Kingdom, then you have a decision to make: Do we give up Spectromagic or the meal at Coral Reef?

The smart person pulls down the park calendar and lays out a dining schedule on top of it. You’ve already selected your restaurants, right? If not, please return to Step 1, above.

Unfortunately, the process of laying out a park schedule is not as simple as it was a few years ago. Why? Disney doesn’t always release their park calendars a full 90 days early. Even when they do, quite often there are changes right up to the day in question. I know—the scoundrels!

So what do you do? While you can’t fully trust Disney’s Park Calendars, they’re the best you’ve got. If they haven’t released the calendar for your vacation month yet, you can make a leap of faith and grab an historical calendar for last year’s schedule and hope that this year’s is similar. Make sure you base it on the days of the week and not the specific dates. Disney’s park hours will usually follow a pattern based on the day of the week with no relevance to the date. Where can you find a historical theme park calendar? I’m sure there are many sources but here’s one I find useful – mainly because it copies cleanly into a spreadsheet.

When you’re finished with this step, your schedule might look something like this sample:

The first column is the day of the week and date; the next four columns contain the park hours for the four major parks. Within each day, I’ll list the park hours and the times of the parades and fireworks shows. I’ll also put an indication of which park will offer Extra Magic Hours (EMH) in the morning (AM) or evening (PM). I don’t list the water parks but you certainly can if they’re of interest. I’ll then plot a high-level touring schedule indicating which park we’ll visit each day. We typically visit a park in the morning (top entry), take a mid-day break, then head back in the afternoon or evening.

As you can see, I’ve decided to visit Magic Kingdom during the evening of Sunday, the 11th, and I can also see that’s an Extra Magic Hours evening (EMH PM). When I’m making my dining reservations, I’ll try to plan a dinner at Liberty Tree Tavern or Crystal Palace on the 11th, for a time that won’t conflict with Wishes. Simple, isn’t it?

Step 3 – Make your reservations

The last step is to book your reservations. For years, we’ve all been doing this with a phone call. Let’s have a show of hands… how many are absolutely sick of hearing “If you’ve visited Walt Disney World more than once in the past five years, press one”? You’re also subjected to being placed on hold for lengthy periods while the person you’re speaking with is waiting for a screen refresh, talking to a supervisor, etc. If you don’t have free long distance, making dining reservations may become quite expensive.

You now have a new option for making ADRs—you can now make them on-line via Disney’s own Web site. I haven’t personally used this yet but I have navigated through the screens and it seems painless.

So there you have it—a foolproof plan to ensure you can dine at Walt Disney World where you want and when you want. Now if we could get them to stop offering the Dining Plan… and go back to those same-day reservation kiosks…

That’s my opinion. What’s yours?