Here are some tips for snagging
difficult dining reservations for your Walt Disney World trip. Disney World trip planning is not easy, and
among some of the most difficult parts of the planning is the dining reservations. There are a lot to choose from, and for
the most popular dining reservations, are actually really competitive. But we have some tips to share with you
about how to get even the most difficult dining reservations or at least increase
your odds here are some of those. First of all, and the most surefire way
to get the most dining reservations, is to book 60 days out and stay onsite. So a lot of people say, well,
staying onsite may not be worth it. But one of the perks of staying
onsite is that you can make all your dining reservations 60 days
ahead of time, all in one sitting. So let's say you have a seven day trip and
60 days before your trip begins, you can make seven days worth of dining reservations. Offsite people have to wait until 60 days
before the day that they want to eat, so you have access to the ones towards the end
of your trip before the offsite guests do. The way that you want to do this when
you book 60 days out is to first of all list your dining reservations in order
of difficulty and not chronologically. So I think the tendency is to want
to say day one, day two, day three. But maybe day three doesn't have difficult
dining reservations on it and day four does. So you kind of wanna sort them
in the order of difficulty and not in the order of chronology. Now you might say, how do I know
which ones are the most difficult? So character meals are generally
gonna be at the top of the list. All of them. They're the most competitive
of the dining reservations. There are a few others that are
competitive as well, such as Space 220. And so those would want to be the top of
your list and the first ones that you book. While the other ones can
float more towards the bottom. And when you are online 60
days out as an onsite guest, there have been a couple different methods
over the years that we have suggested. So we used to suggest booking on the computer
with multiple tabs open in your browser. For every restaurant so that as soon as
the time opened up you could just refresh those tabs and book those reservations. However, the browsers have not been
as reliable sometimes as the app has been, so I want you to sort of
leave it open and maybe have both. Have the app on your phone and
have the browser on your computer to see which one is working best. When I recently did a round of dining
reservations, I had both open and the app was way faster, partially because it
opened up faster than the website did, and also partially because the number of
steps to complete a dining reservation were fewer in the app than through a browser. So I was able to get
through them much quicker. But I would have both of them open and
just sort of experiment to see which one is best, because one might be better if
you can't get anything through the app or the website, or if there's some issues. Technical glitches. Make sure you have the phone number
ready at 7:00 AM Eastern time. The website and the app will
open up at 6:00 AM Eastern time. The phone is available at 7:00
AM and you can call and try to get anything that was an issue. If they're sold out,
they're gonna be sold out. But if there were technical glitches,
the people on the phone may be able to help, whereas the website
or the app, were not able to. So anyway, try website, try app. And as a backup, make sure you have
the phone number handy to call. Another tip for onsite guests booking 60
days out is to put your most difficult reservations towards the end of your trip. I mentioned earlier how onsite guests can
book them all in one sitting, and that means towards the end of your trip, particularly
if it's a longer trip, fewer people are going to have access to those dates,
so your odds are gonna be much better. So let's say you want a Topolino's
character breakfast, which is one of the hardest ones to get. If that is on your list and you want to
increase your odds for getting it, put it towards the end and the chances that
you'll get it will be better because most people don't have access to that yet. When making reservations, if you are
struggling to get anything, experiment with party size, let's say you have a party of
six, you could break it down into four and two and try to get two separate reservations. For example, if you have a party of three,
you may be able to search for four and get reservations you couldn't get under
three, which doesn't make sense, I realize. But sometimes that's what happens. So just experiment with
party size and get it. You can always modify the
number later on if you need to. Because most Disney table service restaurants
allow you to add one additional person when you check in before your reservation, you could even get it for
one fewer than needed. Don't necessarily recommend that
because you know it's no guarantee, but it is usually an option. And if all else fails, then
that could be an option. So if you have a party of five and you
were able to find four that might work out. Try to get five if you can, but if
you can't, four might work for you. Another tip for getting dining
reservations is to consider calling and or using the OpenTable app to book. This particularly relates to
non Disney owned restaurants. There are a lot of those in Disney Springs. If you can't get it through the
Disney system, a lot of times calling will give you more openings or OpenTable will have openings
that you can book just like any restaurant outside of Disney World. These restaurants often will release a
certain availability to the Disney system and then have more through their own system. So you can try both angles, so don't
hesitate to pick up the phone and call or to try OpenTable for some of those. Another tip that has become very
popular in the last few years is to try a reservation finder. These are alert tools that will detect
that something has opened up that previously was unavailable, and it can
text you or email you to let you know, and then you can try to log in and snag
it as long as it is still available. There are various ones such as
Mouse Dining and Mouse Watcher. There are pros and cons of each, different
costs and different availability. I will say that Mouse Watcher has
more things that it can search for, such as tours and different kinds of
appointments in addition to dining so if you're looking for some of those. But Mouse Dining is also an option. And last but not least is don't give up. I know it is very frustrating when you're
trying to make reservations way ahead of time and you don't get exactly what
you want, but the truth is that people cancel all of the time, particularly in
the couple days leading up to a date where they realize they're not going to have time
for it, they're not interested in it, et cetera, and the reservations will drop. So never give up. Just try and try and try again, and you
might just get exactly what you want. So those are some of our tips
for getting dining reservations. Do you have any others that
you would suggest or if you had success using some other methods? Would love to hear those in the comments. Thanks for watching.
