If you’ve been to Disneyland or Walt Disney World in the last few years, even before the global pandemic made big changes, then you know that the parks have become… complicated. It can take a lot of work to plan a Disney Parks vacation, and that work isn’t always over once your trip starts. One of the more difficult things to deal with at both parks is the dining reservation system. I'm personally not a fan, but a very small change is going to be taking place in the coming days that is going to fix one of my biggest Disney Parks frustrations: finding available reservations.
An upgrade coming to both the websites and apps for Disneyland and Disney World, as reported by Scott Gustin will result in guests seeing all available reservations for a given location when searching for a time. So if you try to book dinner at Disneyland’s Blue Bayou but the evening is booked, you’ll see all the lunch availability that might be there. If your goal is to eat at a certain place, and you’re flexible as to the time, this will be a huge help.
Why Getting Disney Parks Dining Reservations Was Such A Pain
If you’re not familiar with the current system, it’s probably hard to see why this is a big deal, because you’d think any reservation-taking system worth anything would already do this. You would be right, but the Disney Parks system does not. In the current system, you have the ability to search by a given time that you want to dine, and then you’ll see a list of locations that have reservations at that time, or within a few minutes of it. But it won’t automatically show you all availability. So if you’re more flexible in when you can book, you’ll find yourself clicking every single window of time to see if something pops up. In my opinion, it’s pretty awful.
Dining at Disneyland and Disney World is one of my favorite things. Anytime I’m at the parks I try to take at least one evening to treat myself to a special dinner, but doing that is tough because making reservations on the current system is a pain. It quite simply doesn’t work right a lot of the time.
While there are options to search for times based on breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that are meant to give you wider availability, the system has never functioned perfectly. More than once I have found a late dinner reservation at Disneyland's flagship Grand Californian Hotel to dine at the wonderful Napa Rose that only showed up when I searched for a time after the restaurant was closed, but didn’t appear when I searched for “dinner.”
Other Recent Changes To Dining And Reservations At Disneyland
This change in reservation systems at Disneyland happens to coincide with the expansion of alcohol sales at the park. Starting in September all table service restaurants at Disneyland park will sell alcohol. It's a significant change for the park that, until 2019 was completely dry unless you had access to Disneyland's exclusive Club 33
This update follows another significant change to the Disney dining reservation system a few months ago. Previously, guests who did not cancel a reservation within 24 hours had to pay a small penalty. Now the cancellation deadline is only two hours before the reservation, which allows guests to have significantly more flexibility if their plans change while they're at the parks.
It’s great to see these small tweaks take place because if there is one area where Disney Parks need help in general, it’s the online space. The apps and websites are not user friendly and they have a tendency to break. When Disneyland Resort tried to sell tickets to this year’s Oogie Boogie Bash After Hours party last month, the system completely crashed and sales had to be stopped and then restarted more than a week later. Hopefully we’ll see these fixes and updates continue until Disney Parks' digital platforms are in a state befitting the company that is the leader in the theme park space.
