Walt Disney World Advance Dining Reservations (ADRs)

So you're headed to the Walt Disney World Resort and you want to make dining reservations in advance...

...Good!  Making advanced dining reservations (ADRs) is not only a time saver for you, but pretty much a necessity.  You can search the internet all day long and find posts from people about the difficulty they had obtaining a dining reservation and how "cut throat" it can be to get the "big ones" (i.e. Cinderella Castle & Be Our Guest).

In planning for my up coming Christmas vacation to the Walt Disney World Resort, like most people, I was a little apprehensive about getting the dining reservations we wanted.  But through some intense planning and booking strategies, I am happy to say I was able to get every single reservation for the date and time we wanted.  So...it is possible.

How did I do it?

Planning

ADRs open up to guests staying at a Disney onsite resort at 6am 180 days before the start of your vacation.  I recommend backing up from that date a good solid month to sit down with your travel party to discuss your dining "wishes."  Plan out each day to include breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Decide which restaurants you want to eat at and at what times.  We put together a spreadsheet showing all of our choices.

Next decide what reservations you absolutely can not live without and mark them as such.

I then did a little research to find out which of our restaurants are "hot" items and tend to get snatched up quick.  Then I labeled those as such.

I then combined those two lists together and came up with our priority booking order.  The priority booking order is important because that is the order in which you're going to book your reservations on the big day.
Note:  It is always a good idea to have a back-up in place in case you can't get what you wanted.

Booking

When the big day arrived, I made sure I woke up and logged into my MyDisney Experience account and was on the booking screen for our first restaurant reservation.  Promptly at 6am, I refreshed my browser and selected my dates and time and went through the booking process.
Note:  Make sure you already have your credit card stored in your account to speed up the process.
Tip:  Log in to the system a few days before and do a couple trial runs on booking dining reservations to familiarize yourself with the system.  You can always cancel those reservations afterwards.

Now you might be wondering what our strategy was to get 8:00am breakfast at Cinderella's Royal Table and lunch at Be Our Guest.  I took our priority list and split it up among the adults that were willing to get up and help with the early morning reservations.  Everyone had a priority 1 through 5 that they were responsible for.  So we were all logged in and booking at the same time.  It was amazing how efficient this process was and how well it worked.

A couple people without accounts of their own used my account which was fine since the odds of us submitting a request at the same exact time were slim.  The others used their accounts since we all had the same booking window.

We also made a rule that even if you didn't get the exact time we wanted, to go ahead and secure the closets time you can get and we'll modify it later.  That way we didn't get bogged down.  After each person finished we went back in to the reservations we needed to modify and searched for better times which seemed to pop up like magic.  We secured those and kept on moving.  We kept logging in and checking for a couple stragglers during the next few days and were able to get those modified.

We ran across a few restaurants, that no matter how much we tried, we couldn't find a reservation.  Turns out most of these were restaurants not actually owned by Disney.  These restaurants only release a few reservations to Disney while holding back the rest for direct callers.  A few restaurants inside the parks and all restaurants at Disney Springs fit this description.  So we looked up their number and called and got those reservations secured.

It took about a full week, but now we're sitting back with about 8 of the most hard to get reservations at the Resort.

Remember, there are other people and families whose vacations come before yours and that have overlapping days with your vacation and they get to book their reservations before you because their 180 days starts before yours.  That is why a lot of these reservations are extremely hard to get.  You have a better chance of getting those reservations at the end of your vacation more than you are the ones up front.

When your booking window opens, you're able to book up to 10 days in the future.  For example, if your 10 day vacation starts December 1...when your window opens on June 4 you can book for your entire vacation, not just the first day.  However if your vacation is only for 7 days, you can only book for 7 days in the future.

Also remember there are quick service restaurants out there that do not take nor require reservations.  So you may want to plan on eating at a few of those if you're unable to secure what you're looking for at the table service locations.

And it is worth noting that you DO NOT need a Disney dining plan to book your reservations. If you later decide you need or want one, you can always have it added to your vacation reservation.

Note: All table service restaurant reservations require a credit card hold.  You card is not charged unless you're a no show.  The prevailing rate for no shows is $10 per person on the reservation.  If you're going to cancel, make sure it is at least 24 hours in advance to avoid this charge.

You will see people canceling their reservations 24-48 hours before their reservation time to avoid the no show fee if they have later decided not to dine there.  That is good news to you if you were unable to get one of your restaurant selections.  There may be a few slots to open up around 1-2 days before.  So keep checking online and on the app even after your vacation starts if you just can't live without that particular reservation.

Tip:  Don't use the app when doing your initial bookings.  The system takes to long and, in our opinion, is not that reliable, when you're banking your entire vacation on it.  It is better to use the online version for the initial booking and the mobile app for changes or modifications while on vacation.

You can download the MyDisney Experience mobile app here for Apple users and here for Android users.

I hope this has given you confidence that obtaining hard-to-get ADRs is possible.

Contact us with any questions you may have.  Happy booking!!