Hey folks, it's Jacqueline for Pixie Dust PhD. When you're planning your trip to
Walt Disney World you'll need to consider your dining plans pretty far in advance. So
today we'll go over the basics of Advanced Dining Reservations at Walt
Disney World.
Advance Dining Reservations, or ADRs, only apply to a sit-down meal
at Walt Disney World. So what you would think of as a normal
restaurant where you go and a waiter or waitress seats you, they take your order,
they bring your food, and they bring you the check when you ask for it. In Walt
Disney World this is called a "table service meal" or "table service dining". So
for any quick service or counter service meals at Walt Disney World, which outside
of all Disney World is basically just fast food or fast casual food, you don't
need to worry about getting Advanced Dining Reservations for those locations.
So when thinking about ADRs you first need to think about sit-down meals.
Do you and your party want to do any sit-down meals? Would you prefer to do
one or more than one per day? If you and your party decide you want to have one
or more table service restaurant experiences it's in your best interest
to make Advance Dining Reservations,
which requires planning pretty far in advance.
Walt Disney World has loads and loads of table service dining options. We're not
going to go over those in the video today, but you should definitely explore
them with your party to decide what you might be interested in. You can do this
by going to the Walt Disney World website and then under the "Things to Do"
tab you'll see "Dining" and then "Make a Reservation". This will automatically
populate a list in alphabetical order of table service experiences available to
you. It's a very long list and the amount of choices can quite frankly be
overwhelming, so I suggest you narrow it down. The default is to show you
everything, but instead of looking at all resorts and all parks you can narrow it
down to just one. For example if you know you and your party you want to have a
sit-down meal while you're at the Magic Kingdom go ahead and select that Magic
Kingdom checkbox to narrow your options. Then just hash it out with your party.
Where are you guys interested in dining? Note that when I make these plans
personally I always like to have an A Team
and a B Team. Meaning my A Team is the dining places that I really want to go to,
everyone in our party agrees on, this is definitely what we want to do. But in
case we can't get those reservations because it's too popular or because the
timing doesn't work out with whatever our FastPasses end up being, the B Team are
other restaurants that we're also interested in doing and would be plenty
happy with. Because you have to plan your dining options so far in advance of your
vacation I personally find it relatively calming to have both an A Team and a B Team ready to go.
Reservations begin 180 days in advance
of your arrival window. You heard that right: 180 days, so essentially six months.
If you've already booked your hotel accommodations and they are on site and
you've connected that reservation to your My Disney Experience account, then
180 days prior to your arrival date you'll be able to book Advance Dining
Reservations for the first 10 days of your vacation starting at 6 a.m.
Walt Disney World Time or Eastern Time. For example, if your arrival day is
December 1st, 180 days before that is June 4th. Let's say you're staying from
December 1st to December 8th. At June 4th at 6 a.m. Walt Disney World time you
will then be able to make Advance Dining Reservations for your entire trip,
December 1st through December 8th. In this case I would highly suggest that
you book your Advance Dining Reservations for the restaurants that
matter most to you. For example, if it is very important that
you get to go to Chef Mickey's on the fifth day of your trip book that first
even though sequentially it doesn't come first in your trip.
Once you've booked your must do restaurants then go ahead and fill in
the rest of your vacation with your other Advance Dining Reservations.
If you're staying in off-site accommodations or 180 days in advance
you simply haven't booked those accommodations yet, you can definitely
still book your ADRs, you just won't get the benefit of the 10-day extended
window. Meaning if your arrival day is December 1st then on June 4th at
6 a.m. Walt Disney World time you will be able to book dining reservations for
December 1st only. And then when you want to book December 2nd dining you will
have to wake up the next day on June 5th at 6 a.m. Walt Disney World time to book
dining for that day, and so on and so forth through the rest of your vacation.
Advance Dining Reservations do require a credit card guarantee. This means that if
you are a complete no-show to your reservation. or if you don't change
cancel, or modify your reservation 24 hours beforehand Disney has the right to
charge you $10 per person on that reservation. To expedite the
process of booking your ADRs at your 180 day window I highly suggest you add a
credit card to your My Disney Experience account, that way you don't
have to worry about entering your credit card information that morning during
booking. And note that while vast majority of Walt Disney World table
service restaurants only require this credit card guarantee, where there's no
actual charge put on your credit card, there are a few exceptions that you will
need to pay full upfront. For example, a reservation at Skipper Canteen in the
Magic Kingdom only requires this credit card guarantee, so you won't be charged
anything on the day that you're actually booking the reservation, you would only
be charged if you fail to show up or change your reservation 24 hours in
advance. In contrast at the Magic Kingdom, Cinderella's Royal Table requires you to
pay in full upfront. So on that day you're booking 180 days in advance your credit
card will be charged the full amount for all of your guests. If this is a
budgetary concern for you to be paying that money upfront 6 months in advance,
definitely be sure to consult the Walt Disney World website at the various
dining locations you're looking at to see if they require payment in full up
front. Note that even though credit card guarantees are required, there's actually
no limit on the amount of ADRs you can make. The limit is simply that they can't
be too close together in time. For example, I can't book a Skipper Canteen
dinner at 4:30 and also a Liberty Tree Tavern dinner at 5:30. The ADR
reservation system online or through the app simply just won't let that happen,
and you'll have to cancel one of them in order to book the other. Typically I
found this limit is a two hour window, meaning that if I have a 4:00 p.m.
reservation I have had luck making a 6 p.m. reservation without having to
cancel one or the other. But anything less than 2 hours is definitely not
allowed, I've never seen that work. A great workaround to this limit is by
including other party guests to help with ADR bookings. For example, in my
last trip to Walt Disney World we had 4 people total and myself and my partner
dealt with booking the ADRs. At Epcot there are so many amazing choices
for table service meals, and nothing in particular screamed a must do for our
party for this particular vacation. So for dinner we ended up booking
overlapping reservations. I made a reservation at Teppan Edo for 4 guests at
7:30 p.m. and of course I was specified on this reservation since I'm the
one who booked it, but I left the other guests vague as just guests two, three,
and four with a little blank Mickey head instead of specifying the people in my
party. Now since my partner wasn't specified in my party in my Teppan Edo reservation,
my partner was able to go ahead and then make a reservation at the
same time at another restaurant; in this case it was at Via Napoli. Having
separate people in your party book dining reservations is a great way to
get around the limit of not being able to book reservations within two hours of
each other. Just be sure not to specify who in your party the additional guests
are and everyone frankly could make overlapping reservations. And then as
your trip details emerge, for example after your FastPasses are booked and
you have a better sense of the timing of your day, be sure to cancel the
reservations that you don't want anymore. If you forget to cancel any of your
reservations note that that credit card guarantee is there for a reason
and it's very likely that you'll face a monetary penalty, which nobody wants. So
basically once you're finalizing your trip just be sure to go ahead and cancel
any Advance Dining Reservations that you don't plan on using. Having multiple
people on the Walt Disney World system when bookings open at 6:00 a.m. is also
a great way to try to maximize your chances to get whatever reservation that
you covet the most. So if your party is willing to help out it's a great way to
not only make your vacation the best it can possibly be but also build
camaraderie. It's really fun after all the chaos of booking to get on the phone
or video chat with the rest of your party and let each other know hopefully
what successes you've had. I remember in my last trip one of my friends was able to
book Oga's Cantina for a prime nighttime slot for all of us and we were just
elated. Do you have questions about Advance Dining Reservations? Or better
yet if you have tips on how to handle ADRs 180 days in advance of your vacation
be sure to leave those in the comments below for other people to check out. If
you found this video helpful I hope you consider subscribing to the channel and
leaving a like. See you real soon at Pixie Dust PhD!