I entered a search into the reservation finder today looking for a lunch spot. (I chose “Lunch” from the time drop-down list.)
I just got a hit for 5:40 PM. Now, I am as flexible as the next person, but that seems a LOT like a dinner time and not a lunch time. Not such if you are using a Mechanical Turk to do this or not. If you are, someone needs to be taken to task for essentially violating the rules.
this wastes everyone’s time since I had to log back on simply to re-start the search. Now I am worried that I am going to get the same hit again in a few hours and my search is being wasted.
At a minimum, you should follow the same definitions of “lunch” and “dinner” that Disney uses in its reservation interface.
Maybe you could post on the Beta testing site above or email reservation_finder@touringplans.com to let them know your specific issue. The reservation finder is a free service in beta testing and is actually done manually by TP staff. Could be as simple as human error.
However, this is feedback about their software. If you are going to offer “Breakfast” “Lunch” and “Dinner” choices, they should work as your users expect.
I suggest that the vast majority of users would not want their searches for a lunch time halted if the system finds a 5:40 PM dining time. That would be that if any legitimate lunch time spots opened up between the time the search was halted and the time the user logged in to re-start it, they would be missed. It also causes unnecessary work for the users since they have to keep logging in to re-start searches with faulty results. You don’t want your user to have bad results or have to do annoying and inconvenient work because of errors in yoru system, even if the software is free or freemium.
I may be wrong, but I am willing to bet that the developers would agree and appreciate this feedback about this. It appears to have happened due to either a user error or an exploitation by a Mechanical Turk contractor.
This may actually be an issue with Disney rather than the Reservation Finder. As far as I can tell, all the time selections mirror those in MDE and the WDW dining web page, so that could very well be the response that the API or Turker is getting from Disney.
I suppose you’re right. That said, I often get weird times when I use “Breakfast” “Lunch” or “Dinner” using Disney’s reservation page as well. I’ve learned not to do that. I guess a newer user would not know better.
API = Application Program Interface. This specifies how software components interact, and the WDW websites have APIs that handle the input from the reservation website and return the results. Some of the other reservation finder sites leveraged these APIs to send automated reservation requests, but I don’t know if TP is using this method.
A Turker is someone who accepts work requests through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a marketplace for tasks that are not easily done via computer. @len indicated in a post that people are responsible for the Reservation Finder requests, leading some to believe that TP is using Turk rather than the APIs.
