ADR opening after park hours extension

In case it is of interest to anyone, the park hours for my week were extended last Friday and I had tons of alerts pending on MouseDining, since we had added onto our group fairly late. I made a note of when waves of alerts for different restaurants came out for the extended times (I’ll convert to eastern time):
Friday 11:30 PM - Yak and Yeti
Saturday 5 AM - Oga’s Cantina, Rainforest Cafe
Monday 3:30 PM - MK restaurants 4-7 PM range
Tuesday 12 AM - MK restaurants 6-8 PM
Tuesday 12:30 PM - Epcot after 7, seemed to slowly release gradually later times through the afternoon.

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What’s your week again (so I can gauge when to look for these myself)?

4/4-4/11. So they extended hours for us on 3/19.

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This is good intel.
Why won’t they release reasonable hours to begin with like the good old days? Especially with the vaccine rollout being opened up to the majority of adults, it doesn’t seem like covid issues will wreak too much havoc. It would be soooo much easier to plan and to get ADRs! But I will refer to this whenever they extend hours for my trip

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The hours are extended through at east 4/17

I really with they’d open FW at Epcot earlier than 11am, instead of just adding on 4 hours each night.

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Easier and more guest satisfaction to give than to take away should that become necessary for whatever reason

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Thank you for this! I am hoping park hours will be extended for our MK days and more ADRs will open up. Looks like any ADRs for MK are added a couple days after new evening park hours are announced.

I still don’t understand this strategy. They’ve been doing it since January.

Why might it become necessary to take away at this point? And wouldn’t it make sense to cut capacity and not hours if there was an issue?

Puzzling, since this has been annoying guests for months now.

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Park hours are being extended in response to the numbers of park reservations. They don’t want to have announced longer hours only for numbers of guests to drop off. As long as the numbers keep up they’ll extend.

If guest numbers drop off after Spring Break then the hours won’t be extended as much. It’s all to do with the number of guests in the parks.

Thanks, but they already have a good handle on attendance at least a month ahead? (From what it appears looking at the APR’s)

People are still able to cancel or postpone trips at relatively short notice, and are doing so.

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Probably more cautious than they need to be, and definitely frustrates the PLANNERS among the guest population. But I don’t think it frustrates the average guest in the same way. And I appreciate their conservative approach knowing that this whole pandemic has presented so many new and unexpected obstacles as it has unfolded. I think they will soon release more dates further into the future, but I think they are not hedging their bets just yet.

As to why they can’t curtail capacity instead? They have already sold those tickets and allowed guests to make their park reservations. Try rolling that back and see how people respond :wink:

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Certainly agree. I just want my personal dates to have extended hours so I can get later ADRs and decide whether we will try to take a mid-day break or power through. Hopefully they will release extended hours about a month out, I’m sure I can find a way to manage if that is the case.

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As soon as I found out the hours were extended for our trip, I went out and tried to get a resy at Oga’s for during the extended time, but Oga’s times are not reflecting the extension. I did a little research. The first day that aligns with the extended hours is two weeks plus one day out. Hoping some more reservations open up at that timeframe for us!!

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Fantastic intel! Thanks for sharing that!

Would you mind sharing what time zone you’re in? For instance, I’m wondering what time it was ET when you mentioned the 5AM Oga’s availability. Thanks!!

I converted them all to Eastern time. So it was 5 AM Eastern but 4 AM to us and DH was not amused with all the text alerts!

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Oga’s Cantina had reservations for during the extended hours on April 15 this morning at 4:45am!

I was able snag one in the 9am hour. Woot!

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