Anybody got a crystal ball? Or advice on how to stay sane last minute trip planning? :) Questions

Alright got some questions for the pros! (I realize a lot of these questions are impossible to answer but would love your gut/opinions anyway)

  1. When it comes to dates that are booked what generally is the likelihood that you can just keep checking and pick up a cancellation? And if you can, do you normally see that closer to the date you go or about a week out as people get COVID or have other plans pop up or do they hang on until the last possible minute and cancel the day before or what? Any gut on this?

I ask because we have a 4 day trip and got everything sorted with exception of HS on 3/18. It was available when we started but then there was a tech issue, then it wasn’t then I saw it again but then there was a different ticket issue (fixed), then saw it again but had park pass issue (fixed) so by the time I waited 3 hours on hold it was gone again and now I am not seeing it pop up anymore despite checking like a lunatic all hours of the day and night. Should I give it up? Am I wasting my time? Or are we just far enough out that people are hanging on and y’all think it will pop back up?

  1. Similar question on dining. Anyone seeing trends there? We got a couple great ones so fine either way and using the reservation finder so at least there I don’t have to constantly check and make myself crazy. If it pops up it pops up but I am curious again when people are seeing that happen. Last Thursday night overnight into Friday am a bunch of reservations suddenly popped up so I got probably a dozen alerts and even though was going for BOG it was gone but a CRT was there so snagged that. Since then - zero alerts. Zero in a week and I have 8 set. Just wondering again if we are in that in between phase where people have all planned but aren’t having to cancel yet or if people are canceling less due to the reduced capacity and additional planning required to go (ie - are only expert planning Liners going and taking all the ADRs because the people that would normally just show up and wing it are being weeded out by the park pass and ticket requirements?).

  2. Anybody got a guess as to what Remy’s opening will do to plans? As in does anyone think Remy’s opening will see people cancel HS park passes and shift to Epcot? It is the only park still available on 3/18 so just curious. While we are on Remy’s and wild guesses - anyone want to take a guess as to when it will open? I know it’s done and good to go just curious if you had to pick a date they are going to launch what date would you guess?

  3. On fully booked days (where you have much less flexibility to bounce and just go to another park) are people still skipping out on HS if they don’t get RoR BGs in the am or on those days since they don’t have the ability to just cancel and go to a different park are people staying in HS and trying for the 1pm BGs (thus making those a little harder to get than they would be on lower crowd days)?

Started planning this trip only 3.5 weeks out so feeling very off my game! Please send some pixie dust my way for sanity and cancellations! Thanks all!

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Well Disney does sometimes replenish the park reservations. I believe they just did recently refill everything. You just have to keep you eye on it. Do you have park hoppers? Of the park is not at capacity you can at least go to HS after 2. Wont help you with ROR but you still get into the park.

Keep working at the reservation finder. People cancel up to 24 hours before ao there is still hope for sure. Just have to be super quick when you get the alert. Stay positive!

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Holy RoR I just got them!!! UNREAL! Tried practically nonstop for a week and it just now went through! I had to send a screenshot to hubs to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating due to lack of sleep!

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  1. They do open up. The passes do also get replenished at times too.

  2. Dining…

I read your comment to mean you have 8 TP reservation finder alerts set. You can only have two active ones at a time. Did you reset them after a failed attempt after an alert?

Make sure to search on MDE for actual times, not just “dinner”, for example. Try both the app and website.

But for 1&2, I think that is one of the Spring Break weeks. So :crossed_fingers::crossed_fingers::crossed_fingers: for you.

  1. Between March and May is the expectation. Possibly earlier than later so you could be lucky, but that could change of course. I don’t see them giving a huge amount of notice of opening.

  2. When people have reserved multiple DHS days, I suspect they are bailing if they don’t get a BG at 7am and they can get something else. But if it’s their last, or only day, then I suspect they will stick with DHS.

On the positive side there are no reports yet of any parks being closed to park hopping, even on days when the calendar showed no park reservations. That doesn’t help with RotR though, if that is your goal.

However Spring Break will be an interesting test of the park hopping system, whether some parks will be closed for hopping.

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I have 2 alerts set in TP (and yes I reset but that hasn’t been necessary the last week because nothing has popped up but yes thank you for the reminder) and the other 6 are set through mousedining.com. The TP finder seems to be better and I like that it texts that’s huge, just wish it would let me do more than 2!

Could you please expound on why to set times vs “dinner”? I currently have them all set for lunch and dinner but happy to update. Wild guess - so that we don’t get alerts for crazy times like lunch at 345pm or dinner at 945pm?

Got the HS park passes just trying over and over and over all times of day and night. Calendar still shows unavailable but it went through and is now showing in my plans! Now I just get to stress about if we can pull off operation get BG at 6:59:59 on 3/18…

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They did “refill” by taking some of the passes reserved for APs and making those slots available to all but they didn’t do that for HS they just moved AK and Epcot slots for 3/15-17 as those dates showed blocked on the calendar. Did AK as well for 18th/19th but we’ve already got that. Seems like they want the calendar to always look like something is available. Every time a date grays out something appears but if they truly have caps then at some point I would assume this won’t be possible anymore…

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Searching in MDE for “lunch” or “dinner” can be hit or miss for some reason. No idea why, just one of it’s quirks. It’s more reliable to give a time, and it will search within an hour either side

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Was not aware thank you! Would this same advice apply when setting an alert? (I would think so just wasn’t sure how the coding was pinging Disney behind the scenes.)

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I would think so. You can just change your alerts to use a time in the middle of when you want one.

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Did exactly that thank you!

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When you set a TP alert by time it will alert you to ADR before/after that time.

The TP reservation finder is staffed by people looking for those reservations and alerting all people that have the same alert set. It is not a computer scan (Disney went after sites doing that).

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Oh wow. So those people basically get paid to do what I was doing the last week trying to nail park passes except they then have to turn around and notify. Add this to the list of jobs I could never do! I seriously haven’t slept through the night in a week! I bet I sleep like a dead person tonight!

I wish the TP dining finder had an option on Oga’s to put anytime as in any time during park hours. Since it is not a traditional lunch/dinner place and we would likely just be getting drinks or maybe a snack really going for the experience I would go anytime of day or night. Right now I have two alerts set for lunch and dinner but it would be nice to have a single alert that was basically anytime that date…

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I still think setting the alert for “dinner” rather than 7pm will result in a search for dinner though on MDE. The person who picks up that alert to search on won’t know whether dinner means 5pm or 8pm.

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Well in some cases we want to put dinner because its a hard to get res so we would take it for dinner at anytime (4pm-8pm) just to get one but others its more we need to eat between 1130-1pm to make our plan work and we’ve got other options so if we get it we get it… I am still mindblown because I figured the alerts were all automation and now you opened the curtain so I will be praying for these people!

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I’m doing the same thing with ADRs as we recently added a 6th and 7th person to our April trip week after Easter. Reservations for 7? Hilarious request! I have the paid subscription for MouseDining and have 100 alerts going right now for groups of 7 and 2, 4 and 5 to try to add on to my previous 60-day ADRs or just cobble something together. And I’m getting only a couple alerts a day, as well as searching myself several times a day and finding very little. Just isn’t much open yet, but I think the week before and week of more will open up. I know I’m sitting on 3-4 times more ADRs than I will use, but I need to see which ones I can get a corresponding additional 2 for or replace with a 7 before I start cancelling.
I’ve found that when searching sometimes a search for a time or lunch/dinner draws a blank, but if you shift the time by 1/2 hour or move from meal period to a time you suddenly get results. It’s like the system skips or something.

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Yep totally feel you. If you’d like I am happy to update this thread over the next 10 days as we get closer to our trip and let you know what action I saw when. Could be a total coincidence but there were a chunk of reservations that popped up about 5am Friday 2/26 for the dates I was tracking (3-18 to 3-20 at that time) even with only 8 alerts set (and many for same places like 2 - one for lunch and one for dinner at same place) I saw BOG, CRT, Yak and Yeti, Homecomin’, etc. I was asleep so by time I could get vertical and see straight a lot were gone but I got a couple of those and am hoping that as things get closer maybe more will pop up. We are party of 5 so I am just searching that although you have a great point - I could at least set alerts for Oga’d for a party of 2-3 and at least get some of us in. Anyone have any luck with getting a reservation for 3 and showing up and saying you have 5? Is that a no no or does it depend on the place? (Thinking of you as well @threeprincessesfourprinces while asking this - would save you a ton of time since you just added a couple folks to an existing trip and have reservations…)

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Yes, I am not disagreeing with the specific time but if you set it for 6 it will still look for a range of all times before/after.

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60 minutes each way right? At least that’s what it says on site. So 6pm alert would search 5pm-7pm…

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Yes and everything in between. If I want an ADR for no later than 6:30 I might set it for 5:30 instead of 6.

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Yep all over it thank you!

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