Do Park Reservations Open Up?

Walt Disney World
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Are you brining all of your kids or just some of them? This trip for me is just myself and DD18.

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This trip is myself, my mother, DS12, DD8, DD4 plus a friend and her DS12. So not the older kids, but still a large group. One on one trips are so nice! Looking forward to that someday.

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I only do that with my Thanksgiving turkey :wink:

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Well, now I have to just leave that mistake in there! LOL :rofl:

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Teehee!

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I have another trip planned in June with just me and DD21. It’s fun when we’re all together, but also fun to be with them one on one. Except DD21 is driving me crazy right now!

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It looks like they have been loading some APRs for this month and April.

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Does this mean they are increasing capacity?

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They seem to do this every once in a while but claim to be at 35%. Maybe they don’t reload all the cancellations until they mass load again?

We cancelled a couple of HS APRs last week for on-site guests (3rd week in April) and it still showed unavailable.

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Thank you, thank you! I was finally able to switch one of my HS days for next month!

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Adding to this post from last year, as I didn’t find a more recent thread with this info.

We are heading down the week after next and want to change up our APRs but the park we want is sold out. Questions:

(1) I booked our hotel and tickets separately but they are both my reservation and tickets are linked to MDE so can I assume my APRs would come from resort pool?

(2) has anyone seen availability pop up day of? We have park hoppers, so we can simply go in the afternoon but if something pops up I’d hate to have tapped into our first park and thus not be able to change our reservation.

Thanks!

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Sometimes it says sold out, but it’s really not.

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are you referring to trying to book it anyway? when I try to book it, it says there are no reservations available.

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Yes. I think Disney probably has a threshold where they say sold out because there are so few available, but if you actually go through the process to book it will let you. For example if there is mayne 50 left they go ahead and say sold out bc they don’t want to run into issues selling people tickets based on availability, yet the availability is so small they won’t be able to book by the time they make their selections.

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So to update for anyone else who many wonder this-

I tried a few different times this past week, even though it said “sold out” on the availability calendar, with no luck. I tried again this AM (calendar was still indicating sold out) and got it after refreshing twice. Needing to let go of existing reservations is certainly anxiety inducing in these circumstances, but luckily I was replacing an Epcot day, so I didn’t mind canceling to try for something else.

I was actually able to change all four of our park days (3/21-3/24) and was able to reserve MK, HS and AK on days that were marked sold out. It took refreshing 2-3 times to get them. We have a Hopper ticket, so I wasn’t too worried letting go of our morning reservation, as I knew we could hop to the park I wanted in the afternoon.

No idea why it worked this morning, but not others. Perhaps there were folks dropping APRs they had but didn’t need. But, if you are trying to change your reservations, definitely keep trying and refreshing. Hope others can be as lucky we were.

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Just another update. Today I was able to switch to a sold-out date/park (Magic Kingdom on an August date that also had Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween – which is why it was sold out).

I first cancelled our Epcot APR, then went to add the Magic Kingdom APR, and got the expected “There are no more Disney Park Pass selections available…” message. I then clicked the BACK button on the page, clicked the same date on the calendar (to help ensure it refreshed any data, not sure if that is necessary), then clicked “SELECT” again under Magic Kingdom. I kept doing this occasionally, and eventually got it.

For those that are curious: as others have mentioned, Disney may add more sometimes. But what is happening here is (again, as others have mentioned) almost certainly people changing ADRs. Let’s say Disney has 20,000 ADRs (just an example!) for a park, it’s 10 days before your desired day, and 5% of people change ADRs. That’s 1,000 people, or 100/day, or about 4/hour.

Two pieces of advice: [1] Don’t spend too much time checking the availability calendar; if a party of 5 cancels their ADRs, Disney isn’t going to reflect that in the calendar; [2] Make sure to cancel any ADRs you already have for that day, to help ensure that a few extra steps won’t cause someone else to get the ADRs. OK, a third piece: be very careful cancelling an existing ADR if you might not be able to get it back.

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