Good luck to everyone hoping to book this! Happy planning!
https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/special-offers/resort-stay-dine-package/
Bummer…We are going 10/22-10/29 and we were hoping for free dining. Guess the room discount will help! In better news we were up today to make our dining reservations and we are all set with those!
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Anyone else having trouble with this? I am within the dates and when I try to “change” my reservation online it takes me through the process and I select my room type and then nothing happens! 
I am currently on eternal hold, been calling DW since the phones opened at 7am EST (6 my time).
I had trouble too. Got to check out and it just wouldn’t process. I think it’s because it means the room was already snatched up by others. When I went back again, the resort wasn’t available for the deal. There’s not much out there and the resort I wanted to stay at wasn’t included.
There have been reports over in Chat of 2 1/2 hour hold times, and some people getting dropped after being on hold for most of 2 hours. I guess that values were all gone within 2 hours of the opening; one person reported all that was available was CBR (but I don’t know if that meant all of the deluxes were gone too). Personally I’m glad that (a) I have no plans to travel at that time and (b) even if I did have plans, I have no interest in the FD. It all just sounds too stressful for me… 
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Geez. I have been all over the site in the last hour looking at every combination of rooms and offers, and I only got one Stitch page. Guess I’ve been lucky. I could have booked a jillion times by now. I booked zero times. I haz a sad.
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So annoyed have been trying to get through for the past 2 hours. Went ahead and booked a new reservation for dates that qualify online, but didn’t take it off at check.
Have been waiting for a live chat operator online to respond as well.
Wow I am glad I am not doing free dining. I already have my annual pass, so I have a room only. This is where I am so happy I went with a TA. I woke up this morning to an email saying she has saved me over $200 on my room only reservation.
First time doing this and I am majorly happy.
20% discount on the Deluxe Resorts? Why, yes please! (if I’m reading that right, of course)
I’m sure my Travel Agent will get it squared away (waiting to hear back) but it looks like the system balks if you try to setup your stay from Saturday to Saturday.
I talked to someone on the WDW Chat thing and he said the only way to get it to work is to basically do 2 reservations and then tell them you have back to back reservations. Has anyone ever done that? Did you have to switch rooms or are they usually pretty good at keeping you in the same room throughout?
(Sorry, not exactly Free Dining related but wasn’t sure if I should split this off given that Free Dining and Room discounts usually were grouped together in discussion)
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One year we did a “split stay” at the Poly where we did 1 day then 7 to get the discounted room (in this case I think it was a buy 4 get 3 nights free and our first night wasn’t part of the offer). We kept the same room throughout. The only real issue we had was our 8 day park hopper was affiliated with our 7 day stay and we had to get everything corrected before heading to the parks on day 1. It was realized prior to us leaving the Poly so it was just a wait to get everything straight at the front desk as opposed to an issue at the gates of the park…
I think being aware of that prior to check-in and it’s likely easy to handle before arrival…
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Yes the hold times are ridiculous. I get it, there’s an insane call volume but waiting on hold for 2 hours is rough. I finally got through and got mine all squared away.
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Were you able to snag the room discount? Hopefully! 
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Yup! Room Discount is all squared away. Not 100% if my room requests stuck though (I need to confirm with my Agent). Saving a little over $1000 now off my original cost (woo hoo!).
It was a good thing I did a bit of my own research, though, as my Agent originally contacted me saying my stay didn’t qualify for any discounts and she seemed content to let it ride as is. But after looking on this site, developing a split-stay plan, verifying with Disney that it was viable, and then informing her of it and my openness to do such a split stay, she then was able to finagle another $300 bucks in savings. 
So she rather redeemed herself in my eyes.
Bringing the grand total of savings to be over $1300.
But the Free Dining discount, that is a whole other monster as no matter what I did(or still do) I couldn’t get anything about my trip to qualify unless I shortened my stay to only 4 days. I’m actually interested to see what I would save if I was able to get the Free Dining discount, but I can’t even run rough numbers beyond assuming every day I save about $68 (or whatever the price is for the Plan)?
I’m happy how this played out as is, though. This trip just keeps getting better and better!
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Apparently I got super lucky on Monday and didn’t realize it. 
I hadn’t been online all weekend so I didn’t know that FD was coming live until I got to work at 7:30 that morning. I jumped on the Disney website, found the dates I wanted and booked all in about 30 minutes without hassle. I guess the Pixie Dust was on my side that morning.
We scored a week long vacation at Pop Century in a standard room. Now to wait for Memorial Day when I can make my ADRs!!!
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We were able to get the room discount for our dates, but not at our original resort. We had a 2 bedroom savanna view villa at Kidani Village. When we went to book all that was available was Old Key West for 3 Royal Rooms at Port Orleans Riverside. We got rooms at Riverside and did save $3500 on our trip so although we won’t be at AKV like I always dreamed of, we will still be at another great Disney Resort!
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I’m counting down to June 1st, that’s when I can make our ADRs!! 
I lucked out (after a LONG hold time, lol) on Monday too! For some reason my TA was unable to find us anything at WL w/ free dining and our current res at POR was excluded for our dates. I had read in some comments that people were having trouble modifying some existing packages to add fd, so I called Disney myself and was able to create a new package w/ the exact dates we wanted at WL w/ fd so we had our TA cancel the original one.
I was surprised she wasn’t able to get it for us…anyone know if they only release a certain number of room availability to TAs b/c Disney would rather people book directly themselves?
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