I have two breakfast reservations (mainly to get into the park early).
BOG at MK at 8:05am (park opens at 8am with early magic hours starting at 8am)
The Garden Grill at 8:45am at EP (park opens at 9am)
- When should we be in line to enter for our reservations?
- When will these realistically get us in the parks?
- I did a last minute reservation for the Grill at EP for just me and my daughter because Anna and Elsa are high on her list if not at the top and I don’t want to wait for hours and she is 4 years old. Could we be out of the Grill at EP quickly if needed or since it is sit down buffet would we be stuck for a bit?
Thanks
There’s a special line for pre-park open ADR’s so you’ll give them a name & they’ll check you have a reservation and let you in.
Garden Grill is served family style (basically they bring you the food - you don’t get up to get it) and service is pretty good. If you want to see all the characters will be the bigger time issue. I’d suggest showing up early for your 8:45 and hope they can seat you then though. At our breakfast there in December, there were lots of empty seats so I’d presume they could accommodate an early seating.
But if your main goal is to get to Anna & Elsa early, an 8:45 will be tough as you’re a long walk from Norway and even if you hustle like crazy 30-45 minutes is a likely minimum - with the walk you might not get to Norway until 9:30 to 10 if you eat a full meal. If the main goal is the meet & greet, I’d switch breakfast to Akershus as the optimal to get you breakfast (princesses too) and quick access to A&E or consider just rope dropping A&E and forgoing an expensive breakfast that morning. The other option would be to use the ADR reservation to get in the park, but take the $10 hit per person for no showing the reservation. Although you’ll have to decide if you’re OK with the cost & ethics of that.
While no one knows for sure we can look back to how it was when they debuted originally at Epcot.
Without a fast pass available that means we’ll probably go back to the running of the dads. At rope drop dads (and moms too) would take off running at Norway, and unlike everything else the CM’s usually did little to stop it and even thought it was funny. The dads would get to Norway and wait for their family to catch up. The wait time was usually 1-3 hours within a few minutes of the park opening. Wait times were pretty dismal all day I would not try to get a meal in at 8:45 if the park opens at nine. By the time you got done eating and made your way to Norway I think you’d be very very lucky to have anything less than an hour wait and potentially several hours.
Although now that they’ve been available for several years and the frozen frenzy is finally starting to die out a little hopefully it will be a little less insane than it was back then.
I was debating using the reservation to get into the park and dropping the $20 for the two-person reservation. I am fine with the cost but still going back and forth on the ethics of it all.
I am going to keep looking for earlier reservations so we could eat - but at this point am unsure what to do.
It feels like the parents running to save a spot would be about at the same level as missing your reservation on purpose. With the Anna and Elsa coming back to EP only a few days before we get there, I am guessing the mad dash is going to be on again. This stuff is crazy.
So we are doing GG to jump in line at Soarin’. Maybe FP frozen and hop in line at soarin?
Do what is right for you. It is not up to any of us to judge! Enjoy!
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Personally I don’t see any ethics issues with it. You aren’t breaking any rules, you are paying the penalty for not showing up for a reservation and it’s a tactic that anyone could use so there is no real special advantage. If that’s what works for your plans I wouldn’t hesitate to do it.
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I agree completely with this^^.
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We have an 8:30am at Crystal Palace and a 9:05 at Garden Grill. Should I just reschedule for lunch at both or is 8:30 early enough to get a headstart at MK? The whole point was to beat the rush but the 8am slots were gone by the time I was able to reserve. Thoughts? Sorry to hijack here, it’s my first post!
You most likely will be able to get into MK before 8:30 for your CP reservation. I would try at 7:45. You will get into MK and have a chance to take some pictures of an near empty hub but if you eat at CP at 8:30 you most likely will not be done (eat and see characters) until around 9:30.
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I agree with @Outer1, the ethics is a non-issue. You’d be savvy, much like Capt J. Sparrow 
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We might have made a reservation for 8am at Akershus a few years ago, and totally blew it off and lined up for Anna & Elsa instead. We never had any intention of eating there, nor did any of the other people in line with us that morning who were doing the same thing. This was during the 4 hour waits and running of the Dads. It was very much worth the $10 per person cancellation fee to not have to run at rope drop with thousands of others, or to wait many hours in line for it. We were third in line and were done in 10 minutes once the meet started.
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