After reading this thread and threads on other boards, it seems Disney permitting “leading reservations” also makes for “a lot of angry guests”.
Yes, and the perk gets diluted if enough people are making “leading reservations”. Furthermore, the perk is 60 days I advance and a “leading reservation” gives guests making them a perk of more than 60 days.
I see your side of it. There are many people who book and change for good reason. It’s really a question of which side Disney comes out on, but there are reasonable arguments to be made for both sides.
Ultimately as word of “leading reservations” spread and more and more guests learn and use the “trick”, I suspect Disney will eventually (maybe not now) do something about it and it will negatively impact those who legitimately push back the start date of their trip. But so does the $200 package cancellation fee at 30 days and the 1 night stay penalty for room only reservations at less than 5 days. “Life happens” 30 days out and 5 days out too.
Ok, what about things like cancel and rebook? This is a common scenario - you cancel and rebook to take advantage of a discount. Or, you wanted a Poly Bungalow, but none were available, so you book a room at the Contemporary. But, 30 days out you see that a Bungalow comes available, so you book it, spending more money at Disney… Technically, these are new reservations. But you are still staying at Disney.
I’m not arguing for leading reservations - I don’t think it’s a great practice. But I think trying to limit it would be more troublesome for Disney than what it’s worth to them. Sure, some people on message boards who know about it get upset. I guarantee you the vast majority of guests don’t even know that practice exists, and so they don’t care. But if you tell them that if they have to knock one day off, they lose their FPs, you’ll have a lot of unhappy guests.
This one was a no brainier. There isn’t a way that this could be done legitimately, so it’s easy to patch. But trying to curtail leading reservations leads to too many issues, so I doubt they will do anything about it.
Besides, it only affects 2 attractions currently - FoP and SDD. It’s not a big enough issue for the headache that Disney would encounter.
But you would have a replacement reservation, so that is already covered. They are giving people 2 days grace, presumably to rebook.
I do think you are probably right. But I also think they will look into how to stop leading reservations too.
So when someone cancels, the system could do the following:
flag the account with the start date of the cancelled reservation
after 2 days, scan for a new reservation
if a new reservation is made, for a date within say 2 days of the original, unflag everything
if no new reservation is found, or it starts later, the FPs could be deleted.
As long as you cancelled between 30 and 60 days, you would still have something of an advantage over offsite guests to rebook them.
As someone said, it’s like a cancellation penalty. And by giving people a couple of days to push back a reservation for flight reasons or whatever, they allow for genuine changes within 60 days.
To my mind this is a good thing and strikes just the right balance. I think with most of this forum the opinion that taking a reservation just to get FPP advantage and then cancelling it was pretty shady. I’m going to be absolutely fascinated to watch what this does to 60 day availability!
TBH, I have always been amazed by the amount of righteous indignation that this practice stirs up. I think that it is important to consider why people do leading reservations in the first place.
Remember, back in the day FPs were part of buying a ticket and were equally available on the day to all guests, and those guests who planned and were willing to zoom around the park were able to get a big benefit because of their efforts. With the advent of FPP, certain guests (those staying on-site) were given a massive advantage by being able to book at 60 days out, and off-site guests were left to fight for the scraps at 30 days out.
IMO, it is a reaction to the increasing monetization of the WDW experience, where things that were formerly free and/or equally available to all guests are put behind a paywall. Stick it to the Man!
See - this is the capitalist in me. The person who worked the hardest got the prize. Study hard, make an effort, and get good grades, er, I mean get fast passes.
FP+ is the kindler, gentler system that makes it nice for everyone to get their three fast passes - whether they understand what they are reserving or not.
It never was really about evening the playing field though. It was really about ride rationing, and the data science that would allow them to change staffing patterns. It can’t truly be dissected from the whole MDX which was never about the guest experience, but fully about calculating the movement of guests and establishing a way to stop truly low-crowd-walk-on-“quieter”-days in the parks. Brilliant from their end.
But -yes- those who were willing to study up and try harder looked for better ways to get a strong ROI.
I saw that, but wasn’t the person reporting it actually trying too early? They didn’t seem to have made allowance for their initial days to have cleared before they hit the rolling 60. But watching with interest.
Looks like I got mine just in time with the one day campsite booking. All still intact.
I still have 60 day FPP access showing in MDE despite not having a matching onsite stay (just a previous one for the stay). So at the moment it’s not clear what’s happening.
That’s how I read it. It looks like they were trying to early. I think tomorrow will be the telling day. People with AP’s will be able to work through it and see if there are any loopholes. I think they are going to close everything on the Disney side. The real question is will they be able to have their coding see if a Disney Springs hotel that booked 60 day fastpasses is still valid or canceled.
I think right now they are targeting the off site crowd. Those like myself who still have a Disney reservation but used a fake leading reservation to open up the fp window early will still be an issue.
