We visited Disney for the second time in February (2015). For this visit and our last visit, we ate at many wonderful table service meals. Unfortunately, O’Hana was not one of them. We arrived at 8:00 for our 8:10 pm reservation. First, my husband spent 20 minutes sitting at the bar attempting to get a drink, but was completely ignored by the bartender. He eventually gave up. At 8:30, someone puked on the floor immediately outside the bar and it took 25 minutes to clean up. At 8:45 we had not yet been seated and I spoke to the manager, Brian. He informed me there was nothing he could do as they were running behind due to people staying to watch Wishes. I briefly spoke to Brian and asked why the following things were not done 1) offer free drinks and appetizers to guest waiting to be seated, wait staff was everywhere, there was plenty of help. 2) Make sure the reservations accommodated Wishes viewing. If there is going to be a lag, then don’t schedule reservations for 45 minutes surrounding Wishes. 3) Start feeding people in the waiting area, there is plenty of seating and some tables available. 4) Inform guests when they arrive that reservations are running an hour late and give them to option to cancel with NO charge attached to the cancellation. He said all were impossible, told me he’d check on my table and left to never return. There were 50 people waiting for tables that were running an hour behind. It was a waiting area full of very angry people. Good customer service by the manager could have alleviated this. Once we were finally seated at 9:10, a FULL HOUR behind schedule, we had sobbing, starving children. My kids are great eaters, and I expected them to like the food. They hated it. I hated it. With the exception of the salad, the food was bland (bread), over cooked (steak), too spicy (chicken and shrimp). It was so disappointing to be help up for an hour for the worst food, both table and counter service, that we had at Disney. Our bill was over $250 (for terrible food), the manager should have comped some of this to make up for the late reservation. He didn’t. Save yourself the trouble and choose any other restaurant.
I’m so sorry you had such a bad experience! Have you contacted Disney directly? Especially if you remember the manager’s name, they can track down who it was and discuss the situation with them. I agree that the situation as you describe it was mishandled. I hope that you contact Disney and they can offer you some sort of satisfaction regarding the issue.
What a horrible experience!
Yes. Be sure to contact Guest Services about the issue. You can e-mail them at guest.services@disneyworld.com. I reported an issue to them recently, but I was not really satisfied with their resolution. I hope you get a better response from them. (The response I received was basically, “Sorry. We’ll talk to the manager. Bye.”)
If you contact them, let us know how it turns out.
yikes, that sounds horrible. I am planning on making an ADR there for our October trip. maybe if I make it earlier in the evening (6:30 ish), we won’t have such trouble with waiting so long.
If you are really unsatisfied, you can always escalate. The Consumerist website has a listing of executive email addresses. They suggest something called an “Executive Email Carpet bomb”, where you send the same email with your complaint and desired resolution to as many executive email addresses as you can find. If 45 people in an office get the same complaint email on the same day, they’re much more likely to pay attention to what the issue is. @DashforCash, If the standard guest relations email doesn’t work for you, this is another idea that might help.
Edit: That list is woefully out of date, but I’d try it anyway. A little Googleing will net you the name of current major executives; putting those into the firstname.lastname@disney.com format would probably work…
If you read up on travel sites, you can see that OHanna is getting terrible reviews for the last 5 months or so.
You had a typical experience. Should the wait staff have kicked everyone out so you could eat and watched Wishes from your table? If you made such late dinning plans then you would know your kids would be hungry. There are other places to eat.
If you had asked on chat, we would have told you all of this. If I were the Manager, I would have denied all your requests other than cancelling your ADR without penalty.
Thank you for this information, @theredhead . I may do just that.
I work in customer service and our executives will receive complaints from our customers from time to time. They generally just pass them over to me to handle. Usually they’re from people who didn’t bother to go through the proper channels first. I liken this to someone going to a bank and asking for the bank president to handle depositing a check for them; that’s what the bank pays the tellers to do. And helping people with their inquiries or concerns is what the customer service reps are paid to do.
So, like you suggested, allowing Guest Services an opportunity to resolve an issue first is best, before going to the execs.
Now I just need to decide whether it is worth my time and effort to escalate the issue. If I do and I don’t get an appropriate resolution or if I don’t get a response at all, it might increase my disillusionment with Disney, and I don’t want that to happen. It’s frustrating because I can overlook the original issue I had – mistakes happen, but it was the way it was handled (or, rather, not handled) afterward that continues to grate on me. It could have been taken care of so easily.
I am going to strongly disagree with you. Having eaten at 30 different Disney restaurants, OHana was the only one that seated a full hour after reservations and has inedible food. I would like others to weigh in-- is my experience typical for Disney dining?
We typically had a relatively short wait for each of our ressies. Usually they were no more than 15 minutes. There was one exception. We waited for a full hour for our table at TTS. But the food was good, and it worked out for us because we ended up being able to watch the FoFP from our table, which was nice and which we wouldn’t have been able to do had we been seated on time. (I just hope we weren’t taking up a table from someone else who had intended to do the same.) I imagine it has to be challenging to come up with a plan to allow as many people as possible to make ressies and to keep in mind the possibility of cancellations as well as slow-eaters or lollygaggers.
Although I’m lucky that it hasn’t been the norm for me lately, I have to agree with @Elaine5715 that waiting for a table is very common at popular restaurants, especially when things like Wishes are a factor. A Wishes viewing is never guaranteed at an Ohana dinner seating, and I’m sure many families delayed their bill to watch the show, or booked at a certain time in hopes of seeing the fireworks. I’ve waited upwards of 30 minutes at Be Our Guest, 45 minutes at Crystal Palace, and even longer times at other establishments. Although it sucks to wait (especially when you’re starved), management can’t kick other families out of the restaurant.
That said, it does sound like there were other negative things that impacted your experience. I’d move forward with contacting higher-ups so they can get your feedback and improve.
If you do escalate it, please let us know how things turn out. I agree that mistakes can be overlooked, especially in as hectic an environment as WDW sometimes is. But once a complaint happens, it needs to be resolved quickly and in an appropriate fashion. It’s unfortunate that this one wasn’t.
I would say that waiting well past your reservation time is fairly common at WDW restaurants, yes. I’d say that is especially true at a restaurant with a fireworks view during the time of night when the fireworks happen. The longest wait I have ever experienced was for Crystal Palace on Christmas Day, where we waited about an hour past our ADR time. Waits will vary based on a variety of things. The manager can’t just tell people “You’ve been here 45 minutes, time to pack it up!”. I’m sure they sometimes wish they could!
No, we only experience this long wait and rushed service at Ohana, and what you describe has been typical the past couple years. Unfortunately this was our family’s favorite restaurant and kids see it as a tradition so we keep going back.
The worst experience we had was last May on Mothers Day when we were seated late as usual, the server was rushed and they dumped all food on our table quickly as wishes started. We had no drinks, silverware, butter, sauces, etc and food was cold by the time we got them. It was the 1st time taking my mother and I had been promising her the famous bread pudding while she was fighting cancer, so this was her special night after just being declared cancer free. So I let it all go trying to keep the night happy… Until… The waiter tells us the last bread pudding was just served to the table next to us! Then I lost it, still polite but let waiter know I was not happy through my tears while asking for a manager. I explained our experience and he did comp most of the bill without my asking and also gave us each 4 anytime fastpasses. It didn’t fix the night and I still need to take my mom back for bread pudding (she has another cancer now and under chemo, so I made the promise to make it up when she finishes treatment), but it was handled well by the manager.
As for the food, we have never had poor quality at Ohana. The steak is most definitely not a Yachtsman steak, but it’s never been bad for us (especially with the sauces if they remember to bring them). I assume if you say the bread was dry, you must not have gotten the awesome butter with it. If kids don’t like something, ask for an alternative. We have never had a problem getting something special for picky eaters. The problem is the service being so rushed and not bringing everything they should.
Correction: we have had the occasional long wait elsewhere, but it is abnormal for us at other places. At Ohana it seems to have become a regular occurrence.
We have never waited at anywhere. We are always seated at our reservation time or before. Wishes was a non-issue. We did not care if we saw it. There were no sauces or butter or any condiments. Food was truly terrible. Manager refused to come to the table and we just left.
If I had read that ADRs ran late and that we should expect poor rushed service for Disney dining, we would have never have visited Disney. In all the tour books and websites, I never once read that Disney dining was anything other than great.
I sometimes wish they still called them “Priority Seatings” rather than ADRs. When it was a “priority seating”, I think it was clearer that you got priority over walk-ups at that time, not a guaranteed seat at that exact moment.
I really am sorry that you didn’t enjoy yourself, but getting seated late for an ADR is a fairly common experience. I do not think you should “expect poor rushed service”, but the fact of the matter is, you’re at a busy theme park. Dining may well feel more rushed there than at other places. It’s part of why I prefer to have meals that are not buffet/family style service. In a more typical setting, you can order appetizers, then wait until they’re delivered to order your entrees, forcing the experience to be less rushed.
I think that the only thing left for you to do, in terms of recourse, is move up the food chain. Contact the guest services email, see what they can tell/offer you. Perhaps they can do something to remedy the situation and increase your satisfaction, even if it is after the fact.
You’re not going to get objective reactions here. Most of us love WDW, even with its flaws. My family has waited about 20 minutes for ADRs, but I’ve understood it’s not a reservation. Last year we waited about 45 minutes for a dinner ADR at Biergarten. It wasn’t fun, but the meal was great.
I’ve never booked OHana because I’ve read so many reviews on Chat about poor service and bad food.
I hope guest services can help you.
Like @BackIntoTheFray said… We all love Disney even with its flaws… Seems to me like missing wishes added to problem; I can only assume that’s why you had a later adr. Being at Disney I’m always prepared for longer waits… Especially with young kids! I once had a trex adr for dinner at 4:30 knowing they would make us wait… Which was about 45min. Sorry you had such a bad experience and hope it doesn’t affect your Love for Disney 