Sorry if this has been discussed previously, but it was a new experience for me today. When the wife & I decided a couple of months ago to make another trip to WDW (for the last week April), rooms were almost impossible at that time to book anywhere. We managed to find a reservation that we wanted at the Poly Villas, and made it a short stay cause of the cost. I also remember reading then how others said availability sometimes magically improves closer to your scheduled stay. So today I was online double checking a few things and discovered that there are indeed a lot more rooms available at the Poly the very week we are going. So we gave into the dark side of the force and decided to add just one more day to our stay.
Since I had an existing reservation I called Disney’s reservation phone line, but was taken back when the rep I had on the line said there was no availability. After I explained that I was also logged onto MDE and that it MDE was indeed showing another room at the Villa exactly the same as we already reserved for the very same price, she advised me to reserve it online as she saw nothing in her system she could book for me. So I did. I now have 2 Disney confirmation numbers for back-to-back stays. My wife joked that we now have a “split stay” at the very same resort. The more we go to WDW, the less I understand. .
I once stayed at a (non-Disney) Holiday Inn for four nights and ended up with three confirmation numbers: 1 night, 2 nights, 1 night. I had to “check in” on three different days even though I never changed rooms. IT can be weird.
It is possible that the CM couldn’t see it because you were actively looking at it!
So, consider this. A customer is looking at a room being available. So they are pondering booking it. At the same time a CM sees the same room on behalf of someone who calls and they snatch it out from under the customer who is viewing it as available at the same time.
To protect against this, it is common for a computer system to temporarily mark a room as unavailable until either a certain timeout period, or while the system detects a customer is actively working with that room online.
This is very likely an intentional feature, not a bug.
When you arrive stop at the desk and let them know this.
You could also try the chat feature to see if they can link them now. You’ll still have two ressies but if they link them you may reduce the chance you’ll need to move rooms
Thanks for your suggestion. I ended up sending Disney an email this morning asking what you suggested as the chat feature was unavailable yet today and the phone wait was 2 1/2 hours. Interestingly, Disney’s automated email reply to my submittal said I could call, or use the cell phone MDE app chat feature if I needed “immediate help” within the next two weeks. It was the two weeks reference that caught my eye, wondering if an email response will take that long. The good news however is that chat on the phone app seemed readily available even though chat via my desk top was not. I’ll wait a few days for an answer to my email. Also I don’t think I was in any special booking engine. I was simply looking at room availability thru MDE when I made the phone call, which showed several different available rooms at the time even thought the CM on the phone claimed she could not see anything. Nonetheless I’m just happy that the Great and Powerful booking OZ at WDW got us a room where and when we wanted it.
I’ll bet we are not talking about the same thing. After logging on, I simply opened the Places to Stay drop down menu and filled in the dates and then clicked Find Resorts. In my case we wanted to stay at the Poly, but the only availability Disney showed at the time was at the Poly Villas and not the main resort. I’m assuming we booked a DVC room directly thru Disney as we are not DVC owners. I booked it cause it was the same rate as a standard view room in the resort had it been available according to their rate calendar. Here is a screen shot of what is showing this morning. The DS-SV room we reserved is still available.
We are indeed talking about the very same thing - that’s the booking engine. You’re calling it MDE but you’re on the website! You kept referencing MDE and I kept looking through my app and wondering how I missed booking available in there all this time.
Now that I’m clear I can stop driving myself bonkers.
Btw you should just be able modify your existing reservation yourself in the My Plans page of My Disney Experience. There should be an option there to change your reservation and modify your dates and add that night. If the room is indeed available it should let you do that.
They will try their very best not to have you have to move. But there is no guarantee whatsoever. I’ve known people who have not been lucky enough to keep their same room.
Phone CMs often have the least info of anyone, TBH
Okay, our situation was resolved satisfactory, but golly what a magical trip through Disney bureaucracy it turned out to be. I’m only sharing all this for your reading enjoyment, and not for any personal bellyaching as I got what I wanted … one room for all four nights with no move.
I ended up using the chat feature on my iPhone’s Disney app since chat via MDE on the desk top was simply unavailable at the time. But that turned out to be a ruse as the automated response to my chat question said that “due to the popularity of Genie we are experiencing higher than normal wait times.” Yes, that is a direct quote! And then an hour and half later I got a chat response that simply advised me to call Disney Central and provided it’s phone number. So I did that this afternoon. This time I talked to someone who knew what she was doing. She put me on hold while she contacted Guest Services with my request. They ended up adding the 4th night to our original reservation and cancelling the second 1-night reservation. That meant of course that they had to re-charge my credit card for the 4th night add-on to the original reservation and refund the room charge for the now cancelled second 1-night reservation. And due to the magic of math rounding I guess, the new charge was as silly penny less than the refund. We had a nice laugh over that as the CM was unable to explain it even though she actually tried. And … as I hung up the phone it hit me that I finally got what I originally wanted when I called Disney’s reservation phone line last week.
So thanks again OBNurseNH. Had it not been for your suggestion I naively assumed I could just wait until we checked in on the first day to see if we could stay in the same room. Silly me.
This is really interesting to me because an extra room (actually 2 of em) opened up on our SWGS trip and when I called to move the 17 and 18 year old boys into their own room (cuz that room looks small to me to share with two teen boys and a hubby) they were able to apply the refund from not having the extra boys in our room to the cost of the next room and all I had to do was pay the extra. These are both thru Disney. Yes I get one is like a cruise but if they can apply funds from my existing reservation to a new reservation for Star Wars hotel why cant they do the same for you for the Poly instead of refunding/recharging. Also I will gander a guess at the penny difference is a rounding thing due to taxes.
For example, if your three night room was really $100.505 they would round it up to 100.51
If your one night room was $20.505 same and you’d pay $20.51
But if together as one reservation it would be $121.01 whereas as to two reservations you were paying 121.02
.
And … as I hung up the phone it hit me that I finally got what I originally wanted when I called Disney’s reservation phone line last week.