For those who were following my post linked below and had similar issues with challenging advanced dining reservations, particularly at character dining restaurants, I have an update now that our trip has arrived.
Disney dining frustrations
Similar to many others, we were able to suddenly get all the remaining reservations we were looking for on a certain random day a few weeks ago. It was then announced that there was a glitch in the dining reservation system and these reservations would be cancelled. This was pretty infuriating because Disney ended up cancelling some reservations that weren’t entirely new bookings, but just time modifications, so I got screwed out of four reservations, which really sucked. However, they did send $25 gift cards for each cancelled reservation, so we got $100 in Disney gift cards as a result. I figured this was like free money since I assumed we’d eventually get the reservations back, with some (aka a lot of) effort. However, after that day, there was literally no availability ever at any of the restaurants we were watching during our travel dates. At this point I was worried that they had too many reservations booked and so when normal cancellations happened, they weren’t being released like usual.
Fortunately, in the past 3 days leading up to our trip, we were able to grab 3 of the 4 cancelled reservations at Hollywood and Vine and Topolinos. So if you are stalking those restaurants, maybe give it a rest and check back in immediately prior to your trip. Breakfasts at Topolinos opened up on two separate days of our trip when I checked yesterday (4 days and 6 days prior to the dining dates respectively) and lunch opened up at Hollywood and Vine 2 days prior to the dining date (tomorrow! Yay! My son is so excited to see Goofy!)
I’m curious to give the walk up waitlist a try at some of these restaurants where it is so frustrating trying to get advanced reservations.