I thought the crowd levels were so-so. Friday the 18th Epcot was busy but not crazy busy the way people described the weekend before. Seemed to just hit pockets of people here and there. I think mostly in the popular areas like United Kingdom and Germany. This was the case several nights at Epcot (we usually end up at Epcot most nights for dinners). I also noticed that the line for Spaceship Earth was long no matter what day of the week or time of day we happened to be at Epcot. I'm not used to that. Normally it's busy first thing when the park opens since it's the first ride people see when they walk in but after park opening the lines usually seem to get shorter as the day goes on. Saturday the 19th MK was oddly empty IMO but on Monday the 21st MK was extremely busy. The rest of the week through the 26th seemed pretty normal crowd-wise for October (we go every Oct. during Food and Wine Festival). I did notice the service at a lot of the restaurants was slow. Not sure if this was due to the free dining or what. But we always go during free dining and service has never been THIS slow. We ate at Chefs de France and Via Napoli the first two nights of our trip and it was fine, even better than fine. Monday the 21st we had breakfast at Kona. It was 25-30 min. after our 11:00 ADR before we were seated. Tuesday we had a breakfast ADR at Kouzzina which went well. But after that it got super slow. Wednesday we had at 7:10 dinner ADR at Sanaa. I'm not sure how long we waited to be seated but everything was slow. Had to wait for our drinks, wait for our entrées, wait for our server to come back between courses to check on us and bring refills and the dessert menu, etc. I think he was overwhelmed and stressed but by the end of our meal maybe things were calming down some since it was getting later because he seemed more relaxed and chit-chatty. Thursday night we had a 6:35 ADR at Rose and Crown. Oh my. We didn't really wait too long to be seated but the service was so slowwwww. Our server disappeared for long periods of time. I can't even tell you how long it was between when she took our dessert order and when dessert actually came out. Felt like FOREVER. The mother and daughter at the table next to us waited even longer than DH and I did. You could tell they were not happy but did not make a huge stink about it. Friday night we had an 8:10 ADR at Ohana. We were seated quickly and our server was friendly and nice but the service was slow. It took more than FOREVER for drinks to come out, for our first courses to come out, for them to come around with the different meats, for dessert to be served. DH was so tired of waiting he wanted to tell them to just forget dessert because he didn't want it that bad anyway. We didn't complain but the server brought us extra scoops of ice cream with Mickey sprinkles and DH felt it was because they knew they were so slow and it was their way of trying to make up for it. Saturday we had lunch at Coral Reef. 12:25 ADR. Not sure how long it was before we were seated. Not immediately but not an overly long wait. Everything was well enough until the server started to clear our dishes. She took some dishes and said she would be back for the rest. She was gone a long time before she finally came back for them and brought the dessert menu. Then dessert took a very long time to come out. When she brought it out I asked for the check because we were going to need to head back to our resort in about 45 minutes to wait for our ME bus and I didn't want to risk the check taking 20 minutes to be delivered to our table and then another 10 min. to finalize. But I will say the server was fantastic. Her name was Kristin. I don't blame any of the slow service we received during our trip on the servers. They were all nice enough. I really think the kitchens were backed up and/or they just plain needed more servers and busboys.
