No one I know personally will care but I needed to celebrate and figured some folks here may understand my excitement. I just booked and fine-tuned all 10 of our ADRs for an April/May trip by 3:30am PST. I managed to get all 10 with acceptable times by about 3:15 or 3:20 but took an additional 10-15 minutes to get times I really liked.
The list includes some challenges so I was pretty proud of myself.
4/29 Coral Reef (I don't know the abbreviation) 6pm Dinner for 3
4/30 HBD 6pm Dinner for 3
5/1 LTT 2:55pm Lunch for 4
5/2 Tusker House 8am Breakfast for 5
5/2 Sanaa 6pm Dinner for 5
5/4 CRT 8:15am Breakfast for 5
5/4 BOG 6pm Dinner for 5
5/5 HDDR 6:15pm Dinner for 5
5/6 Ohana 6:25pm Dinner for 5
5/7 BOG 9:15am Breakfast for 4 (because we enjoy a slow final morning)
If anyone's curious how I did it quickly (and I'm sure some folks are faster), here's a summary.
Days or the day before
-make sure you have a credit card in the MDE system to use as your credit card guarantee for the reservations and pre-payment for things that require it (pre-payment shouldn't be necessary if you've got a dining plan booked)
-make sure you have everyone you intend to dine with included in your "friends and Family"
-know what restaurants you want on what days at what times
-make and cancel a couple reservations to get a feel for the steps, some reservations (like HDDR) have seating options as one of the steps, so know where you'd like to sit in advance for those.
5:30am Eastern Time
-open each restaurant's reservation page in its own tab in your browser
-enter the date you want in MM/DD/YYYY format in the date space on each tab (since you're not quite at 180 it won't let you use the calendar)
-select your party size and dining time (I used meal names instead of times but I think times would work better) from the drop-downs on each tab
-arrange your tabs by reservation difficulty and then your priority
5:59am EST
-try the hardest tab "find a table" button every couple seconds until you get something other than the "try again later" message and then make that reservation all the way to the "congratulations" page
-go to the second hardest tab
-etc.
I left the tabs open on the completed reservations so that I could review the times quickly and then do a new reservation in that tab if necessary to change the time, but I think if I had used times instead of meals I wouldn't have needed to tweak anything.
When tweaking times you will get a warning if you try to make a second reservation within an hour either way from an existing reservation asking if you want to cancel the original, click yes, it saves the original reservation until the new one is complete so even if something goes wrong you've still got the original until you succeed.
I should have made sure that only the friends and family I was planning to book with were in my list at MDE but even with 4 people in there that weren't going on this trip it wasn't too hard to select the right names quickly.
I had 1 reservation give me a few "try again later" messages in the middle of the process so I just moved on and came back to it. I don't know what I had wrong but fighting with it and troubleshooting for a few minutes could have derailed the rest of my attempts so I think it was best to skip it and come back and ultimately when I did, it worked.
Anyway, too early to celebrate with my DW or the friends we're traveling with and nobody else I see on a regular basis would understand why I'm so proud of myself right now so I thought I'd share with y'all. Also, I'm open to feedback about my choices but they were pretty carefully selected (even the ones at controversial times and locations) so I'm happy with them.
The list includes some challenges so I was pretty proud of myself.
4/29 Coral Reef (I don't know the abbreviation) 6pm Dinner for 3
4/30 HBD 6pm Dinner for 3
5/1 LTT 2:55pm Lunch for 4
5/2 Tusker House 8am Breakfast for 5
5/2 Sanaa 6pm Dinner for 5
5/4 CRT 8:15am Breakfast for 5
5/4 BOG 6pm Dinner for 5
5/5 HDDR 6:15pm Dinner for 5
5/6 Ohana 6:25pm Dinner for 5
5/7 BOG 9:15am Breakfast for 4 (because we enjoy a slow final morning)
If anyone's curious how I did it quickly (and I'm sure some folks are faster), here's a summary.
Days or the day before
-make sure you have a credit card in the MDE system to use as your credit card guarantee for the reservations and pre-payment for things that require it (pre-payment shouldn't be necessary if you've got a dining plan booked)
-make sure you have everyone you intend to dine with included in your "friends and Family"
-know what restaurants you want on what days at what times
-make and cancel a couple reservations to get a feel for the steps, some reservations (like HDDR) have seating options as one of the steps, so know where you'd like to sit in advance for those.
5:30am Eastern Time
-open each restaurant's reservation page in its own tab in your browser
-enter the date you want in MM/DD/YYYY format in the date space on each tab (since you're not quite at 180 it won't let you use the calendar)
-select your party size and dining time (I used meal names instead of times but I think times would work better) from the drop-downs on each tab
-arrange your tabs by reservation difficulty and then your priority
5:59am EST
-try the hardest tab "find a table" button every couple seconds until you get something other than the "try again later" message and then make that reservation all the way to the "congratulations" page
-go to the second hardest tab
-etc.
I left the tabs open on the completed reservations so that I could review the times quickly and then do a new reservation in that tab if necessary to change the time, but I think if I had used times instead of meals I wouldn't have needed to tweak anything.
When tweaking times you will get a warning if you try to make a second reservation within an hour either way from an existing reservation asking if you want to cancel the original, click yes, it saves the original reservation until the new one is complete so even if something goes wrong you've still got the original until you succeed.
I should have made sure that only the friends and family I was planning to book with were in my list at MDE but even with 4 people in there that weren't going on this trip it wasn't too hard to select the right names quickly.
I had 1 reservation give me a few "try again later" messages in the middle of the process so I just moved on and came back to it. I don't know what I had wrong but fighting with it and troubleshooting for a few minutes could have derailed the rest of my attempts so I think it was best to skip it and come back and ultimately when I did, it worked.
Anyway, too early to celebrate with my DW or the friends we're traveling with and nobody else I see on a regular basis would understand why I'm so proud of myself right now so I thought I'd share with y'all. Also, I'm open to feedback about my choices but they were pretty carefully selected (even the ones at controversial times and locations) so I'm happy with them.
