60 day booking plan

[Gelir]

Planning a trip for Feb. 22-Mar. 2, 8 nights with 8 day park hopper passes, for my family of 3 (me, wife, 5 year old daughter). We are staying at CBR. Currently working on a list of things to book at 90 days. Would appreciate feedback on options/timing if relevant.

Wife and I love good food, but are resigned to largely mediocre meals. Choices are mainly based on what’s going to give our daughter the best experience. Not sure if it makes sense to book a table dining meal for everyday or not. Can always cancel I guess.

Have not finalized what parks on what days. We will be using lightning lanes the whole time. I guess on some level we have to do that before booking at 60 days so we can know what to try and aim for. Tentative plan below.

Saturday Day 1: Travel (plus minus waterpark pending Florida weather in late February, will play by ear) Disney springs (Trex?)
Sunday Day 2: AK? Last day of Princess Half so maybe steering clear of MK? (Tusker?)
Monday Day 3: MK (hopefully BBB/cinderellas)
Tuesday Day4: Epcot (Teppen Edo)
Wednesday Day 5: HS (Woody’s) (droid)
Thursday Day 6: Low key day (Topelinos) (park optional)
Friday Day 7: HS or Epcot (Ohana?)
Saturday Day 8: MK (crystal palace brunch?)
Sunday Day 9: travel no parks

Table Dining:
Cinderella’s royal table (hoping to book after BBB to do a whole princess thing)
Crystal Palace?
Woody’s round up
Topolino’s breakfast
Ohana? (probably a dinner)
Teppan Edo? Space 220?
Tusker House

Activities:
BBB (early in the week ideally)
Droid building

Anything I’m missing in activities? Appreciate thoughts on meals and strategy, book a meal for every day and plan to cancel if we aren’t feeling it?

 

[foodiddiedoo]

Restaurants and enchanting extra reservations are 60 days +10 from your check in day. I don’t believe there’s a single thing that you can book 90 days out.
Also, Shiki Sai is really good in Epcot (unless you really want to do Hibachi food, it’s got some pretty delicious sushi, but you can also order things like teriyaki). Give its menu a look. Space 220 is really hit or miss and no one in my family but my husband enjoyed their food. The windows were cool but even at lunch with an expensive prixe fixe it’s not really worth it.
Tuscker house is a great character meal/buffet, much better and more interesting food than Crystal Palace and doesn’t offer “brunch”.

 

[Gelir]

Restaurants and enchanting extra reservations are 60 days +10 from your check in day. I don’t believe there’s a single thing that you can book 90 days out.

Edited. Thanks.

 

[foodiddiedoo]

Tiffins has the best food hands down in AK, but I’d still recommend Tucker House for the fun character interactions. Skipper Canteen has better food than Crystal Palace, but obviously you’d miss out on Winnie the Pooh characters.

 

[Gelir]

Tiffins has the best food hands down in AK, but I’d still recommend Tucker House for the fun character interactions. Skipper Canteen has better food than Crystal Palace, but obviously you’d miss out on Winnie the Pooh characters.

Yeah it feels like there is a trade off between food quality and characters generally. We aren’t going for the food though. It’s all about the 5 year old. So we’re willing to accept paying a lot for lower quality meals for the sake of the characters I think. Of course, if she ends up not caring much about the characters we may be calling an audible. It seems like character meal reservations are less likely to be available last minute than the other restaurants. Is that perception correct?

 

[foodiddiedoo]

Yeah it feels like there is a trade off between food quality and characters generally. We aren’t going for the food though. It’s all about the 5 year old. So we’re willing to accept paying a lot for lower quality meals for the sake of the characters I think. Of course, if she ends up not caring much about the characters we may be calling an audible. It seems like character meal reservations are less likely to be available last minute than the other restaurants. Is that perception correct?

Yes, when you log in at 6:58 AM (Eastern) get yourself on the page to make reservations for Cinderella’s immediately. Make sure to have your credit card ready as you have to pre-pay for the restaurant. It’s probably the hardest of the character dining meals to secure, so making sure you don’t plan it for early in your trip helps. The last two times we ate there we did it on the last full day of our trip. Also if you don’t get a reservation at somewhere you like there are websites that will send you emails and/or texts for a certain day/time at a particular restaurant like ***********.com.

 

[foodiddiedoo]

Yes, when you log in at 6:58 AM (Eastern) get yourself on the page to make reservations for Cinderella’s immediately. Make sure to have your credit card ready as you have to pre-pay for the restaurant. It’s probably the hardest of the character dining meals to secure, so making sure you don’t plan it for early in your trip helps. The last two times we ate there we did it on the last full day of our trip. Also if you don’t get a reservation at somewhere you like there are websites that will send you emails and/or texts for a certain day/time at a particular restaurant like ***********.com.

I guess that’s a verboten link but it’s mouse dining dot com.

 

[disneygolfer1985]

I will add that if you are going for that long, I would advise making plans for BBB/Royal table starting at the middle to end of your trip. We are going Nov. 26 thru Dec 3rd and I didn’t have an issue booking BBB on Nov 30. I decided to do Be Our Guest for dinner afterwards and I also booked Akershus the following morning so they can still wear their dress and hopefully their hair will still be good. Also, you can BBB at midnight prior to dining so it helps knowing when you get that to plan everything else.

 

[Gelir]

Also, you can BBB at midnight prior to dining so it helps knowing when you get that to plan everything else.

Do you mean that activities can be booked earlier than dining? That is at 12:01am 60 days before rather than 7am? So you booked BBB that night then dining in the morning?

 

[disneygolfer1985]

Do you mean that activities can be booked earlier than dining? That is at 12:01am 60 days before rather than 7am? So you booked BBB that night then dining in the morning?

Yes. I was on about 20 minutes before midnight and kept refreshing every minute and at midnight I could book. The only issue was it made me re enter my password so I lost my original time I wanted. There was a 11:45am available but after entering my password I got 2 appt at 12:15 for my girls. Then in the morning we worked our plans off of that.

 

[kwdw]

For your length of stay, I’d say cap it at 2 character meals. One with princesses and one with her favorite other characters. I frequently book one TS meal everyday early on, but I usually keep around half of them. As it gets closer to the trip and I am refining how I expect the days to go, I’ll likely switch up a couple things and that includes canceling an ADR or two. I personally usually consider the night before my limit on canceling a;ADR, even though it’s 2 hours now. There are kids menus everywhere, so it’s okay to think about where you want to dine, too!

 

[Buddhaman42]

I don't have a ton of input on your dining/activity choices as they all look pretty solid to me and they will of course depend on what you all want to experience most. I think your plan looks manageable. However, I did want to point out that you keep saying 7am for booking, but that is the start of phone call reservations. Online booking for dining begins at 6AM EST. I just booked all of my dining for our trip in January and was able to snag all of the reservations we wanted at 6AM, some of which we have in common (CRT/BBB/Ohana/Woodys). Best of luck.