Availability at POP during Free Dining?????

[CarolB]

We have stayed at the Pop several times, including during free dining in 2006 and during Christmas week and never had issues. We found the bus service to be excellent - great not sharing a bus and only one bus stop - which is not the case at the deluxes and mods we have stayed at.

 

[Eeyore's My Favorite]

um, so you are comparing the crowds from Sept during free DDP to the crowds in Jan with out free DDP? hm, does that mean I can compare the crowds from the first week of december to the crowds from the last week in december? Again, you are comparing apples to pickled herring.

No, I wasn't comparing the crowds in September @ Pop to the crowds in January at ASMu. What I was stating was the horrible experience my DH & I had at POP in September during free dining. There were many, many issues at POP during September - they just compounded our decision not to go back to POP again as we'd had some of the same trouble during another stay at another time frame at POP. Since we're AP holders if we want to go back to the parks again in September, we'll just do a day trip since we live within driving distance of WDW. Our trip in September was an anniversary celebration which actually was not a happy celebration after all!!

But, I will say that WDW stepped up once I emailed and stated the many issues that we had at POP and they did compensate us quite nicely - so I give big thank yous to WDW for caring about their guests and going the extra mile to make sure they are satisfied.

 

[HopperFan]

We were at POP last year during free dining (we didn't use DDP) and I'll tell you it was the most miserable experience of my life staying at POP. I will not go back again. The resort was full to the rafters. Rude - unsupervised kids running up & down hallways after 10pm at night. Rude guests too lazy to use key cards, and the list goes on and on. The food court was so full that you had to be a table vulture in order to get a seat and pray that your food was still hot when you finally managed to get a seat. The busses were filled to capacity and usually you had to wait for a couple busses before you managed to even get standing room only on it & that was going to the parks. Also, we paid for preferred, but a preferred location is not what we got.

Because of this & many other issues, we switched to ASMu this past January & loved it!! No issues with the bus transportation (only shared one time), the resort was much quieter since it's so much smaller than POP & the food court was great. They had activities every day for the kids around the pool & the movies at night poolside were great, too.

Overall - I'd tell you to stay where you are instead of trying to switch to POP, but that's just my opinion.

WOW, we went to the same resorts at the same time and had the OPPOSITE experience.

POP in Sept during free dining for 10 days and I was so unaware of there being other guests. We never passed any on our walkways, we rarely shared an elevator, we shared the pool with maybe 20 other people, the food court lines went very quickly and we always found a table.

In January we stayed at ASMu for a week to try the new rooms and experience something different. We had people hanging out all over the railings by rooms being loud, we waited in such ridiculus waits at the food court I often just got my DS food while I ate nothing (we like different menus), and I felt the resort was too dark and uncomfortable to be walking around at night.

So glad we are going back to POP this fall

 

[busylilnurse]

tattoo this on your foreheads...

speculative booking of rooms in anticipation of free dining reduces the chance they will offer it again.

Can't we just make this a sticky or something?lol......

 

[RMulieri]

Just to illustrate what Wildoscar and Katirelder have wisely stated, I did book Pop last year for September because we always go in September. When free dining was announced, I called to have it added to my package. They had to cancel my Pop reservation and re-book. The only thing available at the time was ASSp. I eventually re-booked at ASMu. I absolutely could not add free dining to my package because there is a finite number of rooms open for the promotion! We were going anyway, but we did lose our Pop ressie because free dining was such a good offer.

Same thing happened to me, and that was calling late afternoon on the day it was released.I was ablr to get ASmo though.