Average length of character meals?

[Hessie628]

Hi! We are going to WDW Aug. 17- 25 and have numerous character meals booked. Right now we are doing CRT breakfast, Akershus breakfast, 1900 Park Fare breakfast and dinner, Crystal Palace lunch, and Garden Grill dinner. (Some of these we may change, but 2yo dd LOVES princesses and the movie Cinderella. She had such a great interaction with Alice and the Mad Hatter at MK when we were there in Dec. we thought we'd try 1900 PF) Can anyone tell me about how long it takes for all the characters and princesses to circulate? We've done Ohana, Hollywood & Vine, and Chef Mickey's, but none of the princess meals. I'll be able to book FP+ soon and want to have some idea of what times to choose without rushing our meals.

Thanks in advance!

 

[_auroraborealis_]

Assume 60-90 minutes.

 

[droe]

Great question. I hadn't even thought about how long to allow before making a fastpass reservation!

 

[GillianP1301]

We do a lot of character meals, about 8 a trip, and almost every time we are ddone in a little under an hour. There are probably only a handful of times we go over the one hour but have never been longer than 75 minutes.

That timing us after you ate seated, which normally is 5 - 10 minutes, but can go longer. I use 75 minutes total in my planning.

 

[ariane37]

We also are normally out within an hour but as the pp said, that's once we're seated. We haven't experienced too many long waits passed our ADR time but it does happen and occasionally you can end up having to wait for characters, so I think 90 minutes is good. Whether we're doing a character meal or not I don't make FP's for 2 hours after whatever our ADR time is.

 

[Tom P.]

We, too, do a lot of character meals during our trips. I would say that an hour is average. However, I agree with others that you should plan a "cushion" to allow for the unexpected. I would think if you planned an average of 90 minutes per character meal, you'd be safe. Oftentimes you'll be done faster, but that keeps you from having to feel rushed and allows for the unexpected to happen.

 

[DisBuckMan]

Back when we did character meals, we allotted 90 minutes. We found it was fairly rare to get seated on time, and if you're depending on seeing all the characters, it just takes that amount of time. The characters are pretty evenly spread out throughout the restaurant, which generally means that you won't have to wait long to see the first character, but it also means that one probably very recently left your table before you sat, and will have to circulate then entire restaurant before getting to your table again.

 

[mkla2015]

We do multiple character meals each trip and plan for 90 minutes but are usually done in about an hour.

 

[MickeyMinnieMom]

We do a couple of these every trip, and we are almost always done in 1hr. Maximum 90 minutes... but that has very rarely happened for us.