Disney Dining Buddy shuts down...others to follow?

[jtowntoflorida]

I wonder if the "why is it so hard to get a reservation at 180+10?" threads will start to go away once all the sites follow through with the cease and desist? I'm thinking there's a connection there.

Doubt it. I couldn't get BOG at 180+10 even before these services existed.

The service that I use doesn't have the word "Disney" in its name and it hasn't been shut down yet.

 

[lubob]

It's a good start . Good job disney for finding out about a problem and then following though with it. It was starting to be like scalping tickets at a sporting event. Disney will prob come out with new ways to make reservations now..

 

[OKW Lover]

So...has anybody noticed an increased availability of ADR's now?

 

[doconeill]

So...has anybody noticed an increased availability of ADR's now?

With the one site so far shut down, which didn't hold reservations, I doubt it. At best, the web site might work better...

 

[Alice Royal]

Fingers crossed that once most of these sites are taken down, us locals might have a fighting chance at even sub-par ADRs.

 

[Savagekids]

This is good news! Two things Disney needs to do. 1. Not open reservations so early, 180 days is excessive. 30-60 would be better. Heck, even 7 days. 2. Change the way their site does a search. I'd like to long for the duration of my trip for a particular restaurant; not just one meal at one restaurant at a time.

One of the sites allowed you to search that way, it was free and linked you to the Disney site when you found something you wanted. The only harm was possibly slowing the Disney site down. But it was so helpful.

 

[Reddog1134]

Doubt it. I couldn't get BOG at 180+10 even before these services existed.

Lunch or Dinner?

I'm 142 days out and I can still get BOG lunch for any day of my trip.

 

[tmoo]

Disney IT should be able to detect BOTs and block them. That would help system stability.

 

[jtowntoflorida]

Lunch or Dinner?

I'm 142 days out and I can still get BOG lunch for any day of my trip.

We go to BOG to meet the Beast, so dinner is our priority. At the time bookings opened for our December 2014 trip (before these sites were up and running), BOG only offered ADRs for dinner, and zero were available at 180 days. You can't blame these sites for lack of ADRs at restaurants when the issues with ADRs existed before the sites did.

Party season wrecks havoc with a lot of things, including ADRs. If you don't visit between September and December, your issues aren't as bad because the MK isn't closing at 7 pm half the nights.

 

[Reddog1134]

We go to BOG to meet the Beast, so dinner is our priority. At the time bookings opened for our December 2014 trip (before these sites were up and running), BOG only offered ADRs for dinner, and zero were available at 180 days. You can't blame these sites for lack of ADRs at restaurants when the issues with ADRs existed before the sites did.

Party season wrecks havoc with a lot of things, including ADRs. If you don't visit between September and December, your issues aren't as bad because the MK isn't closing at 7 pm half the nights.

We're going Presidents week and were concerned about ADR's because past crowd calendars and park hours have suggested it's a busy week. We got everything we wanted and all our reservations are for 5, 7 or 12 people. Maybe people book trips late for that week????

 

[Dean Marino]

So...has anybody noticed an increased availability of ADR's now?

Love this, as that WOULD be the true metric. Talk is lovely - but performance is what counts .

 

[Dean Marino]

Disney IT should be able to detect BOTs and block them. That would help system stability.

"Should"? No, while I totally agree with you - the real term is CAN, for anything looking like a competent Web/Security Staff. "CAN" is there - when "CAN" happens, WDW will have a competent Web and Security Staff. Until then? By example - it's not important to WDW.

 

[doconeill]

Disney IT should be able to detect BOTs and block them. That would help system stability.

Sure, for any competent IT group. But we're talking about a company that can know for MONTHS they need to scale to support when free dining offers hit and don't do it and can't correct information that has been wrong for YEARS. And that's just two examples off the top of my head.

 

[jtowntoflorida]

We're going Presidents week and were concerned about ADR's because past crowd calendars and park hours have suggested it's a busy week. We got everything we wanted and all our reservations are for 5, 7 or 12 people. Maybe people book trips late for that week????

Busier times = longer hours = more ADR slots. During party season, hours are short and thus there is less ADR availability. Plus, at the time our 180 window opened for that trip, dinner was the only meal for which BOG had ADRs, and breakfast wasn't served. I'm sure availability for BOG is much better now in general than historically because you now have three meals/14 hours in the day from which to choose an ADR rathern than 1 meal/2 1/2 hours (which is how long wide the dinner window is on party nights). My only point was that BOG was hard to get before these services popped up, and I gave a relevant example.

 

[purplegirl1818]

I've been wondering what impact these services have on Disney's servers. We all know Disney servers aren't the greatest to begin with, but getting pinged by all these services for every requested dining reservation every few minutes has to further contribute to the poor response time and instability of the servers.
When we debated using Disney Dining Buddy, I discussed with my husband where we though the line between an acceptable number of inquiries and being classified as DOS attack (not that it was a DOS attack, there just has to be a line in there somewhere). I'm glad to see them go.

 

[mummabear]

I didn't mind their service or the other ones that just search for openings. I've never paid to use them, but they didn't bother me. The only kind that need to go are the ones hoarding reservations for a price.

Another poster did make me wonder if they make reservations then cancel them so they can be successful with altering people. And/or send out messages advising people of openings that are never really there (and people think they just missed them when they log in)

This is good news! Two things Disney needs to do. 1. Not open reservations so early, 180 days is excessive. 30-60 would be better. Heck, even 7 days. 2. Change the way their site does a search. I'd like to long for the duration of my trip for a particular restaurant; not just one meal at one restaurant at a time.

I would hate 7 days. 60 could work.
I agree than I would like a wider search range than a single meal.

 

[Jenni1026]

I got Wishes and Hallowishes through DDB. It worked and I'm sad to see it go.

 

[Josh Hendy]

Sure, for any competent IT group. But we're talking about a company that can know for MONTHS they need to scale to support when free dining offers hit and don't do it and can't correct information that has been wrong for YEARS. And that's just two examples off the top of my head.

Guess they didn't get around to covering that in those months-long, personal and video-based, intensive training sessions that the fired American workers had to give to their H1-B replacements ...

 

[fmfoley]

I am not a fan of websites buying and selling reservations but DDB was well worth the $8 to have a chance at BOG. It worked for us during our last minute September trip for lunch.

 

[Rylie Grite]

wdw table finder shut down as well.