Food and Wine "soft opening"?

[WeLoveLilo05]

I was on another facebook board and someone mentioned that they were at Epcot when they were doing their "Soft opening" for food and wine, I guess they open a day or 2 earlier without advertising? Since no one knew it was basically empty, Any truth to this? If so does it always happen every year? Thanks!

 

[Micca]

We've been to a couple of F&W soft openings. The ones we attended for the past couple of years were "day before" only, and they only lasted about a half day starting early in the afternoon. It's likely that not all of the booths will be up & running, and you will encounter some workers who are getting "on the job training"
which can result in some slowness of service. That said, we'd do it again as it's nice to have even just a few hours of relatively low crowd levels for F&W.

You are probably aware that F&W is beginning much earlier this year on August 31st. Whether or not that change of date changes the soft-opening procedure is unknown.

 

[hiroMYhero]

The Cast Preview has been held the day before the official opening. As @Micca stated, the lines may be very short but it is the training day for the CMs.

When we've used a Chase Disney Rewards card as payment, the CMs at the registers had to be taught the correct procedure for processing. No biggie as we knew the reason for the Preview was to fine tune for the opening day.

 

[Micca]

it is the training day for the CMs

the CMs at the registers had to be taught the correct procedure for processing. No biggie as we knew the reason for the Preview was to fine tune for the opening day.

I think it was just last year (our trips all run together in my head) we were there for the soft opening/preview and I ordered a food item & a frozen drink from a kiosk. Got through the very short line, paid with my MB, and then found out the frozen drink machine wasn't going to be ready to churn out drinks for 20 minutes or so. No biggie, just refund the amount for my drink & I'll move along. Well that was certainly a tall order, it took several minutes just to find someone who knew how to do this. In their defense, they probably don't do many refunds at F&W. I wasn't angry or anything, I knew the drill when we went, and as I said earlier, I def. do it again considering the broad swath of food we cut into over a short period of time.

 

[OhioStateBuckeye]

They didn't have one last year. Our last day in the parks was the day before the festival started. I'd heard that they had the cm openings in the past so we spent the day at Epcot and kept looking for open food booths and never saw any.