How do you plan for ADR so far ahead?

[BrownHP800]

We are 4 months out and trying to make some ADR.

How in the world can anyone plan when and where to eat so far in advance? We made a couple but I am pretty confident that we will have to change or cancel them when things get closer. I have enough trouble planning on what I want for lunch tomorrow let alone when I want to go have dinner with Mikey.

Anyone have tips/suggestions about when/where/why you choose?

 

[gtpoohbear]

The best thing I can say is to start with planning your park days and go from there. You'll want to be looking first at the park hours/EMH schedule to make sure you plan accordingly. Depending on how many days you will be there, you might want to first plan one day for each park, and if you have more time, decide which parks you would like a 2nd, or even 3rd day at.

My family has at least one or two restaurants in each park that are "must-do", and we generally have a preference of what meal we would want there. Plus some are only open or have characters at certain meals. So it falls into place pretty easily once we know what park we'll be at on what day.

As for the exact time, just think about when you usually eat that meal. We are very consistent in our "normal life", so we try to stick as close to that as possible at Disney as well. Actually, at Disney we usually eat dinner a little earlier than at home (we don't eat until 8-8:30 most nights), but sometimes a full day of fun has us more worn out than usual, so I try to get our dinners ADRs around 7-7:30pm. Breakfast usually as early as possible, 7am at most of the hotel restaurants, 8am in the parks, and lunch around noon.

I find the planning to be half the fun, honestly. It helps me get excited for the trip. A lot of people like to set up a spreadsheet to visualize the days and stay organized too. Good luck!

 

[Belleofthehouse]

We always plan park days first. Once you know where you are going, you can decide when and where you want to eat.
There are must-do's for us in each park and some that we will not do again (1900 Park Fare, no thank you ).

we are trying to stay in different resorts each time, so we devote alot of our ADRs to our resort restaurants.

 

[Cafeen]

For the "Where", I create two lists. The first, I toss in all the places that I am interested in going (and meals if they are specific, e.g. LTT (Lunch)). I don't pay attention to number of days or meals or anything here, just a big long list of interest and priority. I then sort out what days I want to be where (based on EMH, parties, crowd predictions, etc). I then start piecing the most important locations/meals from the first list to fit into the 2nd.

For "When", that's much easier for me. Unless it's a specific meal, I just plop them in using 11:30 for lunch and 5:30-7:30 for dinner (depending on what my park plans have me doing that day). Eventually, they all come together and I have an ADR plan all laid out.

When booking, I keep this plan open and just hammer through it and adjust as needed (if I can't get a restaurant for MK day 1, but can for MK day 2, I'll swap around and such).

And then, I spend the next 6 months adjusting, tweaking, fixing, changing, so it looks nothing like the plan I laid out all nice and neat when I started the process .

 

[plinko]

I'm another spreadsheeter! Once my other half did the hard work of figuring out what days were best for crowd levels and such and once we placed our days off, we just started figuring out what restaurants we really really wanted to go to and filled them in accordingly.Our dining times are mostly between 5 and 7 for dinners, since we're hoping to be back kind of early-ish so that we can get a good start in the mornings (generally we have a hard time being up at the crack of dawn), though we do have a couple of breakfasts and one lunch for Le Cellier.

Of course I even planned our counter service meals too, but I tend to get a little more into planning everything than some people might. It might get disregarded later, but that's okay! Mostly I just want to make sure that we don't end up missing anything.

 

[mom2my3kids]

We will not be on the dining plan, and we knew we were only doing three sit downs.. We added two new places and one of our favorites so it ended up not being to hard to decide..

Prime Time Lunch
Rainforest breakfast
Ohana dinner-favorite

 

[BrownHP800]

Thanks for all the input. It has been 6 years since we have been to DW and we never had any problems booking where we wanted to eat. We would call 1-2 days ahead and it was no problem. Now with the free dining, its much more difficult to get a reservation.

We have a couple where we know we want to go for sure. The other problem is that this trip is my son's birthday present so he doesn't know yet. He may not want to go eat with Mikey or Pooh and friends. That will change things up a bit too.

 

[shannonstar]

This may be admitting my OCD, but I use the crowd calendars from 2006-2011 and the predictions from easywdw and touring plans to make my park decisions for each day. I also look at EMH (nights only as we avoid morning ones).

Then I ask for family input (which if your son doesn't know about the trip it will be hard to do)

We have a couple that are always going to be set in stone though:
Crystal Palace - before the park opens so we can get great Photo Pass photos on the way in and be inside the park before rope drop.
Tusker House - same as above

Beyond that, I try to plan my AK day with an early dinner at Boma since we will already be over that way, any resort restaurants are planned to be on days we are at the park closest to them, etc.

It may seem like a lot of planning, but it really takes the pressure off once you get there.

 

[ses1230]

I will echo the other posters - I plan my park days first. When the park hours are released, I decide which parks with the help of a couple crowd calendars. Then I choose restaurants and I make the ADRs at 6am at my 180 days. Obsessive, yes. But like another poster said, it takes the pressure off. Early planning for me = relaxed park days.

 

[LilyWDW]

I have no issues with it. In fact, I love the fact that I can plan so far ahead and know what will be going on. We have our "must dos" (Via Napoli, Raglan Road, and Flying Fish) and then will fill in with places that work well in our day plans and have menu's that look good and interesting. We already know where we will be eating in October 2013. I don't need park hours because I know how many days we need for each park... so it's just a matter of juggling the plans into the days.

 

[holden]

In addition to what others have said, I always try to book only one or two restaurants that have a cancellation policy. That way if we want to cancel a dinner at the last minute (other than the ones that we can't cancel because we'd be charged a fee), we can. It leaves our schedule a little more flexible if we decide to hop to another park or hit Downtown Disney instead for a quick service dinner.

 

[danceintherain]

The way I look at it, we have to eat, so it's not that big of a deal for me to plan out where we'll eat when. I do like to plan mostly lunches in the parks, because that way if we don't get moving as early as I would like, we don't have to worry, and if we end up not returning to the park in the evening (we're midday breakers) it's a not a big deal. It's easy enough to figure out which parks we're going to be at on which days, and that doesn't usually change much, because we end up going to each park at least once throughout the trip, so sticking to the plan works well.

 

[ct_chris]

I use a spreadsheet and touring plans to figure out what park we will be in for every day of our trip. From there, we have each member of the family pick two restaurants. At the 180 days window, I make all our reservations and usually add in one or two new places to the calendar. For example our trip to August we are trying Jiko (AK day) and Via Napoli (Epcot Day) for the first time.

 

[snuggly duckling]

Another spreadsheeter here! It's got a column for each of our days and then rows for breakfast, morning activity, lunch, afternoon activity, dinner, and evening activity.

For our Jan. 2012 trip, we had the deluxe meal plan and wanted to maximize it. With 4 kids in our party, we started by figuring out which character meals we wanted to do. Knowing that we wanted to spend at least one day in each park and all remaining days in the MK, we slotted the meals to match which park we planned to be in that day. Then, knowing where we were going to be we figured out where and how to spend the rest of our meal plan.

Now that we are planning another trip for Jan. 2013, we just dusted off the spreadsheet from last year, ditched anything we didn't want to do again, shuffled some places around, and then filled in the holes with some new selections.

Today is day -180 for us. I was up bright and early booking all of our ADRs and I am confident that our meal selections will not change much. The only thing that (hopefully) will change is that we will be able to get a dinner reservation at BOG when they open that up; but we've got a back-up res all set at 1900 Park Fare if we don't get lucky.