How to keep your ADRs from controlling your day...

[Reba from Naboombu]

Ok...I'm finally getting into this whole planning thing for our first-ever trip in Sept 2012, and I'm really loving the restaurant options. I have picked 7 TS restaurants, with a mix of character meals (DS 7, DD 4) and some unique options for me and DH (we are blessed that our kids are pretty open to trying new types of food):

Boma-dinner
Ohona-dinner, hope to see fireworks from beach after
1900 Park Fair --dinner (Cindy)
Ashkerhaus (Norway, Princess dinner)
Fantasmic package -- Brown Derby or Mama Melrose
Chef Mickey or Crystal Palace-more character meals
Epcot restaurant--either French, Italian, or German

My question is, how to you schedule your ADRs so they don't dictate your whole schedule of touring the parks? If you have them all for dinners, and make your ressies in advance, then you are "locked in" to going to that park for the evening, even if you are trying to "go with the flow". How do you possibly plan for these things so far in advance, while allowing some flexibility into the whole trip? I'm trying to allow for spontaneity and let me kids be kids, but I am also a compulsive planner, and ADR planning is stressing me out!

Thanks for any and all tips on how your families plan their dining times and days!

 

[Tinkerbellie16]

ADRs will control your day. So plan carefully. Some dinners can take a long time so know in advance that you will spend 1.5 hours or more at dinner that will eat into your park time.

It also means that when you schedule an ADR - you have to be there. So if you swim at your resort and realize it is 4 pm and you have a 5 pm ADR across WDW, you rush to shower, get on the transportation, get into a park, run to the restaurant, etc. I've found breakfasts are the quickest sit down meals but then you have to get up in the morning by a specific time.

If you make ADRs at restaurants without a credit card guarantee or pre-payment, then you could just not show up. But if you are on the dining plan and trying to use credits, you might not realize the full benefits of the plan if you skip a sit down meal.

So yes - think carefully about this!

 

[TDC Nala]

If you don't have park hoppers and you choose restaurants inside theme parks, then you have no choice but to go for the day to the park in which the restaurant you want is located (you can take a break and go back to that park if you like, but you wouldn't be able to go to a different park that day). If you want a meal in one park but you want to tour another, then look into park hopping tickets, although they will cost you more.

If you make a reservation requiring a credit card hold (all the ones you have listed by name do except Boma) then you are required to show up or pay the fee, unless you cancel in time. Please see the credit card hold sticky for information about the cancellation policies. So far we are not seeing on the boards any indication that they will allow a late cancellation for any reason.

 

[clanmcculloch]

I've learned over the years that lunch ADRs work much better for my family. There are many reasons why this works well for us.

• we get a few hours in the park in the morning before sitting down for a scheduled lunch when we're all still in good moods.
• It forces us to eat at a specific time so we don't end up doing "just one more thing" again and again before eating as this leads to overhungry kids (and parents) who get veeeeeery cranky.
• When we're done in a park, we can just leave rather than having to wait around for a dinner ADR.
• When we get back to our resort, we don't need to worry about getting out of the pool and showing at a specific time and if we want we can even have one person run into the food court to grab meals for us all to eat by the pool and the kids can continue swimming while the food's being purchased.
• If we just want to stay at the resort in the evening, we can.

 

[scdufek]

I've learned over the years that lunch ADRs work much better for my family. There are many reasons why this works well for us.

• we get a few hours in the park in the morning before sitting down for a scheduled lunch when we're all still in good moods.
• It forces us to eat at a specific time so we don't end up doing "just one more thing" again and again before eating as this leads to overhungry kids (and parents) who get veeeeeery cranky.
• When we're done in a park, we can just leave rather than having to wait around for a dinner ADR.
• When we get back to our resort, we don't need to worry about getting out of the pool and showing at a specific time and if we want we can even have one person run into the food court to grab meals for us all to eat by the pool and the kids can continue swimming while the food's being purchased.
• If we just want to stay at the resort in the evening, we can.

I agree with this. We did a lunch ressie everyday instead of dinner before the kids could get tired out and cranky, and it worked very well. Then we had more flexability in the afternoon and evening to do with what we wanted. We did do the evening 1900 Park Fare, but made sure to get an early reservation. Also, we did an evening Boma, with an early dinner reservation, and it went well too. Plus, we were staying at the AKL, so that made it more convenient for us. The other 6 ressie were lunch and by far our smoothest days!

 

[Goofy4]

Only now, after several trips, can I schedule both lunch and dinner ADRs and have it work out well.

Don't hesitate to ask if they will seat you early if it works better for you. Le Cellier took us 45 minutes early last week (can't say that will always work).

 

[mainemouselover]

I have found that we do well with resort restaurant ADR's. And now that the kids are older we do later dinner reservations. That way we can go to any park for the day and still do a nice dinner. We will be at Disney next week and all our reservation except the Crystal Palace are at resorts.

 

[NLD]

A few ways to handle this. You can pick one or two of these strategies, or use them all:

Lunch ADRs (as already mentioned). They give you the flexibility to sleep in (mornings) if needed, as well as the flexibility to crash early (evenings).

Don't schedule an ADR for every day. (Which also probably means, don't get the dining plan.) Schedule a couple must-haves, and either do counter service for the rest, or do walk-ups.

Don't schedule too many restaurants with credit card guarantees. Because if you want to cancel one of those last-minute, you'll get hit with a no-show fee.

Get parkhoppers. That way you can be spontaneous with where you go each day, except for making sure you get to your reservations.

Leave some days completely unscheduled (no ADRs and no set parks). That way even if you have a rigid schedule on some days, you have others that can be spontaneous.



As for us... we do a combo of the above strategies. The only thing I don't do is parkhoppers. I dislike parkhopping. When we went on our first trip, we had ADRs every day and parkhoppers, and it felt rigid still, not flexible. So, to give you an idea of the the above strategies can work, here's what our itinerary looks like:

Saturday: arrive in the afternoon. Nothing scheduled. We can do whatever the heck we want that night, whether it's stay at the resort, go to a park, or go to Downtown Disney.

Sunday: Magic Kingdom. Morning Pirate's League appointment. Dinner at Whispering Canyon. (This ADR is at our resort, so we have flexibility to either go back to MK for night hours, or stay at the resort, or go to DTD, or check out Ft Wilderness...)

Monday: Hollywood Studios. Lunch at Sci-Fi. (Notice we can sleep in this morning OR get up and make rope drop. Likewise, we can leave the park early--after lunch--OR stay late for night hours.)

Tuesday: Animal Kingdom. Breakfast at Tusker House. (Leaves our evening open to hang out at the resort or do DTD. Makes it possible for us to leave AK after just a couple hours or stay right to closing.)

Wednesday: Epcot. Dinner at Via Napoli.

Thursday: Nothing scheduled. We can choose whatever park we want to go to. Or we can skip a park. Heck, we could rent a car for the day and drive to the beach if we wanted.

Friday: Departure day. Nothing scheduled, except for catching Magical Express in the late afternoon / early evening. So again, whatever we want to do in the time we have before departure.


This works for us. We have some scheduled time and some unscheduled. It keeps our time spent on travel (parkhopping) down. It keeps our time spent sititing in restaurants down. We schedule the ADRs for where we're going to be, so we don't have to pull ourselves away from a park we're enjoying just to travel to (let's say) a resort just to eat.

Might not work for everyone, but for me, it does.

I know some people love parkhopping. I didn't. I enjoy this way better, felt less rushed, less scheduled, and more free. To each their own.

 

[3pletprincesses]

We usually plan either early character breakfast, early lunch or early dinner and here's why. early breakfast, we do it first thing in the morning before doing anything else. Early lunch on our way out of the park before our resort rest time or a tiny bit later lunch if we are lunching outside the park but we still eat before going back to resort. early Dinner as we will go eat before returning to park or right when we return to the park after our afternoon break. we plan our meals either at the park we are visiting that day or at a resort near the park we are visiting that day. I can't imagine having to stop everything just to run to an ADR to simply get back to where we were to begin with. Our meals are all schedule around our park touring style.

We usually plan 1-2 TS a day(depending on which plan we get) and don't get the park hopper since we take afternoon break and find we have more then plenty to do in each park eveyr day without having to hop to another. I've tried hopping one year and fdidn;t like it as I felt I was always on the road and very little park time but that just me.

 

[Keegansmommy]

We hated that about our last Disney trip and it led to some cranky kid situations. This trip (our boys are 2 and 4) we purposely made all of our ADRs as breakfast or lunch with the exception of dinner at 1900 Park Fare.