Island Planning Office . . . the wait!

[alien]

I'm usually the obsessive planner and like to make my own PS's for recreation and restaurants. This year, since we're staying Polynesian LVC, I decided to let the Island Planning Office make all of our PS's. I'm waiting to hear (hopefully today) that Tara got all of our requests. Has anyone left it up to the planning office and NOT received all of their PS's?

 

[mcorbo]

I'm usually the obsessive planner and like to make my own PS's for recreation and restaurants. This year, since we're staying Polynesian LVC, I decided to let the Island Planning Office make all of our PS's. I'm waiting to hear (hopefully today) that Tara got all of our requests. Has anyone left it up to the planning office and NOT received all of their PS's?

I have been in contact with Tara and Sarah at the Poly regarding our June trip. They usually take 24-48 hours to respond to an email. Sometimes I will hear back in a couple of hours. I email them almost daily with changes to our itinerary and they have been wonderful about making them and updating them. So far we have everything we wanted, I think one of them was a bit earlier than we expected, but it was all that was available. My list from them is almost 2 pages long at this point.

 

[GreenFroggy]

I stayed at Polynesian Concierge last year and they arranged most of my PS without any problem at all. However, since we were there during the holidays they suggested that if there were any "must have" PS (like Cindy's) that we should try getting them ourselves as well just in case they could not make it happen. (We ended up with 2 PS for Cindy's and cancelled one) Just make sure that if you arrange any PS on your own, you make them under the same name that Concierge is using. If you use different names for your PS, they will not recognize them as yours and you will run into problems if you want their help altering them latter.

 

[MECH8T7]

I'm usually the obsessive planner and like to make my own PS's for recreation and restaurants. This year, since we're staying Polynesian LVC, I decided to let the Island Planning Office make all of our PS's. I'm waiting to hear (hopefully today) that Tara got all of our requests. Has anyone left it up to the planning office and NOT received all of their PS's?

The itinerary planning office at AKL CL was able to get us all the PSs we requested before the 90 day mark, except they did not get us the illuminations cruise on the specific day that we asked for. They did however get the illuminations cruise for us for another day of our stay. By the way, we were there the week before Easter, which is one of WDW's busiest weeks of the year. I would suggest that you make sure that the IPO has a list of all the PSs you want well before the 90 day mark. You can always change them later.

If you are going to ask for CRT or a boat cruise, my suggestion would be to follow-up with the IPO on the afternoon of the 90th day before those hard to get PSs to see if they were successful and, if they were not successful, you can tell them which other days you would like them to try for. Obviously, if you ask for the hard to get PSs earlier in your stay, it gives you a better chance of allowing them to get it for you later in the stay if they couldn't get it for the day you initially asked for.

I too thought about making my own PSs for CRT and Illuminations as a back-up plan in case the IPO was unsuccessful. However, I decided not to for two reasons.

First, one of my reasons for booking concierge was to leave the hassle of booking (as opposed to planning) PSs to someone else which wouldn't be the case if I forced myself to go through the dreaded CRT "drill". Call this the laziness factor.

Second, I felt pretty confident that they would be able to get the hard to get PSs for me on at least one of the days that we would be at WDW...so, I didn't want to tie up the 7:00 am phone lines (or, heaven forbid, even get the PSs on my own) when I knew that I would likely be cancelling one the IPO confirmed that they got it for me as well. Yes, I know a cancelled PS would go back in the pool to be booked by those who, by chance, call later than the 90 day mark looking for cancellations but I didn't think it would be fair to those who had been waiting for months for 7:00 am of the 90 day mark to arrive to lose a space to someone who was booking as "back-up".