**October 27 2009, 180 Day Reservation Thread**

[Stitch And Friends]

Website is back to showing the message that the booking engine is down

 

[Corwin]

Not working for me. Getting this message:

"We are currently rolling out a *NEW* online dining application to make your reservation process even easier. Please come back and try our new system when it is available. To make a dining reservation at this time, please call (407) WDW-DINE or (407) 939-3463. Guests under age 18 must have parent or guardian permission to call."

Now the online system is back to this again:

"Sorry, the booking system is currently unavailable. Please try again later or call (407) WDW-DINE or (407) 939-3463. If you are under 18 years of age, you must have your parent or guardian's permission to dial this number."

 

[TinkerBelle_325]

SCORE!!!! Finally got through on the main reservation line, got everything I wanted and even made a couple of extra just because I could!

I'm happy you got through, but why take more than you need when you know there are thousands of people that don't have anything yet??

 

[js]

Online is back down, right as I got a California Grill ADR grrrrrr

Not for me. I would LOVE Calf. Grill for March 31

 

[threedisprincesses]

Well DVC, Cm, Jean Pierre, just told me that the dining system is down, has been since yesterday, said it was a system wide issue, not just DVC. This makes no sense, others are making reservations.

This is my question also???? Why are people getting different info?

 

[Belleandtinker]

I FINALLY got a CM and was told to call back in 2 hours. Phone and On-line ressies on hold.

 

[miprender]

Spoke with a nice CM 5 min ago at member services. She told me the entire system is down, call them back in an hour...
How are some people still booking now?
Should I keep trying? I don't want to give up if there is hope...

I want to know too... two CMs said the system is down.

 

[js]

I want to know too... two CMs said the system is down.

Me too. MS said the dining ressie system is "Global" so if they can't the Dining number can't

 

[DisneyDreamerK]

I quit...lol

going back to sleep

 

[ShanF]

THIS IS CRAZY, but yet so much fun at the same time!!!
As I am waiting I keep changing my mind on my times and places LOL
Good Luck everyone!!

 

[EnchantedPrincess]

I just went online, and got the message that they are rolling out a NEW online dining reservation and to come back later to check out the new system.

Still no luck on the phone, just busy signals.

 

[chirurgeon]

Yea! I got (most...CRT is a little late) of what I wanted...

Week of 4/17-4/23
4/18
Crystal palace Breakfast
Sci-Fi Dine In Dinner

4/19
Akershus Dinner

4/20
Le Cellier Dinner

4/21
CRT - The ONLY time available all week was 8:05pm so I took it in hopes to make it earlier when the system clears up!

4/22
San Angel Inn

4/23
50's Prime Time

All in all I am very happy!

I haven't been able to get through yet. I like all of these, can I join you?

Kim

 

[CandleontheWater]

I've gotten 4 member DVC service people and they all are saying they can't make dining reservations. They are now opening their spiel by saying that dining is down. I guess I'll keep trying WDW dine, although I tried for an hour and a 1/2 this morning with no luck. Bummer, I hope this means that I still have a shot at Chef Mickeys for breakfast on April 10th.

 

[funforfive]

I only needed 2 dinners but got them both within 30min of times I wanted...tried for almost an hour to get through...got through at about 7:34lmao and was on hold for 23 min before getting a very nice CM!

4/11 Chef Mickey dinner 5:30
4/12 Le Cellier dinner 6:05

 

[joshua4]

You guys are depressing me. I am on hold and just got a cm. I said "a live human being!" and she said "Yes, but I am room reservations not dining" I said "well, I dialed dining" and she transferred me back into disney music hell. I got a nine more minutes message but now I suspect that once I do my time I will get a cm who will tell me she cannot book anything for me.

 

[jkcyoung]

Done!!!!!Got a very nice CM and her computer crashed while she was pulling my res She tried and tried to get it to work to no avail. She asked if I wanted to hold or try back later. I chose to holdThe original CM kept coming back and updating me and eventually transferred me to another CM that got all my ADR's for me The baby is not bathed, the kids are not dressed for school(this afternoon) but I got my ADR's. I think I have lost all rational

 

[my2disneyboys]

I got through FINALLY!! Was able to get all that we wanted. Good luck to all you out there still trying to get through....

Saturday: Chef Mickey 5:10PM
Sunday: Liberty Tavern 8:05AM -Tonys 2pm
Monday: Kona 7:30AM - Chef de france 12:30PM -San Angel 7:00PM
Tuesday: Play N Dine 8:00AM -Sci fi 1:35PM -Cali Grill 7pm
Wednesday: 1900 Park 8:30AM - Biergarten 1:40PM - Tutto 6:45PM
Thursday: Tusker house 8:00AM -Yak and yetti 1:00PM -Ohana- 6:25PM
Friday: Wave 7:30AM -Plaza 12:00PM - Luau- cat 2 seating 5:15PM
Saturday: Ohana 8:30AM - Kona 5:05PM

 

[Cafeen]

I think the 100 day rollout plan would have been a good one, too.

That being said, I'm not sure what else they could have done? I'm sure they have already increased the number of employees manning the system, but it's not like they could have gone out on the street and found 100 people to come in and work for the day!

There is a lot of training that has to be done in order to be a good call center rep, and, especially given the current economic situation, a company cannot just suddenly throw untrained people into the mix.

Someone earlier mentioned Ticketmaster, well I've seen their system go down just as easily. Let's face it there are probably 1000's of calls coming in right now.

I'm willing to cut them some slack on this, because it's impossible to predict exactly how much traffic will be coming into your call center.

First, a rollout plan would have been a lot better and would have spread the load out over several days rather than all at once.

Ticketmaster was 2nd hand info, so I'm not too sure about it really (so take that with a grain or three of salt) . However, I have seen direct communication from Blizzard (Software Company) relating to large patch and expansion days as well as Blizzcon (their user convention, which is huge) sales days.

There is a ton of background stuff that they do to prepare for these days. They have over 10million subscribers to one of their games (worldwide, North America is about 6-7million), so they do get slammed pretty hard. (And most of these are a bit more computer savvy than your average person).

The biggest issue is load, with the amount of information (Web or Phone based) coming in, things will get jammed, there's only so much information that can either fit in the pipe coming down or that the servers (which handle, separately, both Web and Phone systems) can handle. When preparing for a large day, they will often pull extra resources and appropriate them to spread the load out. They will also disable many unessential web side pieces (forums, their character gearing app, and I've even seen them disable account administration), opening more connections for users for whatever big thing they're doing. Of course, I'm sure the loads that Disney are experiencing are nowhere near what Blizzard sees on a daily basis, so they are less apt to be as prepared. It doesn't excuse them from not being prepare from an IT side though. They could have "easily" done the same thing (to a lesser extent of course) for both the web, phone, and internal network systems.

They did increase the staffing, and from reports of Spanish filler text, I could guess that they also altered phone routing. It doesn't seem like they did much of anything to increase actual capacity though. The website being dropped in < 1 minute as well as the constant circuitry issues are further evidence of this. Also, Disney's track record with IT-related issues is even more support.

Looking at my example, Blizzcon had two sales days over this summer. They had a total of ~25,000 tickets available. On both those days, there were very few other portions of the site up during the time the sales were going. They had roughly 30k-50k people hit their site within 15 minutes of sales opening on each day and the site remained perfectly stable. They planned for it and knew it was coming. Disney has been having issues on normal high volume days between website outages and overloaded phones. They should have easily seen this coming.

So, yes, it is quite possible to plan your system for a day like this. Especially with two months notice.

However, with that wall of text said (hey, you asked what they could have done different ), I'm sure that everyone is working their tails off today doing whatever they can to pitch in, and I'm sure that the issues above were brought up beforehand as well. I don't envy the CMs working the phone system today, nor do I envy their IT department which is likely running around frantic right now trying to get stuff back up.

 

[Corwin]

I did to. I cannot believe I said "yes" when she told me to try again in an hour.

That's excatly what I said too.

I'm so sad.

Me too. I got through earlier, but somehow missed one of my reservations. After redialing for 45 minutes, I finally got put on hold and waited for 30 minutes, only to have the CM who answered tell me that her system was down. She said that she could not transfer me, nor could she put me back on hold, because the system would just transfer me right back to her.

So I thanked her and hung up. I redialed and I'm back to "all circuits are busy now."

 

[andrewilley]

I FINALLY got a CM and was told to call back in 2 hours. Phone and On-line ressies on hold.

Probably just means that all the reservations that they did manage to book this morning haven't been stored after all. Still, never mind eh?

Andre