Park Reservations with AP

[Duck143]

I feel like if they are going to sell out a park, they should reserve additional space for APs. In our experience, it was the exact opposite. If buying a new ticket you could book a reservation. Four family members did this yesterday. The four of us with APs could not.

Also one observation from the parks... There is a ton of closed and roped off space that would add immediate capacity to the parks. For example, the splash station in MK by barnstormer. The play area in Dinoland at AK. Both remain closed. All the closed restaurants and tables. Bring back shows and nighttime entertainment. This has nothing to do with distancing, covid. It has to be staffing. Take a ride like Buzz lightyear or Toy Story Mania. Each and every rider is touching the gun hour after hour all day. How can this be okay but an outdoor play area in Dinoland not be okay? Im not ranting. We love Disney. Just my observation from the past few days. There is a lot more room for folks to spread out if they would just open everything back up.

I was told our park dates were completely booked (we had 8 day park hoppers and all our days reserved), and I noticed many people at the front gate purchasing tickets to get in that day.

 

[MomOTwins]

Excluding if there are Blackout dates, APs paid for ability to enter a park(s) anytime they want. If they wanted to book every day (if this was available) they are entitled to do so. I definitely think that AP's should be able to reserve more than 3 days at a time.

That's why APs were offered a full refund before Disney implemented a new policy. They didn't have to pay the same for reduced access, but they were given the option and chose to. So everyone who has an AP now agreed to the new terms (including that any passes after the first three would be subject to availability, and including that they could book an onsite stay if they wanted to guarantee more advance passes). The whole concept of park passes is that there are a limited number of them--otherwise why even have a reservation system? The fact that APs maybe didn't take seriously the risk of passes selling out doesn't make it unfair to them. Just like when we went down at spring break, we found a lot of angry people being turned away from the parks because they booked a hotel room and tickets through Disney and were told they needed to make park passes, but didn't take that seriously because they thought there was no way that Disney would shut out an onsite hotel guest paying thousands of dollars to be there, but that is exactly what happened.

I was told our park dates were completely booked (we had 8 day park hoppers and all our days reserved), and I noticed many people at the front gate purchasing tickets to get in that day.

So this could be one of a couple of things. It could be that people cancelled park passes in the morning that they had made "just in case" or because they changed plans (or got sick), freeing up availability for same day passes. It could be that Disney had expanded inventory last-minute for that day (there were a lot of days that went from grey to green when Disney relaxed the distancing requirements). It could be those people had already purchased tickets/passes and were picking them up at the ticketing booth (i.e. "will call"). But there is not some sort of of secret plethora of tickets being sold to people without passes. Pretty much what you see with the park pass system is what you get. As noted above, when a park is full, Disney has turned away people.

 

[kylenne]

Well but to be fair, there were plenty of other times the resort/ticket bucket was completely greyed out while APs were not.

It’s like that again right now actually, if you check the calendar for next week. Resort guests are totally greyed out while APs can still get get into AK and Epcot. I go down on Saturday and have been paying attention to these dates for a while now, AP availability was wide open for weeks while resort guests were frozen out of HS. I had to call the passholder line in order to get the HS reservation I have on my pool day at YC (just in case, for another Rise chance), because the website defaults to the resort guest bucket even if you also have an AP.

The funny thing is I’ve seen these same complaints being made, only it was people with resort reservations thinking they should get consideration over APs. Everyone is impacted by this system tbh. All I can say is I distinctly remember a giant warning disclaimer that reiterated the system that I had to click through in order to renew my AP back in February.

 

[LiteBrite]

Well I knew of the 3 day limitation before renewing APs. Never once thought that we would not be able to book beyond that. We were never told that either. We are in Orlando now and cannot go to any more parks. We have tried booking one person at a time, all hours of the day, etc. no luck yet. CM did not have any solutions either other than keep trying. We are not sour about it. Enjoying some more pool time. It would have been nice to have been warned verbally. Also family staying with us were able to book park reservations same day around noon for new ticket purchase. APs stayed blocked. It seems Disney welcomes the immediate cash this way.

I said this earlier up thread, and I'm going to say it again - every day this week, AP availability is added at 2pm. It's not as good as having all day available for sure, but yesterday we were without PPRs in the morning, and at 2pm we were able to book the Studios and spent the afternoon and evening there.

Just wanted to reiterate this in case there are other people there at the moment who are in the same boat, having traveled to WDW with their APs and can't get PPRs any other way.