It certainly did not on ours, the only real request we had was to have a corner first floor room which was noted on our reservation, on-line check in and fax and still was placed in the center, and the room next to us sat empty our whole 6 day stay.
Maybe it's worthwhile giving some thought as to how the room allocation process works at this point, as this seems to apply to a number of recent posts.
Ready Rooms
First, Disney would ideally prefer to allocate most rooms
on the day of guest arrival using the 'Ready Room' system. This means that whatever time you happen to check in, you stand a better chance of getting a room there and then, rather than having to wait and/or come back after 3pm.
The downside of this system is that there are only going to be a certain number of clean, empty rooms available at any given time, and those will be scattered randomly around the resort. The front desk staff should do their best to match up reservation requests if they can, but this may not always be possible of course.
If you don't like the location you have been assigned (check it on a map
before you leave the front desk) you could ask to wait until later in the day in case a more suitable room might be showing as vacant later but has not yet been cleaned and released. The backstage team may decide to allocate a specific room for you at this time, but even if you are given a keycard in the meantime you will NOT be notified of the actual room number until it is vacant and definitely yours.
Online Check-in
Online check-in simply moves the above process forward by a few hours. A short time before you have said you are due to arrive, a CM working backstage will be going through the day's reservations in batches, looking for available rooms from the current ready pool and assigning them to guest bookings, and then preparing welcome packs with keycards, etc. Again, this process should take requests - both from the original reservation and from the online check-in tick-boxes - into account where possible.
One other advantage that online check-in brings is that if you don't like the room location that you've been assigned, you can ask them to check again and you will effectively get a "double dip" as the pool of available rooms may be completely different by then.
Pre-blocked Rooms
There are some instances where the backstage room assignment team may decide to block out a specific room (or rooms) for you in advance, which they generally start doing up to about 5 days out. If they do this for you, remember there is the possibility that if you check in early then your specifically allocated room may not be ready yet (although other very similar rooms might be free). Also there is the unlikely possibility that an allocated room might subsequently have to be taken out of inventory - maybe for maintenance issues for example.
Cases where they may decide to pre-block rooms include:
- Multiple room bookings / groups. If you have several rooms booked for your party, they may try to pre-allocate you a block of nearby rooms.
- Medical or other accessibility requests. These might even have been blocked out months in advance by the WDW Special Needs folks, or they could be due to requests that have been noted on the reservation (families with strollers for example).
- Consecutive Reservations. Continuing stays by the same guests - e.g. where a booking has been split to take advantage of a special offer, such as Free Dining, which starts part way through a guest's vacation. Sometimes the two bookings might have different room categories because of the way the promotion was sold, but the allocation team will normally try to avoid guests having to change rooms if possible.
- Other special requests. This is where I guess most DISboards faxes come into the equation. If a special request (either faxed or from the original reservation in the system) is especially complex, they may choose to block out a specific room for you. However this is entirely optional - in theory, Disney prefers this sort of request to be assigned via the Ready Room process at check-in, in order to best match the needs of as many guests as possible. In my experience, the Port Orleans team tend to go way above and beyond what you can expect from most other resorts in trying to fulfil general requests though.
I do know that the Port Orleans room assignment team runs daily computer searches to pull out all of the above cases, and to try to tie up same-name reservations which might not be properly linked in the system, etc. They also run regular searches for common request terms such as "Alligator Bayou", "Mansion", etc.
Now, as to how many requests they will decide to pre-block, and how many are left in the system to be dealt with using the Ready Room process at check-in, I really don't know for sure. I assume it depends a lot on how busy they are at the time, and how complex the request is. But do remember that anything that they do at this point should be regarded a nice 'pixie-dust' bonus and should not be expected as a right.
Personally speaking, I would have thought that simple single requests such as Alligator Bayou vs. Mansion Buildings, or upper/lower floor room, would probably be better suited to being allocated at check-in time, as there would most likely be plenty of suitable rooms available to choose from without unnecessarily delaying guests in getting access to a room. But more complex requests, and maybe ones for late-in-the-day arrival times, might be worth pre-blocking. However that's just conjecture on my part.
I hope the above might help answer some people's questions and concerns about the check-in / special requests process anyway.
Andre
Good luck!
