Which reservation to keep?

[harrowgirl]

I have 2 breakfast ADRs booked - and I'm trying to decide which to keep.....

I have one at 1900 Park Fare, with Alice and Mary Poppins on a non-park day.

I have one at 8:35 at Crystal Palace. The park opens at 8 for EMH, 9am for everyone else. We are staying offsite, so don't qualify for EMH, and planned to be at the park early so we could get in right at 9 or 8:45 of whenever they started letting people in.


Assume the characters don't matter - our preference is similar for each set.

I like the 8:35 gets me into the park before open, but I'm not sure how long we will be in there - are we going to end up losing a lot of park time after 9am?


thoughts?

 

[ericstac]

I have 2 breakfast ADRs booked - and I'm trying to decide which to keep.....

I have one at 1900 Park Fare, with Alice and Mary Poppins on a non-park day.

I have one at 8:35 at Crystal Palace. The park opens at 8 for EMH, 9am for everyone else. We are staying offsite, so don't qualify for EMH, and planned to be at the park early so we could get in right at 9 or 8:45 of whenever they started letting people in.


Assume the characters don't matter - our preference is similar for each set.

I like the 8:35 gets me into the park before open, but I'm not sure how long we will be in there - are we going to end up losing a lot of park time after 9am?


thoughts?

we just ate at Crystal Palace a week ago, its our favorite breakfast it took my family of 5 45 minutes to eat and I ate 3 plates and a bowl of cereal. We got to see all the characters but this varies and can take an hour or more to get all the characters in, if you even care.

that said this is what I would do.. Keep the CP reservation. Go before EMH like at 7:30am. check in. Most likely they will let you in and go check in and eat at CP. I can almost guarantee you will be let in and sat right around 8am. At opening, it is more of a first come first serve until it starts getting busy.

It always works this way for us with 20 minutes off, not that we plan for it to happen, but we like going early and we check in and they sit us.

One extreme example was this last trip we had a 9am rope drop day at Hollywood Studios and a 9:45am reservation. We got there early because our room wasn't ready, we needed to buy a TIW card at guest services, and there was some Jedi Training stuff going on and I was worried the parking lot would get busy so we got there early.. We asked about the breakfast and they checked their sheet, checked us in and told us we could go eat whenever we wanted.. our plans were to get in and go ride Toy Story Mania at 9am as many times as we could before our reservation..
They let us into the park about 15-20 minutes prior to 8:00am to allow the walk to breakfast and we were directed to the restaurant, and they checked in and they said we would be seated in a minute. So we ate and were out before rope drop and the first in line at Toy Story Mania

 

[Wendybird55]

I think part of it depends on what time of year you are going.

I like early breakfast ADRS in park before it opens and we all LOVE Crystal Palace. However, an 8:45 reservation on an EMH day won't help much with getting a jump on the crowd especially if it's a busy time of year.

We've been to Disney many times and I don't follow EMH much and pick park days and such based solely on our preferences. One day I had like and 8:1am ADR at H&V in DHS and it turned out it was also and EMH day. First even though we had and ADR we had to wait with everyone else to be let in for 8am open (couldn't get in sooner) Then everyone else went for rides and we went for breakfast. So it really didn't give us any head start. But it didn't really affect us much as the park wasn't overly crowded

HOWEVER..with FP+ you can pick your FP selections 30 days in advance and can make them for after breakfast and then after you use your 3 advance FP+ you can pick more.

If your choice is based solely on restaurant quality...I pick Crystal Palace. We always enjoy it there. As far as getting a head start you will get a bit of a head start by getting into park with EMH crowd..but I found even on EMH days parks tend to start getting really busy after 10am and you'll have plenty of time to enjoy breakfast and hit some rides before more people still filling the park.

 

[PrincessKimmy]

I d keep CP. Even if you dont get a jump on the crowds, I dont think youd lose much park time. Id shpw up early like pp suggested and hopefully get seated a little early.
Even if you dont get out until after 9:00 if you use your fp+ wisely you shouldnt lose out.

They are both good choices overall, but we prefer cp.

 

[dhardawa]

For me personally, I prefer 1900 Park Fare. Is there a reason you aren't doing both?

 

[kam1011]

I'd keep 1900. You're already missing the perk of early entry... by the time you're done eating, the park will be full.

 

[It's A Happy Day]

Really I think that the only thing that matters here would be character interaction as
- 1 has no park attachment to it and
- the other doesn't really get you the benefit of the early "before opening" perk that most people go for with the early reservation due to the EMH situation. I actually just cancelled a CP reservation for 8:45am BECAUSE it's the same day that MK has an AM EMH and by the time we finished eating we would have lost the EMH perk. If I'm going to wake up early to get in the park early then I don't want Main Street to already be busy.

IMO I would choose 1900 Park because you have characters you 'don't really see in the parks. Pooh & characters you can arrange to see w/o the restaurant setting.

 

[harrowgirl]

I was able to get an 8:05 at CP, so I decided to keep that one . I booked the wonderland tea party instead of 1900 park for brekkie