With an ADR-How long do you wait?

[Dreamfinder2]

I think about the longest we've ever had to wait was about 20 minutes once. And the screw turns two ways - we showed up for Sci-Fi about 90 minutes early and were seated immediately (granted, this was just after it opened).

 

[MouseEarsJenny]

Last trip, we waited an hour and a half to be seated at Chef Mickey's. Course, that's cause the person checking us in took our confirmation number, took our picture, and then somehow managed to delete our entry from the system. Also, we were ridiculously early in the first place (like 40 minutes, I'm thinking? We had overestimated our travel time by quite a bit...). So at first, we thought they were just not seating us because we were early. Then our ADR time passed, then it was 20 minutes past, then 30... eventually we got up and asked to see if we had missed the beeper going off. When the manager discovered we'd been deleted, he was profusely apologetic, hustled us to a table immediately, and had a waitress run and get us drinks. (They still had our picture, so I guess he had proof we'd been there for an hour and a half at that point...)

But, as I say, 40 minutes of the 90 was just us being overeager.

Actually, we were MUCH more annoyed by the twenty minutes we waited at 'Ohana for a late breakfast when we could see 85% of the tables were completely empty.

 

[catne]

seems like the closer your reservation is to the most popular dining times, the worse the back-up. We're early birds at all meals - worst we ever waited was 15 minutes at Coral Reef lunch in January (was a 11:50 lunch ADR.) At Chef Mickey's breakfast in January, we had 7:30 a.m. (our choice) -- we checked in at 7:25, and were seated at about 7:35. There were maybe 6-8 other people waiting at that point.

When we left about 50 minutes later - close to 8:30, there had to be 75 people waiting & a steady stream of people walking towards the place. It was obvious the later breakfast times were much more crowded, and the seating was backing up. Can't imagine what the crowd would be like by 9:00 a.m.