Disney dining reservations can be made 60 days before the first day of your trip. On this day you can make reservations for up to the first 10 days of your trip. If your trip is shorter than this, you can make reservations for your whole trip at the 60 day mark. If your trip is longer than 10 days, you can make the first 10 days at the 60 day mark and each day after that you can make reservations for the subsequent days of your trip (e.g. 59 days before your trip you could make reservations for the 11th day, 58 days before you could reserve for the 12th day, and so on).
The 60 day window begins at 6am eastern time. I highly recommend logging on right at that time to make all of your dining reservations. To make the process even easier, you should already have a My Disney Experience account with credit card information saved. Credit card information is used to charge a fee if your party does not show up to their dining reservation. Some dining experiences are charged at the time of booking: Cinderella’s Royal Table and the Hoop Dee Doo Musical Revue.
How to Get Your Most Desired Disney Dining Reservations
If you are new to making Disney World dining reservations you may not realize that the process can be very competitive. That’s why I recommend being online right when your booking window begins.
So, how do you get your most wanted reservations in this highly competitive environment? Follow along to find out!
The first thing I do after I decide on park days is figure out where my family is going to eat. I comb through many of the menus to see what my family would be willing to eat and which restaurants have allergy friendly foods that my son will eat. I make a list of which restaurants we would like to eat at in each park.
If possible, I try to put my most desired dining experiences towards the end of the trip. This might mean switching some park days around or park hopping if dining there is very important to my family. The reason you want to put these experiences at the end of your trip is because your 60 day mark is someone else’s 60+10 day mark. Essentially your trip begins at the end of someone else’s and that person has had up to 10 days to make their reservations before you even got the chance. Putting those coveted reservations at the end of your trip gives you a much higher chance of getting them.
Make a List!
Now that you’ve decided where you would like to eat and have made sure that your most wanted dining experiences will be towards the end of your trip, I recommend making a list.
At the 60 day mark you are going to have to decide which reservations you make first, right at 6am eastern time and which can wait for another 10-15 minutes. So that you do not need to think about this in the very early morning or middle of the night (depending on your time zone), a list is important.
It does not have to be fancy. I write mine on a notepad. I write which reservations I will try to get first. On my last trip I really wanted to do a dessert party but the only day we could do it was on our first park day. I knew that it might not even be available because it’s a special dining experience and it would fall at the end of another visitor’s trip, so I made it my first priority.
Picture of my actual list. The date on the left is the date I wanted the reservation for. At 6am at the 60 day mark I began at the top and worked my way down to the bottom.
Only you can decide what to tackle first based on what is important to your family. It definitely deserves taking some time to think about.
What to do if you missed out on a desired reservation?
Sometimes even with the best planning you miss out on your desired dining reservation? What do you do now? Stalk the Disney website. Honestly, any time you have a spare minute or two, check to see if anything has popped up. People change their plans all the time! You can definitely get lucky. You are more likely to get lucky doing this the closer your trip gets because that’s when visitors finalize their plans.
If you do not have time to constantly check the Disney website for reservations, I do recommend the Sakeout app. It’s available on the App Store and Google Play. The app continuously checks for dining reservation availability and sends you a notification if something becomes available. Please note that you have to be fast once you receive the notification because others looking for the same thing will have also been notified of the availability.
