Mousekingdom Blog

Walt Disney World guest can book their restaurants using the new online Disney ADR (advance Dinning Reservation) booking system. The system has been online for about one week. It should help people to plan their dining experience and make bookings from the comfort of their own home, without the long waiting times when calling Disney direct for reservations.

Sounds good! And it does, for those living in the USA. Unfortunately it isn’t that easy if you’re from abroad. After getting to know the tool and fighting to find a restaurant that still have some tables free you can go and “check out”. (That’s if you don’t get an error message that the system is not available, something that happened to me 4 times). It is now that the real problem start for those guest coming from abroad. Some restaurants need credit card verification. For example, if you want to dine at the Californian Grill you will need a credit card, otherwise a reservation will not be possible. But after trying multiple times to enter a card, with three different credit cards, the error kept popping up that the card cannot be authorized.

Without the authorization, no reservation!

After checking the Mouseowners forum it looks like this is normal. If you don’t have a US credit card the tool will not be able to work. The reason for this is unknown at the moment. (is it the card, the address you enter?…)

Another issue is the phone number one needs to provide. You will need to provide the system with a phone number, also for reservation where a credit card is not needed. Even when you can enter a non US address, although you will need to enter a 5 digit zip code too even if your country has only 4 or one with letters, the phone number to enter can only be a US number. This one however can be filled out using 000-000-0000 and you will still get your reservations. For the high end restaurants where a credit card is needed a phone call to Disney reservations will be needed. (including long waiting times for free)

Let’s hope Disney will get these errors out of the system soon so everybody, worldwide, can start using the it. It’s a great idea and a great tool, and the internet makes everything so accessible, but only when the system is set up so the whole world can use it…

If you’re from the USA, or if you are booking a restaurant where a credit card isn’t needed do check out the Advance Dining Reservation site as it is a big help and a lot faster then waiting at the phone.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Disney Theme Parks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.