Disney World closes this dining loophole now

Disney makes the unfortunate decision to make it more difficult to manage dining reservations. Take a look and see what’s changed.

Dining Options

Disney World offers a huge variety of food choices. First, you can choose quick service options. With these, you don’t need a reservation and can get back to your touring plan in no time. If you’re looking for a snack or light meal, check out the various carts too.

Next, there are table service options. All of these require making reservations ahead of time (unless you’re lucky and find walk-up availability.) These are more expensive than quick service, but give you the chance to take a break from your busy day. Table service options include casual dining, character dining, and fine dining experiences.

Dining Reservations

Getting your Advanced Dining Reservations (ADRs) set up for your trip is one of the most fun parts of planning a Disney vacation! I (Susan) enjoy browsing menus for each restaurant and figuring out how much it would cost my family to eat there.

However, it can be difficult to predict ahead of time when your family should stop and eat. In the past, I’ve used the dining plan and it felt like our touring plans revolved around dining reservations.

Guests can book dining reservations 60 days ahead of time. I recommend being on the Disney website at 6:00am on your 60 day mark, especially if you plan to eat at the most popular restaurants, such as ‘Ohana, Askershus, and Roundup Rodeo BBQ. For tips on getting the most difficult dining reservations, read HERE.

Reservation Change

In the past, most dining reservations guests had until 11:59 pm the night before their reservation to cancel their dining reservation or they will be charged a $10 per person cancellation fee. However, recently that changed to a 2-hour window, giving guests more flexibility. Note: this doesn’t affect pre-paid and dining experiences.

As long as there was availability, guests could modify these reservations very close to the reservation time. But that’s changed now. Disney website now states that restaurants offering advance reservations do not allow modifications within 2 hours of the reservation time.

Restaurants offering advance reservations do not allow modifications within 2 hours of the reservation time.

Does it make sense to line up the cancellation and modification dining policy? Or are you disappointed in this change? Please let us know in the comments.