You’ve got your trip booked, but now you need to know how to book a dining reservation at Walt Disney World. With over 200 different restaurant choices, it can be extremely overwhelming trying to narrow down where you want to eat. And since you book dining reservations 180 days before your trip, you’ve got to know 6 months before you go if you will want to eat at the most popular restaurants or you won’t be able to get a reservation!
200+ days before your Walt Disney World trip, start narrowing down where you want to eat. You can read reviews of all the restaurants here on CouponingtoDisney.com and you can check out the menus on the Walt Disney World dining site.
182+ days before your trip, finalize where you will attempt to make dining reservations. Make a list with each restaurant and 3 different times that you would like to book there. Have at least 3 alternate restaurants for your trip just in case the one you want is booked.
181+ days before your trip, store your credit card in your account on MyDisneyExperience. Make sure that your resort reservation is liked under My Reservations.
On the morning of your 180th day, you can log onto MyDisneyExperience.com at 6 am EST to book your dining reservations. At 7 am, you can book them over the phone at 407-WDW-DINE.
Here is how to book a reservation on MyDisneyExperience.com:
Search for the name of the restaurant you want to book. You can see above that there are fields on this page to include date, time and party size of the reservation. I skip that and instead click on the arrow to the right next of the name of the restaurant that I want to book. I find the restaurant’s dining page to have a friendlier reservation interface than this page.
On the restaurant’s page, you’ll see a blue box on the far right where you can input your reservation details and the time you want to book your meal. There is an option to pick Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner and that will look for available times within a 4 hour window. Click “Find a Table” to bring up a list of available reservation times.
Click on the time you would like and you’ll be redirected to a page to select which guests will be at the reservation.
You’ll then be directed to the payment page where you put your credit card guarantee. You will not be charged today (unless you are booking at Cinderella’s Royal Table and you aren’t on the dining plan), this is just to prevent you from not showing up for a reservation that you have made.
On the final page, you’ll verify your email and cell phone number and agree to the terms. This is also the page where you can indicate your special dietary restrictions such as a milk or peanut allergy (although this can be edited at any time, so I do not recommend filling this out on the morning of your 180th day. Come back and edit it at a later time). Click the Reserve button and you are all set!
Don’t miss these tips on when to book your dining reservations.
Learn more about Walt Disney World Dining and get suggestions for where to eat, how to use the Disney Dining Plan and more.