Look, we get it — planning a Disney World vacation can be tricky. That’s why we’re here to help in any way we can.
Magic Kingdom
Booking a Disney World vacation often requires picking out the ideal hotel reservations for you and your family in addition to selecting dining reservations that will elevate your trip from good to great. Reservations, whether they’re for hotels or dining, are pretty much standard for most folks visiting Disney World. However, it turns out you could be making a crucial mistake when going through the reservation process.
You might be aware that Disney World offers reservation windows. For example, when you book a Disney World trip at a Disney resort, you will be able to begin selecting your dining reservations 60 days out from your check-in. However, that rule gets a little dicey when considering split stays.
Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort
Before we get into the specifics, it’s important that we define a split stay. Split stays are simply trips where you stay at two or more hotels during one Disney World Resort visit. Often, people will do this to make itineraries work, budget, or experience multiple hotels during one trip. It’s a pretty simple process, but it does change the finer details when it comes to dining reservations.
Art of Animation
We recently saw a future Disney World guest named Stephen ask planDisney the following question:
“I have a Disney World stay planned but I am switching resorts in the middle. Will I be able to book dining 60 days from the first resort check in through the entire trip? Or just through the first resort stay?”
A Disney panelist wrote back and clarified Disney World’s rules.
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According to the panelist, guests utilizing split stays will have multiple booking windows.
“However, since your Resort hotel reservations are separate bookings at two locations with different confirmation numbers, you’ll have two separate booking windows,” wrote the panelist. They also suggested that reservation availability is “generally greater the further into one’s booking window,” so working backward from the end of your stay might yield some better results. Either way, this is something you need to be aware of when making dining reservations in conjunction with split stays.
Homecomin’
As a reminder, dining reservations can be made in the My Disney Experience app. When in doubt or if confusion sets in, there’s never any harm in reaching out to an official Disney representative via phone or online chat to clarify questions you might have about the dining reservation process.
You can also learn more about advanced dining reservations by clicking the link HERE!
Steakhouse 71
Have you run into this reservation catch before? Let us know and continue to follow us right here at the Disney Food Blog for the latest Disney World news, tips, reviews, and more!
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Which hotels would you select for your ideal split stay? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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We are out to try as many of the hotels as we can, but our go-to split stay is to take a day (or a few days) at the beginning at Doubletree at Disney Springs. This way we don’t ‘waste’ our first true ‘Disney Resort Day’ with travel time. We take that day or those days to get in our Disney Springs time (while we’re close and still have plenty of spending money lol), and spend a couple of days getting our ‘Disney legs’ back in the parks, and then take a ‘rest’ day to switch to our ‘real’ Disney resort. The Doubletree is great, but it always feels like an upgrade to ‘enter the bubble’ and switch to our on-site resort. Shopping at Disney Springs in the early days of the trip also helps to cut down on stuff we would have to lug from the parks, and gives us more time in the parks as well. There’s always souvenirs that are unique to each park, but getting the annual souvenirs and what can be had from the Star Wars shops at Disney Springs helps a lot with our park visits.
When we did a split stay, we called the dining reservation line when it opened in the morning 60 days out and the Cast Member was happy to make dining reservations for our full stay’s length since we were unable to online. Cast Members are so helpful!
I have had the same experience as the previous poster. I called the dining line and they gladly made all my reservations for the second half of our split stay. The only negative is that the dining line opens at 7 AM, an hour after online reservations open. Still, we had no issues getting everything we wanted.
I have heard reports of people calling and being told this isn’t possible, so it may just depend on who you get on the phone. If someone told me no, I’d just politely end the call and then call back and try again.
Thank you for writing this article. I just learned of this split stay challenge which is not published on the Disney site or app. Very frustrating and now I’m looking at changing resort reservations. This is not a magical experience.
This just happened to me. I went in January to Disney and then used that stay to do a bounce back offer for September and decided to do a 7 day stay at a deluxe hotel. However before my trip began I added 2 days to the trip and stayed at the all stars value resort as I wanted to try all the different resorts. When it came time for the 60 day dining I can only book for the 2 days at the all stars when I reached out to Disney they informed me that because of 2 different booking confirmations I had to wait different days to book the dining reservations. Led to a stressful week but at least I learned that while split stays are fun they do have their stressful moments.