It has been about a week since Disney has announced their plans for reopening the Walt Disney World Parks. With the summer travel slowly starting in a few weeks, Disney will start by opening up Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom on July 11th and Hollywood Studios and Epcot on July 15th. However, with the reopening, there will be a slight restructuring of the Disney experience, including a new Disney reservation system.
What are the changes coming?
One of the biggest changes is to reservations that were already established. Disney announced that they were canceling all Fastpass and Dining reservations through the end of the year. Part of the dining reservation is the removal of the free Disney Dining plan that was available through the summer vacation package. Instead, Disney is replacing this with a 35% room discount. Part of the cancellations are due to the new incoming Disney reservation system.
This will be a way that Disney can track how many people are in the park at any given time. By changing the system, they are able to keep with their reopening plan and attempts at social distancing.
How does the reservation system work?
We do not have all of the details at this time but what we do know is that will limit the number of people that they will allow into the parks. It will likely mimic the reservation system that was implemented at Shanghai Disneyland. Guests with resort reservations will have priority followed by annual passholders. After that, if not at capacity, general tickets for that day can be sold.
For Shanghai Disneyland, It was required that visiting the ticket site and verify a phone number. This would be used to create an ID for the individual. Once a ticket had been registered with the account/ID and select the day that it will be used. It has been reported that some people were unable to make further reservations for later in the week until after that day was used. You can select the specific day and time of arrival with the new system. After this has been completed, a QR code will pop up in the app, along with the information such as party size and chosen date. On a positive, the QR code would be unique and would thereby not require fingerprint scanning.
Will it be the same for Disney World and Disneyland
This will likely need to change for the Disney World Reservation system for a couple of reasons. First being the sheer number of people staying on-site and making plans for an entire week. The other being that they have started to allow dining reservations 60 days out instead of the 180. Why this impacts the Disney world reservation system is because you would need to make sure that you get a spot in that specific park for that given day. An example would be if you had a dining reservation at Be Our Guest but not able to get into Magic Kingdom. As soon as more information comes available, we will update this article.
Disney has halted all new ticket sales for the time being but would expect to slowly open this back up after the reopening. This helps keep it for those that have resort reservations and annual passholders.
What do you think of the new Disney World Reservation system? Let us know in the comments!