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It has been a few weeks since Disney has announced their plans for reopening the Walt Disney World Parks. With the summer travel slowly starting in the next couple of weeks, Disney will start by opening up Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom on July 11th and Hollywood Studios and Epcot on July 15th. Certain sports will also be reopening during this time as well. However, with the reopening, there will be a slight restructuring of the Disney experience, including a new Disney World 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. We have seen a reservation system start-up in Shanghai but this is different than Florida.
How does it work for Shanghai Disneyland?
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.
How does Disney world reservation system work?’
Starting off you will need to link your park admission to your Disney account. The tickets will need to have been purchased previously. Once you have added your ticket purchases, you will be able to create a party.
This can be done by selecting friends and family from a list and hitting continue. At this point, you can start to select the day that you will be going to one of the parks. Then you will need to choose which of the 4 Disney parks you will be going to that day and the time you will be visiting the parks.
There will be no park hopping at this point, so you will only be able to pick 1 park per day. Of note, there will be a COVID-19 liability waiver that will need to be signed under terms and conditions. After confirmed, you will be able to see the all of your reservations under plans. You can use the “make another reservation” button to finish planning the other days of your Disney vacation.
Will it be the same for Disney World and Disneyland
This likely needed to change the Disney World Reservation system for a couple of reasons. First is 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 had been halting all ticket sales for a time but has slowly opened this back up. This helps keep it for those that have resort reservations and annual passholders. At the time of reopening, they have started through September of 2021. Annual passholders can book reserved spots while they have resort reservations, and up to 3 days currently for days they are not staying on property.
What do you think of the new Disney World Reservation system? Let us know in the comments!