Today’s the day! The sun is shining and we are making Disney World park reservations! So long as you have a resort booked and tickets or an annual pass linked. Otherwise the reservation system opens for annual passholders without a resort stay to begin booking on June 26th 2020 and those with existing tickets can begin booking on June 28th 2020. The reservation timeframe is open through September 26th of 2021.
We’ll walk you though how the system should move through in a glitch free world, but there have been and will be a ton of glitches popping up. We’ll also show you a handful of the common glitch or loading pages you are likely to see along the way. Remember Vanellope Von Sweetz, not all glitches are bad, they’re just functioning differently and if you know how the glitches tend to behave you may be better able to work it in your favour. Just remember that this is a completely brand-new section added to their system that was created in a matter of months, patience will be key here.
First thing is to try to log in to your MyDisneyExpereince at the main Walt Disney World website.
Once logged in, if it does not take you there already, you will want to click on My Plans. It will take you to a general over view, and if you scroll down will show a daily break down of your plans.
First you’ll want to make sure that your account is connected with the Family & Friends that you plan on enjoying Disney World with. Then if you are staying on property you will want to make sure your resort reservation is linked for yourself and others attending. Same thing goes lastly for your park tickets or annual passes, you’ll need those linked.
Once you see everything is linked properly you will want to click on “View Availability” within the Important Message shown towards the top.
It will first ask you to select the people who you will be wanting to make a park reservation for. Make sure your party is correctly selected and continue.
A calendar will then appear, continue on to the appropriate month that applies to you and select a date. For myself I am using August 18th 2020 as my example here.
Once selected the four park options will show just below, along with the time frame that you can enter each of the parks.
Click on the park of your choice and it will move you thorough to reconfirm the arrival time window that you can have for that park on that day.
Once you have confirmed the park and arrival time it takes you to your final screen for review. Here they ask you to read and agree to the terms of service and a COVID-19 liability waiver.
After reading and agreeing to the terms click on the box and continue through to the confirmation page. You will see the park, your party members attending, and your arrival window. While there are vary rarely problems with Fastpass selections truly disappearing it has happened so to error on the side of caution we suggest to take sceenshots of all you confirmations.
Your theme park reservation will show within My Plans in a way similar to how Fastpass have traditionally be seen. On the mobile app it even shows as a ‘Fastpass’.
Now, the above is how the park reservation should go if things go perfectly smooth. Along the way you may encounter some issues and a variety of loading screens. If you run into any of the true ‘error’ pages you will need to try to reload or exit out completely and re-enter. Some examples include when Stitch eats the page, or Olaf’s “Whoops!”, or the classic 504 gateway timeout.
If you see a loading page that looks like the wonderful castle or the Space Mountain then you are in a good spot (theoretically) and are in part of a waiting queue. Just sit tight. Sometimes the Castle will refresh to the Space Mountain page and other times just goes right in. The Space Mountain will occasionally show a countdown clock starting from 15 minutes. The clock has often not been accurate and will sometimes seem to reset. Don’t worry about it, just ignore the clock. You are all in the queue and should get moving along shortly.
Some other common glitches that are occurring is that things keep “disappearing”. Resort details or park tickets may not show under My Plans. Don’t worry, I almost guarantee that they are in fact there. It’s not an uncommon issue in general for that to happen and with the new addition to their system it is seemingly occurring more. Before panicking just try refreshing the My Plans page and see if it comes back. It may take a bit for it to “come back” where you can see it (depending on how overloaded the system is) but it should show again. If you still can’t get a resort stay or tickets to show after a few hours or a day then I’d try giving Disney a call. Currently it is near-impossible to get through the phone lines or chat so don’t put yourself through the extra stress and hassle too soon, you may not need to call at all. Below are an example that shows where my resort “disappeared”.
As of right now there is no way to book your park reservations on the mobile app – though you can view your confirmed choices through the app. You can attempt to use you mobile or tablet’s browser to go to the Disney site and go through the process but so far from personal attempt it is more likely to leave you staring at the castle or Space Mountain for hours. A laptop or desktop seems to be the preferred way to go to make your reservations go smoother and quicker. Just keep trying and you’ll get through.
