The new Mobile Dine Walk-Up Waitlist service has finally been rolled out to the My Disney Experience app! The My Disney Experience app is now equipped with a new feature that will allow guests to check wait times at restaurants throughout Walt Disney World and add parties of 7 guests or less to the walk-up waitlist, if available. It does seem that the feature is still testing, with only select restaurants available, but it has been integrated into the app.
When you go to search for dining reservations on My Disney Experience, you’re now given the “Now” option under “Search by Time”. Of course, this only works for same-day availability.
In order to facilitate social distancing and minimize unnecessary interactions at the check-in podium, parties of 7 or less can put themselves on the Walk-up list. Parties of 8 guests or more must still inquire at the podium for walk-up availability. These are the restaurants we can currently see under the service:
- Kona Cafe at Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort
- Sanaa at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge – Kidani Village
- Topolino’s Terrace – Flavors of the Riviera at Disney’s Riviera Resort
- Whispering Canyon Cafe at Disney’s Wilderness Lodge
At the bottom of the page, it’s noted that additional dining locations may have availability, but do not offer a walk-up list via the app.
Currently, these restaurants show “Walk-up list is currently unavailable to join due to high demand.” If you are in the parks, it will show you the walk-up eligible restaurants near you.
Stay tuned for updates on how the service works and how you can make the most of it on your next trip to Walt Disney World.
If there’s anything like a silver lining to this pandemic, maybe in a small way it’s Disney – or at least WDW – making lots of really useful functional updates to the app. Disney has been kinda slow adding these sorts of features in the past, but with all the new needs for dealing with the pandemic they are responding pretty aggressively with feature enhancements.
One thing that may become apparent pretty quickly is the information technology teams for WDW and Disneyland are almost completely independent of each other (I worked with both teams for about five years – very frustrating). So unless the Disneyland IT teams are being forced – and yes, given the Disney internal politics, they’d likely have to be forced – it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Disneyland open with their app missing a lot of the enhancements.
I’d love to be wrong, since the first park we’re going to visit will be Disneyland as we had to cancel a visit there planned for last May, and it would great to have all of these new bells and whistles on the Disneyland app!
Is this only accessible in the parks? I looked on the app and I can still search for a 6pm dinner reservation at 6 but there was no now option.