Month: December 2013

Price Reduced for 2014!

NOTE: This information is outdated. The post is kept for historical significance. Please visit our pricing page for the latest pricing information.

We’re excited to announce that our already low introductory subscription rate has been reduced to $9.55/mo, effective immediately. This new, reduced rate will allow even more people to fill their Disney resolutions and eat at Disney restaurants on short notice throughout 2014.

Subscribers will also enjoy our other tools, currently under development, as they are released throughout the new year.

This change has been applied retroactively. Subscribers that signed up at the old rate have already had their subscriptions adjusted to reflect the new rate. We’ve thrown in a few bonus days for all current subscribers. Current subscribers’ accounts have been extended 30 extra days to reflect the new pricing.

Here’s to a great, spontaneous 2014, filled with good food, drink, and Disney magic, maximized by WDWTools. Celebrate with us by signing up now!

ADR Challenge: Pre-RD Breakfast @ Crystal Palace (Rigid): DONE

RESERVATION BOOKED 17 days, 4 hours, 42 minutes after watch was placed.

This is awesome because it’s _all_ of the ADRs I wanted for my mid-January trip. I didn’t even know I was going to be having this trip a month ago, and now I have reservations for BOG, CRT, ‘Ohana, and pre-RD CP.

RESERVATION FOUND 10 days, 21 hours, 50 minutes after watch was placed. This slot actually stayed open for about five hours, but I was unable to book during that time span.

I want pre-rope-drop breakfast in the MK at CP on Friday morning. Post-RD breakfasts are easily available at the moment, but not pre-RD.

ADR Challenge: Be Our Guest, Under 30 Days (Flexible): DONE

UPDATE

RESERVATION BOOKED 2 hours 12 minutes after watch was placed.

Two desirable times opened up. I was away from my computer when I got the mail, so I clicked the link to book the time slot I preferred…

which brought up the booking page on my phone.

And proceeded to book. 🙂

We’re still waiting for a second chance on our rigid day because we missed the first reservation opening, but if we can fudge things around a bit, we can typically find something much faster. Of course, rigid days are fine, and as shown in that post, can also be found quickly, but as in all things Disney, it pays to be flexible.

Earlier, we described the process of watching for ADR at Be Our Guest on a rigid schedule, where we only have one available night in our plan. This works, but it can take a longer time to find an opening. If we’re a bit more flexible (perhaps we have the Park Hopper option, for instance, or want to prioritize our trip around ADRs), things can work out more quickly.

Our watch looks like this:

we save it, get our pretty icon:

And wait. Will update.

ADR Not-So-Challenge: Easy Booking at Flying Fish Cafe

So we’ve done features on booking an ADR at Be Our Guest and Ohana on short notice, two places where ADRs for desirable times can be hard to come by. But what about a place where it’s not so hard to book an ADR? Disney has many restaurants and usually at least some of them have availability.

Let’s choose Flying Fish Cafe. We’ll say we want to have dinner there on Jan 16.

OK, all ready to go! Much easier than going through that whole shebang on Disney’s site, issuer of hundreds of requests, killer of devices < 1 GB of RAM. Remember how ADR Sniper is actually much easier on Disney than their own system? Yeah.

Less than five minutes later, we get an email and a text (because I enabled SMS notification, which is free of charge).

There’s several times available. I just have to click the link next to the time that I think is most convenient…

and bam! Right to Disney’s booking page.

All neat and spiffy, ready to book an ADR. And because the restaurant we’ve targeted isn’t super high-demand, we can afford to wait for our ideal time to open up, if we choose.

ADR Challenge: Early Dinner at Ohana, Under 30 Days: DONE

UPDATE 1

RESERVATION BOOKED 3 days, 23 hours, and 23 minutes after watch started.

Another one where I was not at my desk.

That was pretty cool! Excited to eat there. Anyone guess how long it would’ve taken me to get this if I was trying by hand? I’ve heard reports of people checking daily for 2+ months and never finding anything … we set up a watch, went about our business, and snagged a res in 4 days. 😀

A note to Android users: Disney’s bottom-anchored navigation bar is fidgety on Android. You need to zoom your page in and out several times until you find a size where the “next” button appears.

Want dinner at Ohana during our mid-Jan trip. Unfortunately, 9:30 is a little late for me…

Not a big deal. I’m just going to throw together a watch here…

This pretty much shows what I want, but like I said, I can’t eat at 9:30 on the 15th on still be expected to make rope drop the following day. 8pm is probably the absolute latest I could make it. So, since I’m looking for something specific, I ‘m going to just add a time range here…

Cool, my range is added. I hit the “create watch button” and …

we’re all done! Just as with Be Our Guest, we never have to visit the Disney site until we receive a message that our time slot is available. Since we set a specific time range, we’ll only get a notice if something between 5 PM and 8 PM shows up. Sometimes this can take make things take longer, but we’re going to give it a go anyway. Because we have our subscription to ADR Sniper, we can always move things around, add an extra watch that’s less specific, or otherwise improve on-the-fly. It’s also important to note that cancellations primarily will happen closer to the planned booking date, so we may be waiting a while on this — but it sure beats having to manually check it on Disney’s site all day, and still miss the reservation. Stay tuned to learn if we are able to snag this res or not.

ADR Challenge: Be Our Guest, Under 30 Days (Rigid) : DONE

UPDATE 2:

RESERVATION BOOKED 8 days, 23 hours, 13 minutes after setting up the search. It took 7 days for our second chance to materialize, but we were able to get our res with 19 days left.

UPDATE 1:

RESERVATION FOUND 23 hours 45 minutes after setting up my search. Booking failed due to my failure to click button in timely fashion.

WDWTools’ notifier sent me a message at 7:54 PM this evening, showing an available reservation for Jan 14 at 7:40. That sounded good to me! Unfortunately, I didn’t see this mail right away despite the text alert, and when I tried to book it six minutes later it was gone. 🙁

I will keep my watch active and update again when another opening comes in. We are working on an iteration of the product that would respond to available reservations automatically, removing necessity for individual action.

For more frequent options, one should consider making a more flexible search.

Will be at WDW 1/14 — 1/17 with my wife for our anniversary. I just booked this trip earlier this week, when it was 28 days out. I want some ADRs, but at the moment I’m a little unsure of what exactly. I know I want Be Our Guest,  though. I haven’t set anything up yet. Now I want to make sure I secure my spot.

I start out by logging in at wdwtools.com.

Then, I want to use the ADR Sniper tool to make sure I can get dinner at BOG, so I go to the ADR Sniper section and click “Add New Watch”.

You can see the form for establishing a new watch here. I want to eat at Be Our Guest, so I select that restaurant from the dropdown. And I want Dinner, so I select that too.

As stated above, I want to eat this meal on January 14. It’s a short trip and I want to fit some other ADRs in, so I start and end the search on the same date — Jan 14. It may take a little longer to get this reservation because we are being specific about our date, but I’m confident we’ll find something. If we’re feeling a bit more flexible, we should try searching for a range. Openings are found much faster that way.

I could set up some more specific time ranges if there were other pressures that night, but I still haven’t planned much of the trip out, so I’m ok with being flexible right now. Some other ADRs we try won’t be this way.

Hit save …

… and voila, my watch has been stored.

Believe it or not, that’s it for this part of the work. I don’t have to go to Disney’s site at all. I just have to wait for something to hit my mailbox now. Typically something is found pretty fast, and I’ll update this post with info once that happens. 😉

 

Now Open!

WDWTools is officially accepting its first users! Only a few people will get in during open registration. Everyone else will need an invitation. If you miss the open registration window, ask your friends for an invite!

We’re celebrating with a grand opening special price of $17.95/mo.

Our premier product is ADR Sniper, a tool that makes it much easier to secure dining reservations at Walt Disney World Resort. Please see ADR Sniper’s relevant pages for more information.

Other tools are being developed and will be made available as they become ready, including tools to enhance FastPass+ and MemoryMaker. Register today to be part of the magic!

Announcing ADR Sniper

Do you know the brittle anxiety of hovering over Walt Disney World’s dining pages for dozens of days on end? WDWTools’s debut product, ADR Sniper, is here to help you get your advance dining reservations without the nail biting.

ADR Sniper is a software package that monitors Disney’s dining pages based on your input and sends you notifications when a reservation opens up. For an additional fee, you’ll soon also be able to instruct the program to automatically book the reservation on your behalf.

ADR Sniper is still a product in early development, and more features will be added as ADR Sniper matures. Statistics and feedback from the initial userbase are critical to our success — please let us what you think by mailing feedback@wdwtools.com.

To access ADR Sniper, sign up now!