New credit card guarantees

Big news in the dining world is the expanded list of restaurants requiring credit card guarantees starting on October 26th. Basically, if you're going to book a signature meal or a character meal, you'll need to provide a card. The cancellation policy is similar to many already in place, a $10/person fee if you do not show or cancel less than a day before the reservation.

Quote:

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To provide consistent Guest service, adjustments will be made to the Walt Disney World Resort cancellation policy beginning October 26, 2011. At that time, additional table-service locations will begin using the cancellation policy already in place at select restaurants on property. When booking a reservation at these restaurants, Guests will be required to provide a credit card to hold a reservation and will be charged $10 per person if the cancellation isn’t made at least one day in advance.

Pre-paid locations will continue to retain the full, pre-paid amount if Guests are unable to honor the reservation and are unable to cancel the reservation one day in advance. Special dining events and packages such as Fantasmic! packages, New Year’s Eve dinners, Victoria & Albert’s reservations may have different cancellation requirements.

Dining locations participating in the credit card guarantee policy will be as follows:

Pre-Paid Locations

• Cinderella’s Royal Table
• Disney’s Spirit of Aloha Dinner Show
• Hoop-Dee-Doo Musical Revue
• Mickey’s Backyard BBQ

Credit Card Guarantee Locations

• 1900 Park Fare
• Akershus Royal Banquet Hall
• Artist Point
• California Grill
• Cape May Café
• Chef Mickey’s
• CÃ*tricos
• The Crystal Palace
• Flying Fish Café
• The Garden Grill
• Hollywood & Vine
• Jiko – The Cooking Place
• Le Cellier Steakhouse
• Narcoossee’s
• ‘Ohana
• Tusker House Restaurant
• The Hollywood Brown Derby
• Victoria & Albert’s (cancellation policy is $25/per person)
• Yachtsman Steakhouse

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Thanks for the announcement. I am happy they are implementing the policy. We go to many of those restaurants each trip (as do many others). They can be really hard to get ADR's for even at the 180 day mark. Hopefully, it will make it easier to get ADR's with the credit card guarantee policy. It is simple to book a reservation and cancel later with no money down. More consideration goes into it when it comes out of your pocket.

I'm happy for this change. It was too easy before and still is at the locations without this policy for people to make reservations and then decide later they didn't want to eat somewhere. People should be responsible and cancel if they know in advance that they aren't going to use a reservation.

Oh I missed that...thanks so much. I agree with the other posters, I hopw that this will make getting ADRs easier.

i'm so glad this is happening! this will (hopefully) stop the people who make multiple reservations at different restaurants for the same time frame from taking up all the ADRs!

At first, I really liked this idea since it will curtail people from taking up multiple ADR's for the same time frame...


...but now, I'm not so sure I like it...

We like to do a table-service meal on our arrival night, instead of going to a park. We generally arrive around 3pm and so I do not book an ADR before 7pm so that we have a little leeway. Unfortunately, sometimes the unexpected comes up...flight delay, check in delay, someone not feeling well after the flight...and we can't make our reservation. Now, we'd be saddled with the no-show fee. So, we'll probably no longer book a TS on our arrival night.

I can also see people hauling their exhausted, ornery and rambunctious children to character meals because they want to avoid a penalty. We've booked early dinner ADR's before but we've had to cancel (and I did call to cancel) because one or both of our kids either fell asleep or just didn't want to sit through a meal.

I think this is a positive change overall. I also think that it will virtually eliminate the chance of a last-minute or walk-up reservation. Since those with ADR's will be penalized for no-shows, I foresee the frequency of no-shows dropping significantly which will almost eliminate the possibility of a walk-up.

We typically cancel or replace one of our meals in the middle of every trip. If we were thinking of canceling something with a penalty the day of, we'd probably go to the reservation anyway, just to avoid the $20 charge.

In retrospect, I think the dining reservation reminders that are now being sent out are a precursor to this announcement. That may help prevent people from being no-shows just because they forgot they made a reservation.

I'm biased in my opinion on this just because I make so many dining reservations. Disney is making it less easy for travel agents to make dining reservations. A recent site redesign took away the old TA dining reservation interface. It was kind of neglected to begin with, but it was better than the way I have to do things now. These new CC guarantees just add another layer of steps.