Feature Article: Choosing Your Disney Dining Reservations - Walt Disney World Dining Planning - PassPorter - A Community of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, and General Travel Forums
As of January 1, 2019, we have closed our forums. This is a decision we did not come to lightly, but it is necessary. The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk. The server software itself must be updated, and it cannot be without removing the forums.
So it is with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to our long-running forums. They came online in 2000 and brought together so many wonderful Disney fans. We had friendships form, careers launch, couples marry, children born ... all because of this amazing community.
Thank you to each of you who were a part of this community. You made it possible.
And a very special thank you to our Guides (moderators), past and present, who kept our forums a happy place to be. You are the glue that held everything together, and we are forever grateful to you. Thank you aliceinwdw, Caldercup, MrsM, WillCAD, Fortissimo, GingerJ, HiddenMickey, CRCrazy, Eeyoresmom, disneyknut, disneydani, Cam22, chezp, WDWfan, Luvsun, KMB733, rescuesk, OhToodles!, Colexis Mom, lfredsbo, HiddenMickey, DrDolphin, DopeyGirl, duck addict, Disneybine, PixieMichele, Sandra Bostwick, Eeyore Tattoo, DyanKJ130, Suzy Q'Disney, LilMarcieMouse, AllisonG, Belle*, Chrissi, Brant, DawnDenise, Crystalloubear, Disneymom9092, FanOfMickey, Goofy4Goofy, GoofyMom, Home4us123, iamgrumpy, ilovedisney247, Jennifer2003, Jenny Pooh, KrisLuvsDisney, Ladyt, Laughaholic88, LauraBelle Hime, Lilianna, LizardCop, Loobyoxlip, lukeandbrooksmom, marisag, michnash, MickeyMAC, OffKilter_Lynn, PamelaK, Poor_Eeyore, ripkensnana, RobDVC, SHEANA1226, Shell of the South, snoozin, Statelady01, Tara O'Hara, tigger22, Tink and Co., Tinkerbelz, WDWJAMBA, wdwlovers, Wendyismyname, whoSEZ, WildforWD, and WvuGrrrl. You made the magic.
We want to personally thank Sara Varney, who coordinated our community for many years (among so many other things she did for us), and Cheryl Pendry, our Message Board Manager who helped train our Guides, and Ginger Jabour, who helped us with the PassPorter-specific forums and Live! Guides. Thank you for your time, energy, and enthusiasm. You made it all happen.
There are other changes as well.
Why? Well, the world has changed. And change with it, we must. The lyrics to "We Go On" for IllumiNations say it best:
We go on to the joy and through the tears
We go on to discover new frontiers
Moving on with the current of the years.
We go on
Moving forward now as one
Moving on with a spirit born to run
Ever on with each rising sun.
To a new day, we go on.
It's time to move on and move forward.
PassPorter is a small business, and for many years it supported our family. But the world changed, print books took a backseat to the Internet, and for a long time now it has been unable to make ends meet. We've had to find new ways to support our family, which means new careers and less and less time available to devote to our first baby, PassPorter.
But eventually, we must move on and move forward. It is the right thing to do.
So we are retiring this newsletter, as we simply cannot keep up with it. Many thanks to Mouse Fan Travel who supported it all these years, to All Ears and MousePlanet who helped us with news, to our many article contributors, and -- most importantly -- to Sara Varney who edited our newsletter so wonderfully for years and years.
And we are no longer charging for the Live Guides. If you have a subscription, it's yours to keep for the lifetime of the Live Guides at no additional cost. The Live Guides will stay online, barring server issues and technical problems, for all of 2019.
That said, PassPorter is not going away. Most of the resources will remain online for as long as we can support them, and after that we will find ways to make whatever we can available. PassPorter means a great deal to us, and to many of you, and we will do our best to keep it alive in whatever way we can. Our server costs are high, and they'll need to come out of our pockets, so in the future you can expect some changes so we can bring those costs down.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your amazing support over the years. Without you, there's no way us little guys could have made something like this happen and given the "big guys" a run for their money. PassPorter was consistently the #3 guidebook after the Unofficial and Official guides, which was really unheard of for such a small company to do. We ROCKED it thanks to you and your support and love!
If you miss us, you can still find some of us online. Sara started a new blog at DisneyParkPrincess.com -- I strongly urge you to visit and get on her mailing list. She IS the Disney park princess and knows Disney backward and forward. And I am blogging as well at JenniferMaker.com, which is a little craft blog I started a couple of years ago to make ends meet. You can see and hear me in my craft show at https://www.youtube.com/c/jennifermaker . Many PassPorter readers and fans are on Facebook, in groups they formed like the PassPorter Trip Reports and PassPorter Crafting Challenge (if you join, just let them know you read about it in the newsletter). And some of our most devoted community members started a forum of their own at Pixie Dust Lane and all are invited over.
So we encourage you to stay in touch with us and your fellow community members wherever works best for you!
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Feature Article: Choosing Your Disney Dining Reservations - Walt Disney World Dining Planning
Choosing Your Disney Dining Reservations - Walt Disney World Dining Planning by Cheryl Pendry
Every time we visit Walt Disney World, one of the highlights for us is the amazing selection of dining on offer.
But with so many places to choose from comes a problem. How on earth do you decide? We're fortunate in that we usually spend longer visiting Disney than many people do, but even on a two-week vacation, you're not going to be able to fit everything in, and you're going to have to make some tough choices. So how do you do it? Well, here's how we set about it. We very rarely dine anywhere but table service restaurants at Disney. We like being able to sit down and take a break from touring the parks, and table service allows us the opportunity to rest our feet for an hour or so, while sampling some wonderful cuisine. Our usual pattern is two full meals a day, mostly lunch and dinner (as we're not huge breakfast fans), with a snack for the third meal. As such, the Disney Dining Plans don't entirely match our eating habits. However, the closest is the Deluxe Dining Plan, offering three table service credits and two snacks per night of your stay per person.
This means if we want to use the Deluxe Plan, we need to have some meals at Signature restaurants included, to make best use of all our credits. So the first question to answer for each vacation is whether we're going to use the Deluxe Dining Plan or not, as that will affect the type of meals we're going to go for. Well, this time, we did want to do that, mainly because of the new addition of restaurants to the Dining Plan this year. I already knew, as soon as those changes were announced, that I wanted to sample dinner at both Fulton's Crab House, and Bistro de Paris. Although we've been to Fulton's before for lunch, dinner has been too pricey for us, while we've never been to Bistro before, so that will be a new experience for us.
Aside from that, we had the old favorites that we just have to go back every single time, and I'm sure you do, too. For us, that's Boma, Beaches and Cream, the California Grill, the Crystal Palace, ‘Ohana, and Teppan Edo, so all of those went on to the list. Now you start to see how quickly our days fill up! The next step was to settle down, and go through The List, so called because it's a spreadsheet we've made with every single Walt Disney World restaurant on it. We look at each one, and think about whether we want to eat there or not, also considering how long ago we last dined there. We go through this process together, saying "Yes," "Maybe," or "No" to each one. After that, you've hopefully got a short list, although inevitably, it's never as short as you'd like.
The next step in the process is to automatically include the restaurants we said yes to, provided there aren't too many of them. Then we look at how many more slots we have, and start filling them up with the "maybe" options. We tend to find that dinners fill up very quickly, particularly if we're going to be eating at Signature restaurants, as many of them are open only for dinner. That means that if we have a question mark over our "maybe" restaurants, if they're open for lunch, then they've got a much better chance of making the final list.
It's at this stage that we start to look at which resorts we're going to stay. We learned a couple of vacations back that it's much more enjoyable to have dinner at your resort once in a while, as then we can share a bottle of wine and not worry about how we're going to get back to the resort. After all, if you're in nice clothes, you really don't want to be getting on Disney buses. As our tour of the resorts will take us to Animal Kingdom Lodge and Bay Lake Tower, that accommodated two of our favorites for dinner, Boma, and California Grill. Into that, we added Jiko into the mix, along with 'Ohana, with the Polynesian easy enough to reach from the Contemporary.
Next, we start looking at which parks we're going to be in on which days, and start adding in restaurants to those days. That's how places like Yak and Yeti, Mama Melrose's, and the Liberty Tree Tavern found their way on to the selected list.
Before we knew it, the list was closed off -- after all, we have only got eight full days on property on this upcoming trip, and there was a waiting list just in case any other gaps should come up. And wouldn't you know it? One space did open up, with the surprise news that we would be returning to Walt Disney World for one final lunch after our cruise on the Disney Fantasy. I was ready with a set of options to fill that gap.
Despite all my careful preparations, I'd managed to miss one key restaurant -- one that currently isn't even open -- Be Our Guest in the newly expanded part of Fantasyland. As to whether, and how, we'll fit that one in remains to be seen, but already my mind is working on that one, and I have a few ideas....
What do you think? Please add your own comments, experiences, or news related to this article in this thread! Reader feedback is welcomed and encouraged.
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