ParkMagic Podcast: Insider Tips To Plan Your Disneyland Adventure
Our goal is to help you simplify planning for your trip. We give you tactical tips to help you plan your next magical Disney Vacation to Disneyland and California Adventure.
We want to make you feel like you have a clear plan. In short, we want you to feel like you have a Disneyland expert in your pocket. Helping you plan your meals, rides, shows, and how to spend less time in line.
ParkMagic Podcast: Insider Tips To Plan Your Disneyland Adventure
Disneyland Dining Reservations with Dustin from Mouse Dining
Learn the ins and outs of getting the most popular dining reservations with Dustin Checketts, co-founder of MouseDining. We'll help you navigate the culinary delights of Disney, with insider nuggets on what you need to know before you book your sit-down dining reservations at Disneyland.
CHAPTERS:
0:02 Intro
0:30 Introducing Dustin from Mouse Dining
2:50 Going Beyond Pizza and Hamburgers
3:45 Pros and Cons of Blue Bayou
5:16 Dining Reservations at Disneyland Have Never Been In Higher Demand
6:08 Why Too Many Dining Reservations Can Sink Your Trip
7:56 What Locations Need Reservations At The Disneyland Resort
10:11 Character Dining- Setting Expectations
12:50 Hardest Reservations to Score At Disneyland
16:55 Reservations For Large Groups
20:35 How Mouse Dining Works
24:32 Last Minute Reservations Are Usually Available
24:54 Using MouseDining.com to See If Reservations Have Dropped
25:29 When Do Reservations Become Available for Disneyland Resturants
28:26 Use OpenTable for Downtown Disney Locations
Links:
ParkMagic 'Dining & Dining Reservations' Course Module
MouseDining Website
Show Transcript
Right now, our tools are just for Disneyland, but we hope to expand to other parks soon. Disney changes policies, prices, and shows often. Be sure to visit our website at Parkmagic.com or Disneyland's Website for more information.
Park Magic is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Walt Disney World, Disneyland, or Disney Enterprises, Inc. Walt Disney World, Disneyland, and Mickey Mouse are all registered trademarks of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Any use of third-party names or trademarks is for identification purposes only and does not imply, nor is it intended to imply, any affiliation with, endorsement from, or business relationship with any third party, including with Walt Disney World, Disneyland, or Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Welcome to the Park Magic podcast, your place for insider tips for your next Disneyland adventure. Whether you're a first-timer or first-time in a while visitor, we're here to unwrap the secrets to creating and simplifying your dream Disneyland vacation.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the Park Magic podcast. I am so excited I've got somebody who knows more about dining reservations at Disney than most people on the planet. I've got Dustin Checkits, one of the co-founders of Mouse Dining. If you haven't checked out Mouse Dining, it's an amazing tool. Just grabbing some of those reservations can be a little overwhelming. People are getting up at six in the morning. If you're like me and only get up at six in the morning if something crazy is happening, then you can use Mouse Dining to help you get alerts of when maybe a reservation to Blue Bayou or Goofy's Kitchen is available. It will save you a lot of stress and allow you to get those last-minute dining reservations. I've been able to get things at Blue Bayou with a week's notice. Dustin, first off, thanks for co-founding such an awesome tool.
Speaker 3:You're very welcome, thank you.
Speaker 2:Your whole family has a strong affinity towards Disney. Can you share a little bit so people know that you're not just some Yahoo? I pulled off the street.
Speaker 3:Okay, sure, thanks for having me, robin.
Speaker 3:I appreciate it. This is fun. We've talked about doing this for a little while, so it's fun to finally be here.
Speaker 3:My Disney years I will rewind back to my childhood. I grew up closer on the West Coast in Utah. Disneyland was our home park. That's just what I knew of Disney growing up and that's where my love of Disney began. Today I live in Georgia, so I'm closer to Walt Disney World and that's where I spend most of my time now.
Speaker 3:But I always love and cherish the times going back to Disneyland because it's just nostalgic. There's so much has changed if you're there. But then you go back years later you're like, oh, it really hasn't changed that much. But really, disney first made a big impression in my home when we would watch Little Mermaid, aladdin, beauty and the Beast and Lion King and all of those amazing animated films. So I grew up and I was determined to be a Disney animator. I was really young at the time and I would draw a lot. I do remember making a trip to Walt Disney World young and I would sit in Hollywood Studios it was MGM Studios at the time and just watch the animators draw. That's still something I enjoy doing. I follow a lot of different artists. I just find it fascinating that people are that talented that they can just pull something out of their imagination, throw it on a page and I fall in love with it. That's the origin story of me and Disney. But since then I've really enjoyed to better understand the parks and Walt, and definitely the food.
Speaker 2:So I took a friend to Disneyland for the first time because she was like I don't get you Disney adult people and so I was like you have to experience the way I experience it. So she came with me and she's. I really just thought I was going to be hamburgers and bad pizza and I was like, oh, we have that. Maybe 100% have that alien pizza planet. I'm looking at you, but some of my favorite foods are at Disney and there are some places where you're going more for the ambiance and you're going. There's some places that they legitimately have delicious food that I like crave, even outside the parks 100% agree.
Speaker 3:Yes, there's some of yours actually.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you have to request an advanced. I'm gluten-free, so you have to request an advanced bike emailing special diners but the gluten-free Monte Cristo sandwich. And I prefer cafe Orleans because While blue bayou has an amazing atmosphere, I feel like the service is not always the greatest and it is like buffet food. So I kind of like cafe Orleans, because I've done blue bayou several times. I love it. I think for a first time it's great, but I really like people watching. And then the quesadilla tacos at cosina kukamanga is so good, I love those. And then my other one is the popcorn Sunday that they have at Carthage circle al fresco dining. They have it. Then a nice game was chocolate and caramel, but they interlace caramel popcorn into the Sunday.
Speaker 2:Wow, it is so good I have ditched my smoke jumpers and I was like you have this, I'm gonna go have the lettuce wraps and get a pimp's punch, and so those are some of my favorites.
Speaker 3:Great no spot on the cafe Orleans over blue bayou. So for me it was the ambiance and the experience of going to blue bayou. My dad was always excited to take us to blue bayou and when we go there he's like look, there's pirates of the Caribbean and it's quiet. It's always nighttime in there and you can hear the frogs and everything. And that was several great memories growing up as a kid. But as we've gotten older we're like oh, they also have the money crystal sandwich over at cafe Orleans. Let's go try it there. And same amazing sandwich, always as good as I remember. But for my wife it's the palm freaks that you can get at cafe Orleans as an appetizer before you start. Our kind of tradition is the money crystal sandwich with some palm freaks and we same thing we enjoy people watching. So sitting outside at cafe Orleans and just being around all the people hustling and bustling is really fun, but spot on 100%. You could have described me and how I feel about the blue bayou and money crystal.
Speaker 2:And just a side note, the whole point of this podcast is advice for normal people. Make sure that you're watching the meal time, that something is available for. There's not a lot of menu items that are like that, but there are. Some people have been freaking out about dining reservations for Disney World for Probably a decade, but I remember as a kid you would just walk up and make a walk-up reservation at the beginning of the day for blue bayou. I would say it's probably just been since COVID the dining reservations have been really big for Disneyland.
Speaker 2:I see people in the boards and in Facebook and Reddit and they're like how many reservations do I need? Personally, since I grew up in Southern California and we thought going to the $2 t-shirt store was like living it high, we didn't really do a lot of dining reservations. Especially when my kids are little, we did no dining reservations usually. Now that we have a little bit more discretionary income, I personally don't like to have more than one dining reservation a day and usually on a trip I might only have one or two because they do take up quite a bit of time. I feel like for every dining reservation you need to plan at the minimum an hour, but I've been stuck in blue bayou for two and a half three hours, yep.
Speaker 3:So I think that's wise advice. Part of what I do is like lurk in a bunch of different communities online on Facebook and Reddit and other Places, and I see some folks that just they have their trips planned down to the minute they have three large sit-down table service restaurants a day and I'm like, oh my gosh, that is so much food, especially in summer when it's hot, and it's so much money. I and so 100% I'm with you and just say, hey, like it is very reasonable to have one table service meal a day, usually lunch or dinner If you're into the breakfast with the character dining. Those are great experiences. I have young kids and they absolutely love those.
Speaker 3:But pick one and then just kind of coast through the rest of the day and find out what's available. With my memories growing up with my father and my family not just my father, but my father it was his thing to take us to Blue Bayou and treat us. So long as you got to the park and walked to the Blue Bayou host in the morning, you could just request and get a table that afternoon. And it's not been that way, at least for since post COVID, for sure, but probably a little prior to that as well.
Speaker 2:And just to compare, I can get two turkey legs and three corns and feed my family of four for less than 40 bucks. Blue Bayou for a family of four you're looking at least 200 bucks probably by the time you get everything done. Especially if you have an adult beverage, that can add up pretty quick. Let's talk about what kind of restaurants you need reservations for. It would be the character dining, which would be storytellers, and Plaza Inn and Goofy's Kitchen. And Goofy's Kitchen is the only character dining that's available at a not breakfast time. So if you wanted to do that the first day you came into town, you could do Goofy's Kitchen. And then there's the bar. So Uga's Cantina and Trader Sam's, which is Chef's Kiss, one of my favorite. But you cannot spend more than 90 minutes in there unless you want a really good headache.
Speaker 3:I agree.
Speaker 2:Those kind of cover the big things right. So it's pretty much anytime you have a waiter.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so table services where you're sitting down and you have a server serving you. There's a couple of different versions of quick service, but quick service would be you pick it up, or you order and just pick it up and take it with you as you pay. There's at least in Disney World I know there's all a cart where you can walk into an area, just throw a bunch of stuff on a tray and check out and they'll buzz each item as you exit and charge you a fee, while Disney World also includes what are they called family style at, like Ohana, but those are still table service restaurants. But yeah, I think that covers it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I don't think there are any family style. So if you're coming from Disney World and you're looking for, like that, liberty Tree Tavern, you get everybody gets the same meal. I don't believe that there are any restaurants that do that at Disneyland. They're all individual. And then there's the other character dining that I forgot about was the Napa Rua's Princess Adventure, which is $125 a plate and that includes if you have a three year old as well. From what I understand, the character interactions there are pretty intense and amazing. Could you discuss a little bit about what to expect at a character meal? I've seen some people disappointed because they thought they were going to get 45 minute conversations with Mickey and he's got a lot of magic to make around the park, so it's more of a drive by right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. And keep in mind, my experience is most recently and definitely post COVID is with Walt Disney World. The last time I visited Disneyland was during COVID, when they did their own kind of mini food and wine I'm forgetting the exact name of it. So it's been a couple of years since we've been there and even that was really limited. They didn't have any of the rides operating at all. They just opened California Adventure and said enjoy the food, enjoy the ambiance, here you go. But that was fun. My wife and I went to that and it was fun.
Speaker 3:But regarding the experiences with the characters, it'll vary because it is that just quick, say hi, have a brief interaction, take some photos and move on, because the actors are in the character for quite a while. They're out there and so they're trying to hit as many as they can, and even sometimes they'll rotate out the characters and you'll say goodbye to them and five minutes later you'll say hello to them. Better experiences are going to be found with the princesses and it's been a while since I've been to some of the other kind of seasonal events and some of the after parties. But I think I've heard I'd have to, I'd have to confirm this, but I think I've heard that those experiences are pretty good too, but really just the experiences that you should expect is really just characters walking by your tables having a brief interaction with preferably each of your children, just for a moment.
Speaker 3:But if you have one child or one child that really shows a lot more excitement than the other children. The characters will spend most of their time with the one. That's obviously reciprocating that interaction. I don't know if they're told this, but only expect about a minute to two minutes at your table and if you get more than that, feel lucky and grateful, take that opportunity to take some amazing photos, because that's what you're paying for Generally. Character experiences I think I've estimated to be about 15 to 25 dollars additional. If you just look at like the food and the experience minus the characters, you're paying an extra 15 to 25 dollars per head at your table to have just that character experience. So if you were to try to get equal quality meal on the part elsewhere minus the character experience, that's what I, in my head, have made that number to be for me and my family.
Speaker 2:And I think the other thing that's important to know before you book a character meal is so you might think like they would have Mickey, minnie, goofy, pluto at every location. At Goofy's kitchen you're guaranteed to see Goofy and then it's going to be an assortment. Sometimes Minnie's there. It's very rare to see Mickey. From what I understand, at Goofy's kitchen or rarer Plaza, dining has probably the most characters. Make sure you check to see what characters, especially if there's a specific one If you want to see princesses, you would have to fork over the money to see the princess dining. There are locations that you can see in the parks where you can meet all of these characters with no additional cost, so it's not required. If your kids are really into characters, you don't have to do the character dining, but you should expect to be spending a little bit of time in line. That's the benefit of the character dining is you get to skip the line of waiting for those characters.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I understand those. I think they call them meet and greets and I'm sure that's the same at both parks, but I think their character meet and greets is what you'll look for, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd love to know your experience at Mouth Dining at Disneyland. What are the hardest locations to book? I have some anecdotal man. I can never seem to get that dang one. Do you have any data you'd be comfortable sharing with us?
Speaker 3:Oh, 100%. So I share this publicly. Just whenever I get a moment or when things seem interesting, I will post in Reddit. Mouth Dining has its own subreddit and I'll post this whole list for Walt Disneyland and Disney World and separated by park.
Speaker 3:I haven't pulled that list recently, so I'm actually looking at raw data from mouse dining right now, and you talked about character dining being very difficult to get. But really, if I look at Disneyland, the California Adventure, downtown Disney and the surrounding area there, blue Bayou is by far the top of the list. And let me back up how I'm judging this is by how many mouse dining users have alerts set for these restaurants. This is just a total number of alerts that our users have set for these restaurants and right now, blue Bayou tops everything for both Disneyland and Disney World by a decent margin. So I don't know if they've done something recently or whatever's happened there, or there's just a giant surge of people trying to get in that down there in California, but that tops everything. For example, in Walt Disney World, the equivalent of that is like Space 220 in El Hanna. That's beyond both of those.
Speaker 2:So at Disney World. I wonder if it's because at Disneyland there's only a couple places to get alcohol and Blue Bayou and Ugo's are pretty much it, unless you're really fancy in your club, 33 member right. So I'm wondering. Because they're opening up River Bell Cafe or Leans and Carnation Cafe will be serving alcohol shortly. It will be really interesting to me to see if that changes the availability of Blue Bayou. That's interesting.
Speaker 3:If I keep going down that list, I and you'll have to tell me Lamplight Lounge, is that an alcoholic?
Speaker 2:Yep, do you have alcohol there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so that's number two in Disneyland, Ogas Cantina. Number three you guys like your alcohol Trader Sam's Tiki Bar.
Speaker 2:If you like cocktails, worth it those are the top four and number five.
Speaker 3:You get down to your Plaza in dining experiences. Let's see if I can keep going. Then you've got Goofy's Kitchen, the Princess Breakfast at Napa Rose, Carthé Circle Cafe or Leans Napa Rose, and then we get to the Phantasmic Dining Packages Carnation Cafe, storytellers Cafe and so on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that would probably be a really interesting post is like the three weeks after to see how that changes that dynamic.
Speaker 3:But yeah, and those are available, so I published this list. Yeah, like I said, I sort of organize on Reddit and I just post it when I list the week of the year so you can gauge. But you can go back and look at the history and kind of see how it's changed and sometimes that's interesting to see. In fact, after this podcast, I'll go ahead and publish this list so that your listeners will have the to look forward to. But you can reach out to me there, make comments on it there, and I'm happy to adjust that report or dive a little deeper if anybody finds it particularly interesting.
Speaker 2:And I'll make sure to put that link in the show notes so you guys have it without having to dig too. So I think the other thing that I see people struggle with is they're like I'm trying to go with 422 people and I don't understand why I can't get a reservation. Those locations, especially like Blue Bay, like 4 people pretty easy to get a reservation, but once you pass 6 people it becomes very difficult to get a spot for you all together.
Speaker 3:Yes, and I guess I'll speak to that because we've experienced the same thing and we see the same thing, and so I'm not the type of person that just wants to use my gut and be like, yeah, it just feels that way. I want data to prove that it's that way, and so I actually have people in the parks now. They're gathering some information so I can definitively say how many 2 tops, 4 tops and 6 top tables a restaurant has, what's its max capacity, so that we can better understand throughput. And Tessa and I have spoken a few times but he's the data scientist for the rides and wait times. I want to take that over for the food and dining and restaurants.
Speaker 3:So we're gathering a lot of this kind of data that's not really published anywhere but it's publicly available. We just have to go hunt and search for it. But in the future we will know with certainty approximately how many people can get in and out of a restaurant in a given timeframe, and that it'll be hard to judge exactly and precisely because we don't know staffing or any other particulars, but in general we should have some very good idea of that. Specifically to your question no, it's. There's not a lot of tables that are 6 tops or larger, and some restaurants the tables are bolted so they can't even push them together or move them around. So we're learning that right now and I hope to have some data to prove that. But I agree that with your gut and my gut. It's definitely true. I just want to find out how true it is and if there's any exceptions to it.
Speaker 2:And with Blue Bayou they push the tables further back. So if you want to be on the water and you have more than a four top, you're not going to be on the water, you're going to be further towards the back of the restaurant, at least to the middle, because they don't push tables together at the waterfront from anytime I've seen in there, I have not seen them do that, at Disneyland at least. So what I usually recommend to people is let's say you have a group of eight book, two tables of four, yes, and then you can very nicely ask if it would be possible to maybe sit close together. But no, that might be a big ask and the answer might be no. I have one really picky eater.
Speaker 2:So what we might do is say, okay, you really want to ride Casey Jr. I would rather do lots of other things in the world rather than do it right, casey Jr. So let's have you go with somebody who doesn't mind writing, casey Jr, we'll get you guys some quick serve. So you need to split up your group or you can break it up into two groups and then know you might not sit together, but if you have a group of over 10, I would really just recommend that you do quick serve, because those bigger tables take even longer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I have data to prove that. So in the availability that we see, 97% of all availability is for parties and tables of six or fewer. So if you're trying to get a table for seven or eight or nine or 10 or more, just know that you're looking for a needle in a haystack. Your suggestion of splitting your party is exactly what we tell our users when they come to us with that question or concern. But Disney honestly hasn't done a good job and again, I focus most heavily on Walt Disney World. But their website will tell you like do you want to try for a party of 10 in the blue bayou? And they'll let you look for that, but there's never going to be any availability.
Speaker 2:And if you do get that you should go buy a lottery ticket.
Speaker 3:like that moment that's not a bad idea, but yeah, we have data to support that, and so just know parties larger than six. Even if you're six and you have a child with you, I would still recommend including that in your party, because Disney likes to account for the bodies that they're putting at the table and not necessarily how many are going to order food, and it's more a spacing and fire safety thing than just money and logistics, so keep that in mind.
Speaker 2:So if somebody's like look, I don't really want to use mouse dining, I use mouse dining when I go and there's a free version and a paid version.
Speaker 2:With the paid version you get text. So especially if you don't work a computer job where you're looking at your email all day, then the paid version can be really helpful. But if somebody's like I don't want to use a service, I just want to do it myself. I don't usually get up at six in the morning, 60 days out, I usually go in and I would just keep looking over and over again, and if I'm going with a couple other people, I'll show them how to do it and everybody just checks off back often and you can get them that way. But then you have to be somebody that would remember on a regular basis or just set up alarms to go back and look over and over again. Can you talk a little bit about how people use mouse dining? Because the people can use it for a short period of time and just to score those reservations, and then you have five alerts for free.
Speaker 3:Six.
Speaker 2:Six alerts.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about the service just briefly. But mouse dining I'm glad you brought up the question, first of all because it made me think of something that we usually don't talk about, so I'll speak to the free experience first. I'm of the opinion that I want to prove to you that our service works before I ask for your money, and so we launched as a 100% free service. There was no cost to it whatsoever. We were sending texts, we were sending email and doing all the things. It was fine while we were small, but as we grew, our texting bill became significant, and so that's when we had to start charging for it. Over the years, we've played with that and we think we found we struck the right kind of balance of what do free users get versus what paid users get, just before COVID happened, so this was like October 2019. And so we felt pretty good about it, but then everything shut down, and that was. We didn't know what was going to happen at that point, before you even register. You don't even have to register to visit the site and go look around and you can search for Blue Bayou, some of the restaurants we've been talking about, and you can go and we'll show you a nice calendar that will show you current availability. And you just have a little drop down and you can say I'm looking for a party of two or three or four or five, and we'll show you with a great amount of accuracy not 100% accuracy, but we'll show you with a great amount of accuracy anything that's available right now and we'll give you a link and say here, just go to Disney and book it. You don't pay us anything, you don't owe us anything. Just this is a better way to look at Disney's availability data. And here have it.
Speaker 3:Beyond that, if what you're looking for doesn't exist, that's when the next step is. Okay, we can help you get that reservation that you want. That's not currently available, but in order for us to help you, you'll need to register for an account, because we've got to save some things and better understand what you're looking for and then you can create an alert and that alert it collects what date you're looking for, what meal time you want, your party size and if you have any very specific time you want to go. And then we'll save that alert and we'll monitor Disney's website for you and notify you via email for that free account if something comes available and that service is 100% free. You just have to register an account so we can save some things for you and know how to notify you when we find something. The final step in that is okay, you're using that, maybe not having success, or you need more than the six alerts. That's when we can say hey, if you want that and a few other things, you can pay us $9 a month and that'll activate text messaging. So I love your example, like if you're not in front of a computer all day long, like text messaging, it's just really convenient, but it is very costly for us.
Speaker 3:Second thing is you can create up to 50 alerts so that way you don't have to finagle and constantly be like deleting alerts and adding alerts. You can just set them all up once and just let it do its thing. You get 50 alerts. The texting supports international numbers, so they can get their alerts internationally as well and help you in that search. And you can add more numbers as well when you pay and more email addresses. So if you have a party of five or six, I would always recommend having everybody get the notification, because one of you is going to be faster than the others, and that increases your chances of getting that reservation. That's really the service in a nutshell. That was a little longer than I wanted, but I think we have everything feeling pretty good at this point. And the last point I will make is that we have a mobile app that will be releasing, probably in the next 30 to 60 days, that will enable push notifications as well.
Speaker 2:That's really awesome If you're older, like me, and you like remember listening to the radio and you had to dial in. You got to be listening for that little word and then you got to dial in. Right then, and that's why it's also important. Looking at yourself, people will be like there's no hope, there's no reservations. There are people that book 12 reservations for their two day trip and then they cancel the ones they don't want. Now I don't particularly love that strategy because it ties up other people from being able to get reservations, but people cancel all the time.
Speaker 2:We're going to do another episode on walk up reservation getting into the walk up line as well so that is also an option that maybe you might want to consider. I messaged you saying, hey, could you build this for me? And then somebody else did a post and I'm using mouse dining for this and I was like that's exactly what I wanted. So if you go to mouse dinning's website and you go into the individual restaurants, it will show you which reservations have had availability in the past. We're recording this. In August, there was a big hubbub because Goofy's kitchen was not making new reservations even though it was well within the 60 days, and then we found out recently that it's because they're doing some sort of funky Halloween thing, so people were losing their minds, thinking that they had missed their opportunity to get Goofy's kitchen so you can use mouse dining. I'm going to include a video of that in the show notes as well. You guys do Thavi's workshop and Joy Depot and stuff too, right?
Speaker 3:Yes, we do.
Speaker 2:Can you tell us for Disneyland, what time right now are the 60 days in advance of the day? So if I'm going to be there on December 10th and December 11th, then the December 10th will open up for me exactly 60 days and December 11th will open up exactly 60 days before December 11th, which is different from Disney World, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I'm going to be Jeffrey Rush from Pirates of the Caribbean to say those are more like guidelines than rules. But yes, that's the plan, that's what they aim for, but certainly that does not happen all the time. We have immense amounts of data that can prove that they drop when they drop. Now my limited knowledge of the kind of internal workings of Disney restaurants and dining reservations is that some of the different restaurants just have proprietors. They're stuck using kind of Disney system or they have their own system that then injects into Disney system. So it really does boil down to an employee or another system making the data available and then publishing it. But then there's all these events that get in the way and special events and the parts hours change, and sometimes there's private events in the evening, and so it really does throw a wrench in things, and that's probably what you were experiencing, honestly, with Goofy's Kitchen. We had some communication with customers that were asking about that very particular thing. The data suggests that those just drop when they drop. You should be looking that day or maybe even like a few hours before they're supposed to drop, but if they don't drop, that's when a service like mouse dining can be incredibly handy because you'll be notified the moment they do drop. So, for example, if your trip's not for six months, you can set the alerts now and just walk away and forget it. And then once you get that first email, you're like oh look, reservations dropped, now I can actually try and go book something. So there's a lot of different ways to use mouse dining. And the other way I mentioned it already but just to address your question, like Some people just use mouse dining because it's just a better view of current availability.
Speaker 3:When our families at the parks we just pull up mouse dining and are like what's available? Is there anything available at these restaurants over the next three days of our trip? And sometimes the stuff we maybe really want to get into is booked. But we'll just keep going down our list of stuff we like and stuff we like to try and surely there's going to be something available. But we just use it because it's a better view. Even on, disney has a brand new website that went live yesterday. You can still only search for one day at a time, so you have to go in for each day of your trip. If you're going to spend three or four days at the park. You got to check for Monday, tuesday, wednesday and Thursday all individually. Where on our service. You can just look at the calendar and be like, oh, there's something available Tuesday.
Speaker 2:Disney's website is not always the easiest. And one thing I also want to note is if you're trying to get into downtown Disney restaurants like Tortilla Joe's, Napoli, those kinds of things, also check OpenTable, Because OpenTable has much more availability for those restaurants and they don't talk to each other. If you misjudged your arrival time or your departure time, you're trying to get something not in the Disneyland hotels but in that downtown Disney space, then definitely look at OpenTable. And then there's a place called Anaheim Packing House which has just this amazing assortment of all these really cool restaurants. It's about a 15 minute Uber, but if you like foods from different ethnicities, you like to be a little adventurous, that can be a fun place to go as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, great tip on the OpenTable. The way I understand it is that OpenTable has a designated number of reservations that they're allowed to fill and that Disney has their reservations. So you're right. You can go to Disney's site and see that Ralph Grinn and the Jazz Kitchen is booked up. You can go to OpenTable and be like, oh, there's six tables available, so great, 100% agree.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate you making the time. I know you're really busy helping people get awesome tables at lots of different awesome restaurants and thank you for co-founding such an awesome tool. That, I think, is a real help to the community and especially people who they're just planning their vacation, and so the idea of checking back every 20 minutes for reservations on top of everything else they have to do for their Disney vacation can be a little overwhelming. We have a link in the show notes to Mousetining and you can also go to parkmagiccom. Forward slash mouse dining and you can also go to mouse diningcom. So, dustin, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing that. Dito, like which ones are the most booked was really interesting.
Speaker 3:No problem, and it changes all the time, so we should do it again. This has been great. Thanks, robin.
Speaker 2:This has been another episode of the Park Magic Podcast, where we help you plan your magical Disney vacation, and we hope that you'll tune in for our next episode.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to this episode of the Park Magic Podcast. For more tips and planning tools designed to help simplify your Disneyland adventure, visit parkmagiccom. If you enjoyed today's episode and want to hear more tips, be sure to subscribe to the Park Magic Podcast and don't forget to leave us a review. Your feedback helps us spread the magic even further. Leaving a review could also help you. Each month, we will be selecting one reviewer to win. A one hour planning session with Robin. Winners will be announced at the end of the first episode of every month. Thanks for tuning in and remember that we are here to help you have a less stressful and more magical trip to Disneyland.