How do you choose ADR’s so far in advance?

[877]

We’re going in October (hopefully),

I’m wondering how dibbers know when/where to book their ADR’s for?

For example do you already have planned which park you will be visiting for those dates, show times etc?

It’s a bit overwhelming this year!

[sha9]

We always plan our park days in advance so we can book FP. We choose a mixture of breakfasts, lunches and dinners based on that. We only occasionally have dinner in a park but if we have DDP will schedule in a couple of evenings in parks to eat at our favourite restaurants.

[Uke_Lay_Lee]

I made a list of the places I wanted to go to and the meals I wanted them for like breakfast, lunch etc. Then I looked at the park events like the Halloween party, When the hours were released it kind of came together. Someone on here suggested early stuff Like Character breakfast do the first week and save the later stuff for the second week and that helped me plan too. Also keep in mind busy days like weekends I avoided anything already popular on those days.
I have a rough idea of what I want for FP but for me the restaurant booking took priority as I didn’t do much of the restaurants the first time I went.
Hope you get what you want.

[arosiem]

I’m hopefully going in October & I booked our ADRs on Monday.
I have a daily plan and I’d researched where I want to eat and what parks we’re doing when. My plan got changed slightly according to the availability of some restaurants

[The Fatadder]

My approach to ADRs:
I start of making a long list of all the places we would like to eat at, we then talk about it over a couple of evenings and try to cut it down to the appropriate number of restaurants for the trip (usually with a couple of spares).

We have a standard list of the minimum number of days per park that we have used on previous holidays (although Hollywood Studios was updated this year due to Toy Story and Star Wars lands ).

About a month before the ADR day the DIB Busy Day Guide is released, so this is pulled into a spreadsheet (and then compared with the busy day guides on a couple of other sites). From this I populate a spreadsheet listing the best parks for each day, against which we then pick where we are planning to go (cross checking with the other list to ensure we have the right number of days per park.)

We then take the list of restaurants and slot in the obvious ones where the restaurant is in the same park we are visiting or the hotel. Then we fill in the "ok" locations, where there is park to park connections or at Disney Springs (this mostly seems to impact Epcot restaurants for which we always seem to have more of than Epcot days). Finally there are the others, at which point we have another look to decide do we really want to eat there or would somewhere else do.

This time the lack of a hire car certainly puts a little more thought into that last group, as its not quite so easy to hop around moving location to get to restaurants without one.

Then we try and get them all booked (as early as possible on ADR day of course)

[877]

Thanks everyone for the tips, much appreciated.

Here’s hoping it actually happens for everyone! 👍

[returnplanning]

If you are like me you decide where some places that you really want to eat are - either because you have been before or because they sound cool. You set out a rough plan.


You then forget the ADR day because you are working, and realise about 5 days after your due date, so end up scrambling like a madwoman.

Hope that helps.

(I did get most of what I wanted, though!)