Walt Disney World will be open for business in just a few weeks, but before that happens, all the people who were planning to visit will need to make reservations. Due to the park's limited capacity, everybody will need to be booked into specific parks on specific days and this morning that reservation system went online. And based on reactions on social media, there are a lot of people trying to book, and that is overwhelming the system to some degree,
While it appears that many were able to get in and book their trips with little or no problem, there were certainly some issues that cropped up. Many people were simply had trouble getting the page to properly load. In all honestly, it's a frequent problem whenever any website gets overwhelmed by more guests than expected, and it seems that the load was just a little too much.
It seems there there were certainly some tricks to optimizing your odds in getting everything to work properly. It appears that desktiop or laptop web browsers were having more success that using mobile browsers. It also seems that certain browsers worked better than others. Of course, there was no way to know that at the beginning of the process, which led to people having problems just getting to a proper web page.
The issue was that whether you wanted to book a Walt Disney World trip for this July or next February, this was your first chance, and with a lot of open questions regarding what park capacity will look like not just in the short term but for the foreseeable future, everybody who wanted to be sure they got to go on the dates they really wanted needed to jump online now to try and secure those dates.
The Walt Disney World website had a virtual waiting room where guests were supposed to wait until it was there turn to book, but even if you got to that point, there was apparently no guarantee it would work properly.
On the plus side, while there appeared to be a system bottleneck of guests trying to get in to book, it seems that maybe the actual booking isn't that big a deal. I haven't seen any reports of the first few days filling up or people not able to get the dates they want, and it looks like there is still availability across the board, though that certainly may change as more people get in and book. Today only those who also had Walt Disney World hotel reservations were able to book their trip. Those staying off property on Annual Passholders with no hotels needed will need to wait a few days.
With the limited capacity, there's a real question whether the park will start to get full on certain days. There are certainly a lot of people willing to visit the parks right now, the website issues are proof of that, but there are also many not yet willing to take the chance. We'll have to wait and see just how busy things get when the parks open in July.
