Very Un-Disney Restaurant Policies

Jon81uk

Well-Known Member
I agree 100 percent. We had an issue in December where Tusker House charged us 3 dining credits 1 hour after we , a party of two had eaten there). i only found this out the next day when we ate at Ohana and i discovered we were missing 3 credits, called guest services they said we would have to go to guest services at any park or to our hotel to take care of it. I wasted time going to guest services at Epcot to be told that we would have to go to our hotel, so we are supposed blow of all our fastpasses and go back to the hotel to fix someone else error, I finally called the hotel and got someone to fix it, but still wasted tons of time on something we did not do. I t would have nice to at least get an extra fast pass to compensate us for all the extra trouble and wasted time.

Why not just resolve it when you return to the hotel at the end of the day?
 

threvester

Well-Known Member
I agree 100 percent. We had an issue in December where Tusker House charged us 3 dining credits 1 hour after we , a party of two had eaten there). i only found this out the next day when we ate at Ohana and i discovered we were missing 3 credits, called guest services they said we would have to go to guest services at any park or to our hotel to take care of it. I wasted time going to guest services at Epcot to be told that we would have to go to our hotel, so we are supposed blow of all our fastpasses and go back to the hotel to fix someone else error, I finally called the hotel and got someone to fix it, but still wasted tons of time on something we did not do. I t would have nice to at least get an extra fast pass to compensate us for all the extra trouble and wasted time.
This happened to us twice last trip (9/2019)..Be our guest charged us for an extra 4 entitlements and crystal palace charged us 1 extra.. We were given 4 extra entitlements as compensation for our time spent proving/fixing the situation.
 

Phonedave

Well-Known Member
Couple of points.

I may not be an IT person, as in I do not code, however I have Project Managed more IT projects that I can remember.

I suspect that Disney is much like where I work. We are a huge company this is active 24/7/365 - there is no down or slow time. We are also the aggregation of many different mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations, we also have to history stretching back to where nobody knew what a computer was. There are literally hundreds of interacting systems here. It is a huge undertaking to consolidate them all, while they are operational, and are mission critical. It's not an excuse for Disney, but just some insight into where their problems arise.

As was said by the OP, the easiest and most customer pleasing solution (aside from not making the mistake in the first place) is the place a hold for the amount of the meal on the customers card on file at the resort. Once everything is sorted, they either charge the credits and remove the hold, or they charge the card if the customer was lying about the DDP. A follow up email / text is also in order once things are resolved.
 

DisAl

Well-Known Member
The worst experience we have had with Disney IT was how they handled room / magic band charges. I don't know if they have done anything about this but when we were there last March it worked like this:
I had a "consolidation of current charges" pending charge of $473 on my card one night while the individual charges that made up that $473 were all still showing as individual pending charges, PLUS another $100 hold after the "consolidation". So at that point I had $1046 of pending charges on my card for what would eventually be a $473 charge. And they were doing this EVERY NIGHT, not every 5 days. I finally disabled the charge card notification on my phone because they were waking me up at 2:00 a.m. every morning when they did their overnight processing.
What really does not make sense is that they go ahead and pass along each charge as it is made as a pending charge and then later combine all the pending charges and charge the combined charges as a NEW pending charge. Why combine them at all? Since the charges are already pending on your card why not just leave them that way and let them go through? As long as your charges keep going through they could just hold on to that first $100 hold until the end for a security buffer. That would be so much easier than the messy process they have now.
It also makes it impossible to keep up with your individual charges because once they are consolidated you don't see the individual charges any more. So, if you don't already save every receipt for your credit card you should because you won't have a record of individual charges, just the consolidated charges!
You will have NO record of individual charges on your credit card bill if you need to go back and check something.
 

Victor Kelly

Well-Known Member
Save receipts, have your itinerary printed out for everyday inuding dining and fastpasses. I have a copy on my phone, plus a copy on my email and then a written copy for each day on an index card.

Disney's IT system sucks. I had to waste an hour before to get things worked out, each time a blunder happened another hour was lost. If I have already paid I will not pay again. If they hit my card I will dispute it and shut off the card via online banking.

Someone mentioned having the non paying customer arrested. A lawyer will have fun with that because the cops will arrest you because they are on the Disney payroll. Which would give Disney bad press. Facebook and Twitter are powerful for us pions.

This can all be solved by not using software and hardware that is incapable of handling the load that they have.
 

PrincessNelly_NJ

Well-Known Member
I agree 100 percent. We had an issue in December where Tusker House charged us 3 dining credits 1 hour after we , a party of two had eaten there). i only found this out the next day when we ate at Ohana and i discovered we were missing 3 credits, called guest services they said we would have to go to guest services at any park or to our hotel to take care of it. I wasted time going to guest services at Epcot to be told that we would have to go to our hotel, so we are supposed blow of all our fastpasses and go back to the hotel to fix someone else error, I finally called the hotel and got someone to fix it, but still wasted tons of time on something we did not do. I t would have nice to at least get an extra fast pass to compensate us for all the extra trouble and wasted time.
Look on the bright side at least you weren't accused of lying like we were.

We were on the DDP but paid OOP for our meal at Via Napoli by charging it to the room (just two of us). Somehow, the server charged our meal to the room & used 4 of our TS credits for another family's meal. When we went to have it resolved, a woman at POFQ's front desk was adamant that we were lying. She "politely" suggested that we probably were joined by friends and had a few alcoholic drinks, hence the extra credits & additional room charge and we must have forgotten. (This was prior to alcohol being included with the DP. mind you, we went the very next day)

I was shocked. She refused to fix it until we could prove what we ordered, luckily I still had the receipt. She did issue the credits back but made sure to tell me to double check my math when scheduling meals next time.
 
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ninjaprincesst

Well-Known Member
Look on the bright side at least you weren't accused of lying like we were.

We were on the DDP but paid OOP for our meal at Via Napoli by charging it to the room (just two of us). Somehow, the server charged our meal to the room & used 4 of our TS credits for another family's meal. When we went to have it resolved, a woman at POFQ's front desk was adamant that we were lying. She "politely" suggested that we probably were joined by friends and had a few alcoholic drinks, hence the extra credits & additional room charge and we must have forgotten. (mind you, we went the very next day)

I was shocked. She refused to fix it until we could prove what we ordered, luckily I still had the receipt. She did issue the credits back but made sure to tell me to double check my math when scheduling meals next time.
I think the first couple of people I talked to thought we were lying too. But seriously why would a party of 2 go back to the same place an hour later and magically become a party of 3? I even brought up the fact that could check our magic band scan and see that an hour after we ate we had scanned in for our KS fastpass.
 

Dad 2 M & M

Well-Known Member
Look on the bright side at least you weren't accused of lying like we were.
When we went to have it resolved, a woman at POFQ's front desk was adamant that we were lying. She "politely" suggested that we probably were joined by friends and had a few alcoholic drinks, hence the extra credits & additional room charge and we must have forgotten. (mind you, we went the very next day)
Gee Willikers ......Sounds like the CM missed her life calling! She should have been an Imagineer to come up with a scenario like that out of the blue......
 
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jwutony16

Active Member
Not really you are still out meals that you already paid for and if they don't fix it you will have to pay out of pocket for something you already paid for.
[/QYou are right. I didnt finish my thought and apparently I hit send. I was going to add that going to GS to get meal credits back is a lot easier than dishing out extra money and trying to receive a refund.
 

Djsfantasi

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
So, okay, if someone is on vacation at Disney, we would expect their budget to be flexible enough that they have at least one meal's worth of cash in the bank or available on their credit card.

However, there is no law that says you have to have extra cash available when you visit a Disney theme park. When you buy the dining plan, you are pre-paying for meals. Suppose the OP literally did not have the money to pay for the meal out of pocket? They are not trying to steal anything; they have already paid Disney for the meal.

What could Disney do if you simply refused to comply with the restaurant staff's instructions?

Reservations under the dining plan DOES require a credit card up front. For example, if you’re a no show, they charge your card $10. I’m good with that.

In this, they had my card. The issue for me was the following:
  • Their point of sale system couldn’t find my dining plan.
  • They COULD see my entitlements online
  • A “glitch” in the system couldn’t charge my dining plan, EVEN THO’ THEY COULD SEE IT WITH ANOTHER SYSTEM.
  • They expected me to pay out of pocket
  • Or they expected me to wait for an hour or so to see if their system would start working.
I was not happy because the restaurant management expected that I would be hunky dory with that.

It was their problem, not mine. And the expected me to pay for that mistake.

Yeah, right!
 

Jon81uk

Well-Known Member
Reservations under the dining plan DOES require a credit card up front. For example, if you’re a no show, they charge your card $10. I’m good with that.

In this, they had my card. The issue for me was the following:
  • Their point of sale system couldn’t find my dining plan.
  • They COULD see my entitlements online
  • A “glitch” in the system couldn’t charge my dining plan, EVEN THO’ THEY COULD SEE IT WITH ANOTHER SYSTEM.
  • They expected me to pay out of pocket
  • Or they expected me to wait for an hour or so to see if their system would start working.
I was not happy because the restaurant management expected that I would be hunky dory with that.

It was their problem, not mine. And the expected me to pay for that mistake.

Yeah, right!

Charge it to your room account and resolve it at the resort front desk later on. They are much better equipped to sort out issues with your resort package than the restaurant manager is. This also means you can do it outside of the park when you don't have to rush off somewhere else.

Its not a good thing that the system wasn't working, but resolving vacation package issues it at the resort front desk is always much easier as in-park they are only really set up for dealing with day guest issues.

I'm not saying your experience wasn't awful and they should have tried harder to give you a simple solution. But a franchised restaurant is never going to be able to resolve these sort of issues as well as the resort can.
 

NickPytlinski

Well-Known Member
im not an IT professional by any means but the requests from the manager in the restaurant is what probably caused the most grief.

i get its not the managers fault, but he is there to solve issues like this that do not impact the guests experience. its called hospitality.
The guest should not have to expect to do extra tasks because Disney system is playing up.
why should they pay cash or card for a meal already paid for. why should they have to go to guest relations.

i 100% understand the frustrations from the OP.

how many meals are comped in disney for someone saying "i dont like this meal becasue......"
the individual meal is normally comped.

You sometimes cannot foresee a problem with an IT process. But there should be something inp lace as the OP says for this eventuality. If it means a free meal. then on disney head be it.

it would be totally unfair to give disney a pass on all problems that arise, whether it be a software provider or a member of staff!
 

daisyduckie

Well-Known Member
Because you SHOULD NOT HAVE TO in the first place. And my experience with that is that it will take you an hour to get it done there too.

Well the system shouldn't have glitched, and yet it did. Life isn't perfect. And anyone who expects things to run perfectly 100% of the time is setting themselves up for huge disappointments.

People really need to learn how to deal with problems with a bit of grace.
 

Chi84

Premium Member
Has nothing to do with being an adult or handling matters with grace. This is a problem that Disney has seen before, and it should have a way of dealing with it without unduly inconveniencing the guest. The options presented to the OP at the restaurant were not reasonable or adequate. If I had to accept one of those options, I would have taken it up with guest services afterwards and I would absolutely have expected some type of compensation. Disney may not always handle things well at the front lines, but their guest recovery is pretty good. We got two complimentary nights in a lake view studio at Bay Lake Tower as compensation for having our form of payment disconnected from our MDE account (twice) due to the credit card authorization holds. And I never asked for a thing - just wrote an email to Disney describing the problem and stating I hoped we could look forward to a better experience the next time we visited. The OP had every right to expect Disney to handle the issue much better than it did.
 

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