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Disney Reservation System Plans Outage
- Thread starter prberk
- Start date
Captain Chaos
Well-Known Member
Even before the outage I was having issues with Disney Online Dining... No matter what browser I use, I cannot seem to be able to select the date or look for a table... I looked into all my settings, reinstalled Flash, deleted my cookies, and still nothing...
mp2bill
Well-Known Member
Tom
Beta Return
An update on 10/18/2010...
WDW is announcing another outage - implying that the first one is over. It IS NOT - the online dining system is still broken.
While I hate to suggest this... if you hit the online dining system to verify reservations, and can not do so? Check by Reservation number. If this fails? FOLLOW WDW's PUBLISHED ADVICE. This would be:
"Sorry, we are unable to retrieve your reservation. Please call the Disney Reservation Center at (407) 939-3463. If you are under 18 years of age, you must have your parent or guardians permission to dial this number."
Yup - a real load on the system. But it is EXACTLY what WDW is asking you to do - look at their web page.Yes, this IS the only way (apparently) to motivate the WDW "Web Service" people to actually update their content to agree with WDW actions. I did so this evening - taking up a good 12 minutes of CM time, apologizing for the published advice at the official web site, then verifying ALL of my reservations.
What did you prove by doing this? All you did was waste 12 minutes of a Cast Member's time, and delayed another guest in making or changing reservations (something that would have actually been important).
It has been made extremely clear in this thread that not an ounce of data was lost during the system upgrade. If you didn't have an immediate need to change an existing reservation or make a new one, there was absolutely no reason for you to call.
They published this system outage as best they could (including listing all of the outage dates well in advance) and have been extremely forward with their voice mail recordings and website notices. Neither your call, nor the calls of anyone else who just wants to call to waste valuable call center time, are going to make the IT department work any faster.
Seriously.
Had you forgotten to write your reservation information down?
Tom
Beta Return
Ah, I see now.
You proved that people who know for certain that their reservations are perfectly in tact are able to call and waste the time of CMs and other guests just to "stick it" to the web department.
I imagine they have called in the entire web staff tonight to work 24 hours a day to make this global system upgrade go faster. We all owe you a debt of gratitude.
Touche.
askmike1
Member
There is an outage announcement located on the Book your Vacation page.
Outage Notification: Please be advised that we will be updating our systems to serve you better. If you are considering making a reservation in the near future, we kindly ask that you please make that reservation prior to 5 p.m. ET - October 19, 2010. During this enhancement, beginning on October 19, 2010 at 5 p.m. ET, online bookings and bookings through the Disney Reservation Center will be unavailable. We do expect to return to full functionality by the morning of October 20, 2010 and apologize in advance for any inconvenience. Please note that these dates and times are subject to change
There is none on the dining page, but let's be honest... dining reservations aren't nearly as big as vacation rentals (in terms of needing to know in advance). In addition, the bulk of the outage occurs overnight when the reservation center is closed. If they try and make it online, they'll get a notice at that time telling them about the outage. If they get an error now (or after the next outage) telling them to call the number, they can do that to retrieve their reservations. Not to mention that if you already made a reservation online, you have the entire confirmation message in an email sent to you.
Furthermore, there is no "outage of the day"... the outage is done and there won't be another one until tomorrow night (which is significantly smaller and different than the last). There will be bugs which will cause the various systems to be on and off until the bugs are settled.
Oh boy... so I see Disney told you to do something, and therefore you did it. You know, there is a difference between being smart... and being a smart-alec (or something else I won't say). A bit of common sense is in need here. If you need to find your reservation right away, you call the reservation center and they will help you. If you are just doing this to be a smart-alec and waste both the cast member's time and a guest's time who actually needs to make that call.... that is just wrong and without any form of common sense.
Wow.... you obviously have absolutely no clue of what is going on behind the scenes right now. :brick:
Tom
Beta Return
For the record, when I used the term "web" I was mocking. I, personally, completely understand the major difference between the many isolated divisions of the IT world.
And also for the record, based on the extremely limited information I have on what's been taking place, kudos to you (and everyone involved) for what appears to be a successful upgrade (phase). The fact that the bulk of the system was completely operational when Disney said it would be is amazing (and unique).
disneydata
Well-Known Member
FYI -
The IT team doesn't care at this point if the online dining system isn't working. They don't even care if the dining system itself isn't funny operational (I wouldn't totally say that, they're just REALLY low on their priority list). There are bigger fish to fry at this point until after the last upgrade like the thousands of reservations that are checking in over the next few weeks. Also the thousands of dollars in deposits that need to download to said reservations in the old and new systems and making sure everything integrates properly.
Once the systems have been upgraded and the kinks worked out, they will start to look at the dining system in general (there are problems with it after the first upgrade). THEN they will work on getting back full online fuctionality. Don't expect it to come back fully anytime soon.
The IT team doesn't care at this point if the online dining system isn't working. They don't even care if the dining system itself isn't funny operational (I wouldn't totally say that, they're just REALLY low on their priority list). There are bigger fish to fry at this point until after the last upgrade like the thousands of reservations that are checking in over the next few weeks. Also the thousands of dollars in deposits that need to download to said reservations in the old and new systems and making sure everything integrates properly.
Once the systems have been upgraded and the kinks worked out, they will start to look at the dining system in general (there are problems with it after the first upgrade). THEN they will work on getting back full online fuctionality. Don't expect it to come back fully anytime soon.
Tom
Beta Return
Honestly, I think the Dining Reservations site is the only place Disney forgot to put up the "outage" message. It's definitely plastered anywhere else you try to make or modify reservations online.
For all we know, they may have actually programmed their Content Management System to display a notice on the dining pages during the "scheduled" outage, and had it stop displaying automatically when the system SHOULD have been back up.
I don't give the Online Dining Reservation "department" a lot of credit anyway, at least compared to the rest of Disney web and IT. Even the "new and improved" beta system can't handle some of the simplest tasks. I long for the day when it can actually recognize your Dining Plan and simply place a Credit Card hold for things like Dinner Shows without actually charging your card the full amount.
Tom
Beta Return
This enlightens me in MANY ways... Disney has departmentalized the Dining System? edwardtc - I'm starting to understand the issue... now that the Dining System is Customer Facing - it should be under the control of Disney IT. Dow Chemical's R&D department was on the web long before the rest of the Company - but when the day came that the corporation embraced the Internet? I knew that the right thing to do, for the sake of the ENTIRE Corporation, was to allow corporate IT to own the technology. The current situation with Dining must frustrate you to no end - and I understand why.
You are in the middle of a swamp full of alligators - but when this is over? I STRONGLY urge you to talk to management, and do all that you can to pull the entire WDW Web Presence under the control of your Central IT Division. Around 1998, we had 15 separate Departments controling 15 separate Customer Facing sites with ZERO integration. No - it wasn't working
In the mean time - if you are dealing with a separate department? Consider a phone call... find that Department Manager. Tell him what you are doing, and why it's important to all of Disney to gain his departments help. If this man has any sense of Corporate Responsability, he will help you.
Hey, it could be worse... you could be doing the backend upgrade with a Chlorine Sphere 40 feet away....
...and yeah, now I've said too much. Please don't forward my note to Dow - I really want to keep my Pension (and spend most of it at WDW)....
For the record, I don't work for Disney in any way, shape or form. My post about the Dining website was purely opinion-based, but comes from my frequent interaction with many of their sites. But I have a strong feeling that the "web" people for the different sites are probably sitting in offices in different states. Then there's the backend people who are probably in yet another state. I have no idea if this is true or not - just seems this way based on the lack of cohesion.
I code websites myself, and often find myself browsing their source code...for fun (sad, I know). The coding style is different between the main WDW site and the WDW Dining site. I've often found somewhat unprofessional comments left in the code on the main site (don't see any right now) like <!--This is broken. We'll fix it later--> or <!--IE Sucks-->. I often use IE hacks, but I take the "IE Sucks" part out of my public code :lol:
Interesting to note: they use Adobe's Analytics called SiteCatalyst.
Lastly, you might notice that when you go to the online dining page, it automatically re-directs you to a temporary "Down for Maintenance" page. This makes me think my hypothesis was true about them setting a "timer" for their temporary pages, and letting them go "live" even when the back-end wasn't quite ready to handle dining reservations again. Just one giant lack of communication. You are dead on about the need for more in-house collaboration.
Amused to Death
Well-Known Member
As of today, I still can't see any of the 66 dining reservations that I made before they started updating their software, but just now, I was able to make six new reservations for April, and I'm able to pull those up without any problems. Let's hope that adding a few new dining reservations doesn't permanently delete all of the old ones! :lol:
askmike1
Member
Just speaking in general while small companies can do that, it just simply isn't feasible for companies as large as Disney to have a one-job-does-all approach. I definitely agree that in principal, it would be nice if people can have at least some knowledge of all the different areas, but it is most important for them when the divisions are split to have excellent knowledge in their area and some knowledge in the areas they interact with (as opposed to having "good" knowledge everywhere). But yeah, just not feasible with big companies. On the opposite end, Disney is well known for moving people around to different areas, so it is very likely that most people will have had experience in various areas of the company.
I believe I may have misinterpreted your previous post based on the wording. If you were calling to verify your reservations still existed, that is of course a perfectly reasonable thing to do (if on the other hand you were calling to be a smart alec and just tell them about the problem, my previous post holds
). Just speaking personally, this is what I would recommend people do if their reservations don't show up. If you are already in the resort... just visit your hotel concierge. If your vacation is within the next 2-3 weeks, or you lost your confirmation emails... call the reservation center and ask for your confirmation numbers again (and let the CM know of the website problem). If your vacation isn't for at least a month and you still have your confirmation emails.... just chill.
Give it time. If you want to be nice and let Disney know of the problem, just use their 'Contact Us' link. Again, just my personal opinion.
Tom
Beta Return
I wonder if new ADRs can be made, and then retrieved - or is the entire online version of the dining system down?
I can't imagine the hold times right now. I wonder if they brought in some English-speaking back-ups to help absorb the overflow.
ToTBellHop
Well-Known Member
I have older reservations (made before the system upgrade) that begin in 402, so this wasn't done during the upgrade.