Mass cancellations for Oga's in January & February

[DoleWhipDrea]

Disney Destinations e-mailed me a few hours ago about my upcoming trip with family:

Dear Guest,

We look forward to seeing you soon at the Happiest Place on Earth!

We wanted to notify you as quickly as possible that due to an unforeseen issue, unfortunately, we need to cancel your dining reservation for Oga’s Cantina.

Reservation for ____________

Oga's Cantina at the Disneyland Resort

_____ PM

We sincerely apologize and know this is an inconvenience. We have since resolved this issue and encourage you to visit Disneyland.com or the Disneyland app to check availability and book a new dining reservation, pending availability. To assist you in making other plans, we will be sending you a $25 Disney Gift Card eGift from Disney Gift Card Services you can use during your next visit.

Please note, any other dining reservations you may have made are not impacted and will be visible on the Disneyland app and online.

If you have any questions, please call (714) 300-7805. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

A Twitter user says that they were able to re-snag a new reservation for the date that they were going, while others user said that they found no availability (this was within a few hours of the cancellations.) I couldn't find anything for my date unfortunately.

After contacting one of my family members who was really looking forward to visiting the cantina, he urged me to call the number, so I did. After about an hour of being on hold (BTW, they've updated the hold music loop and it re-loops after about 10 minutes, only playing snippets of songs woven together - absolutely awful) the CM I spoke with said that there was an "error" and that they were working to fix it, but she had no more information than that. She told me that eventually new reservations would become available, but she didn't know when. I asked why Disney couldn't simply look at the previous reservations and simply re-book the guests that previously had those times, but she couldn't answer why. Just a lot of "I don't know." She offered to transfer me after our call to leave a survey - and which point I was hung up on instead.

Disney's IT has always been bad, but wow, this is just a whole new level of awful. And while I'm not blaming individual front-of-the-line CMs, the general way of handling guest services seems to have drastically gone downhill. I'm just so frustrated and disappointed.

 

[TP2000]

....I asked why Disney couldn't simply look at the previous reservations and simply re-book the guests that previously had those times, but she couldn't answer why. Just a lot of "I don't know." She offered to transfer me after our call to leave a survey - and which point I was hung up on instead.

Disney's IT has always been bad, but wow, this is just a whole new level of awful. And while I'm not blaming individual front-of-the-line CMs, the general way of handling guest services seems to have drastically gone downhill. I'm just so frustrated and disappointed.

Wow. Sounds like yet another bad day for Disneyland's IT.

I'm trying to imagine how OpenTable or a big luxury hotel chain would handle this type of data collapse and cancelled reservations, and I can't imagine they would handle it the way Disneyland is.

It's just getting weird.

 

[DrAlice]

Premium service.

The Disney Difference.

 

[mickEblu]

Disney Destinations e-mailed me a few hours ago about my upcoming trip with family:



A Twitter user says that they were able to re-snag a new reservation for the date that they were going, while others user said that they found no availability (this was within a few hours of the cancellations.) I couldn't find anything for my date unfortunately.

After contacting one of my family members who was really looking forward to visiting the cantina, he urged me to call the number, so I did. After about an hour of being on hold (BTW, they've updated the hold music loop and it re-loops after about 10 minutes, only playing snippets of songs woven together - absolutely awful) the CM I spoke with said that there was an "error" and that they were working to fix it, but she had no more information than that. She told me that eventually new reservations would become available, but she didn't know when. I asked why Disney couldn't simply look at the previous reservations and simply re-book the guests that previously had those times, but she couldn't answer why. Just a lot of "I don't know." She offered to transfer me after our call to leave a survey - and which point I was hung up on instead.

Disney's IT has always been bad, but wow, this is just a whole new level of awful. And while I'm not blaming individual front-of-the-line CMs, the general way of handling guest services seems to have drastically gone downhill. I'm just so frustrated and disappointed.

Yeah they ve just gotten too big and too fast for their own good. They seem to just roll things out when they re not ready or capable. Things don’t seem very planned out and it feels like they re just doing things on the fly. Then to make matters worse the customer service isn’t even there when things go wrong. Ive been waiting for my key holder welcome package for 4 months (even though people who bought them months after me have theirs) and when I called a couple weeks ago they told me to call them again in 6 weeks if I still haven’t gotten it and that there was nothing else they could do. But I did get a little princess like giggle from the CM after she said “we didn’t think the keys would be so popular.” It reminds me of the growing pains I dealt with with ATT after the acquired DirectTv.

 

[TP2000]

Premium service.

The Disney Difference.

TP2000 True Story: I read your post and thought "I wonder what Disneyland says about their customer service practices nowadays? Do they even pretend they have that any more? Is it still World Class Guest Service according to them?"

So I just now went to the Disneyland.com website and hit the Guest Services tab to learn about what kind of "Guest Service" I will receive if I visit Disneyland as a "Guest". This screen just popped up....

You can not make this stuff up!

 

[DoleWhipDrea]

TP2000 True Story: I read your post and thought "I wonder what Disneyland says about their customer service practices nowadays? Do they even pretend they have that any more? Is it still World Class Guest Service according to them?"

So I just now went to the Disneyland.com website and hit the Guest Services tab to learn about what kind of "Guest Service" I will receive if I visit Disneyland as a "Guest". This screen just popped up....

View attachment 608125

You can not make this stuff up!

Wow.

Ugh, I really am not a fan of everyone simply blaming everything on Chapek, but one can't deny that things have really gone off the deep end since he was put in charge.

/D'Amaro?

 

[josh2000]

Absolute bull. I had to get up very early in the morning to make that reservation, just for it to get cancelled. Very unhappy.

 

[CaptinEO]

Wow.

Ugh, I really am not a fan of everyone simply blaming everything on Chapek, but one can't deny that things have really gone off the deep end since he was put in charge.

/D'Amaro?

D'Amoro is much better at public relations/ events but is cut from the same cloth as any Disney executive.

 

[waltography]

D'Amaro is much better at public relations/ events but is cut from the same cloth as any Disney executive.

Seems like it's a harder lesson for people to learn with D'Amaro given the amount of goodwill he received while he was a part of Disneyland leadership, but now that he's at the top there's really no excuse for the subpar parks experience he's stamped his approval on.

 

[mickEblu]

Seems like it's a harder lesson for people to learn with D'Amaro given the amount of goodwill he received while he was a part of Disneyland leadership, but now that he's at the top there's really no excuse for the subpar parks experience he's stamped his approval on.

And he’s terrible with a lightsaber.

 

[DrAlice]

TP2000 True Story: I read your post and thought "I wonder what Disneyland says about their customer service practices nowadays? Do they even pretend they have that any more? Is it still World Class Guest Service according to them?"

So I just now went to the Disneyland.com website and hit the Guest Services tab to learn about what kind of "Guest Service" I will receive if I visit Disneyland as a "Guest". This screen just popped up....

View attachment 608125

You can not make this stuff up!

At least they're honest!

 

[TP2000]

Seems like it's a harder lesson for people to learn with D'Amaro given the amount of goodwill he received while he was a part of Disneyland leadership, but now that he's at the top there's really no excuse for the subpar parks experience he's stamped his approval on.

He swooped in to Anaheim being tall and handsome and charming, and (to his credit) he cleaned up the mess Colglazier left him and mended fences with important people who were mad at Disneyland after Colglazier's snobby reign.

A lot of Mr. Damaro's fame comes from being much better looking and far more personable than Colglazier.

I'd been entirely out of the loop on that Star Wars Hotel thing for the past few years, but just got caught up on it via YouTube and the thread over on the WDW side. And... my God... that light saber thing Mr. Damaro did for the cameras was cheap looking and stupid. He was trying to have fun for the cameras, but it looks really dumb.

 

[CaptinEO]

He swooped in to Anaheim being tall and handsome and charming, and (to his credit) he cleaned up the mess Colglazier left him and mended fences with important people who were mad at Disneyland after Colglazier's snobby reign.

A lot of Mr. Damaro's fame comes from being much better looking and far more personable than Colglazier.

I'd been entirely out of the loop on that Star Wars Hotel thing for the past few years, but just got caught up on it via YouTube and the thread over on the WDW side. And... my God... that light saber thing Mr. Damaro did for the cameras was cheap looking and stupid. He was trying to have fun for the cameras, but it looks really dumb.

The Star Wars hotel thing is interesting. As a normal Disney themed hotel some fun Star Wars levers and a little light saber flash light game can be a small added bonus for that hotel's theming.

When you try to sell something as an "immersive premium experience" and charge 6 thousand dollars for 2 nights, it just looks like a cheap attempt to con customers.

 

[TP2000]

The Star Wars hotel thing is interesting. As a normal Disney themed hotel some fun Star Wars levers and a little light saber flash light game can be a small added bonus for that hotel's theming.

When you try to sell something as an "immersive premium experience" and charge 6 thousand dollars for 2 nights, it just looks like a cheap attempt to con customers.

Oh my gosh, I had no idea how badly that Star Wars Hotel was crashing and burning out at WDW until a few days ago. I got stuck in a YouTube loop of all these Star Wars Vloggers and Disney Vloggers who were just trashing the pre-opening PR that Disney is now pumping out for it, and it's insane how badly they are botching this!

The pre-opening PR for the Star Wars Hotel is like a masterclass in creating cringe inducing material that scares people away instead of lures them in and snags a down payment on a reservation. Their PR on this cheap product is literally causing mass cancellations.

A college marketing class could use the Star Wars Hotel as a perfect example of what not to do with an expensive product aimed at a niche audience.

It's so bad, I still wonder if it's all not a big prank and a purposeful goof on the fans. But if it's not, Bob Chapek is even dumber and more clueless about his customers than we feared.

 

[SoCalDisneyLover]

The Star Wars hotel thing is interesting. As a normal Disney themed hotel some fun Star Wars levers and a little light saber flash light game can be a small added bonus for that hotel's theming.

When you try to sell something as an "immersive premium experience" and charge 6 thousand dollars for 2 nights, it just looks like a cheap attempt to con customers.

Everything originally advertised about the hotel made it sound too good to be true. Like an incredible, once in a lifetime experience, with unmatched technology and immersion. If it had delivered on that, then the price, even though extreme, would have been worth it, and the demand would exist once word and reviews got out.

Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, it seems the end result might fall short of that mark. Disney does not like to admit mistakes, and they hate having to lower prices even more, so it will be interesting to see what they do if enough people balk at the prices being charged to stay there. I imagine they're anticipating being filled to capacity for months following the official opening.

Expect cuts to the already subpar experience when the budget has to be trimmed to compensate for the lack of revenue.

 

[Sailor310]

A guaranteed ride on ROR might have been worth more when the boarding groups were running.

 

[CaptinEO]

Everything originally advertised about the hotel made it sound too good to be true. Like an incredible, once in a lifetime experience, with unmatched technology and immersion. If it had delivered on that, then the price, even though extreme, would have been worth it, and the demand would exist once word and reviews got out.

Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, it seems the end result might fall short of that mark. Disney does not like to admit mistakes, and they hate having to lower prices even more, so it will be interesting to see what they do if enough people balk at the prices being charged to stay there. I imagine they're anticipating being filled to capacity for months following the official opening.

Expect cuts to the already subpar experience when the budget has to be trimmed to compensate for the lack of revenue.

This seems to have been Disney's MO as of recent. Both Star Wars Land and Avengers Campus talked about how you could "Live Your Own Star Wars Adventure" or "Train To Be A Super Hero".

Yet the company cheaped out on both big time and blatantly lied to all their customers about what the product was for YEARS during development and even during opening advertising campaigns.

All those talking points and photos constantly shown at conferences, press events, and ABC Specials were all lies to scam the public into paying for a product that didn't exist.

Theres a big difference between upselling and lying. Disney did the latter.

 

[CaptinEO]

Oh my gosh, I had no idea how badly that Star Wars Hotel was crashing and burning out at WDW until a few days ago. I got stuck in a YouTube loop of all these Star Wars Vloggers and Disney Vloggers who were just trashing the pre-opening PR that Disney is now pumping out for it, and it's insane how badly they are botching this!

The pre-opening PR for the Star Wars Hotel is like a masterclass in creating cringe inducing material that scares people away instead of lures them in and snags a down payment on a reservation. Their PR on this cheap product is literally causing mass cancellations.

A college marketing class could use the Star Wars Hotel as a perfect example of what not to do with an expensive product aimed at a niche audience.

It's so bad, I still wonder if it's all not a big prank and a purposeful goof on the fans. But if it's not, Bob Chapek is even dumber and more clueless about his customers than we feared.

Isn't it so funny that even Disney's biggest supporters, the vloggers, have finally turned against them.

It's for a lot of reasons, Genie+ being a major one, but this Star Wars Hotel is what really appears to be the turning point.

It is hilarious how their marketing made people not want the product, like you mentioned. Anyone on this board knows how bad these Disney marketing videos are. It's so interesting that now the entire internet is taking notice of these terrible videos. All thanks to the Galactic Starcruiser.

I'm not even sure if it's all Chapek to blame, Lucasfilm seems to be heavily involved in the themepark Star Wars projects.

Lucasfilm without George Lucas doesn't seem to understand what Star Wars is. They have fisher price looking monitors in a blank white hallway that looks pristine, have an empty Star Wars Marketplace devoid of life, and make movies about how Luke is a jerk that tells sarcastic jokes and how Han and Leia are divorced.

 

[Stevek]

Just show up, walk in's refresh every 30 minutes. We had zero issues getting in on a busy day, waited roughly 15 minutes for the 30 minute refresh and then another 5-10 min in the standby line.

 

[trylon57]

Not this year. We used to go
every year to either Orlando or Anaheim but not now. 19 visits to Orlando, 5 visits to Anaheim. Not interested these days. Oh well... maybe next year.