Very Un-Disney Restaurant Policies

[Chi84]

Wow, this sure heated up! I would never suggest it's okay for a guest to be rude to any Disney employee, but there was no need for the OP to be a sheep about this either. We're talking about very profitable businesses which should - and do - expect to be held accountable for things that go wrong resulting in a poor guest experience. If the restaurant manager was the one assigned to deal with the issue, then it was perfectly fine for the OP to express his frustration at being given two resolutions that he found unacceptable. It doesn't matter that the manager couldn't resolve the issue - what he could do was let the people in charge of the restaurant, and ultimately Disney, know that guests expect a better plan in place when problems arise. As stated many times here, this is not the first time Disney has seen this issue.

Over the years, we've had a few (thankfully very few) issues that needed to be addressed, and our experiences in resolving them varied quite a bit. For those who suggested a "five-minute" call to guest relations or a "quick trip" to the front desk, it doesn't always work that way. Some Disney CMs are better than others, and some issues that you think would be easy to fix turn out to be fairly time-consuming. Based on my own experiences, I wouldn't be so generous with other people's vacation time.

 

[ninjaprincesst]

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.

Ok what if he was like us , we rope drop to park close every day, and the only time we were near the resort desk was when we were waiting out front for the Magic Express bus, when would we have taken care of it? What if you don't have that much room on your card because you know you had the dining plan, perhaps like us you had tons of Disney rewards to use for souvenirs we did not have a lot of extra money with us. When you have the dining plan that is supposed to cover it you are not planning for having that extra charge. No it is their fault, the should not expect you to waste hours of your trip because they have a problem it is their problem , they are the ones that have messed up it should be on them to fix it on their time and not cause the customer to screw up their trip.

 

[RobWDW1971]

Ok what if he was like us , we rope drop to park close every day, and the only time we were near the resort desk was when we were waiting out front for the Magic Express bus, when would we have taken care of it? What if you don't have that much room on your card because you know you had the dining plan, perhaps like us you had tons of Disney rewards to use for souvenirs we did not have a lot of extra money with us. When you have the dining plan that is supposed to cover it you are not planning for having that extra charge. No it is their fault, the should not expect you to waste hours of your trip because they have a problem it is their problem , they are the ones that have messed up it should be on them to fix it on their time and not cause the customer to screw up their trip.

For me it’s a combination:
1) Disney’s fault obviously
2) Disney needs to fix it
3) Hassling the poor restaurant manager and threatening “consequences” is way over the top
4) Call the front desk and have them handle it
5) If this is an ongoing issue stop buying the dining plan
6) If you let something like that derail your vacation, that is the definition of first world problems and a lack of perspective

 

[DisAl]

But they aren't - if it is hitting a room charge it isn't getting on your credit card...it is just sitting there so you aren't actually "out"

Is it ideal? no. But is not the managers fault (who was trying to help)

Actually when you make a charge to your room it IMMEDIATELY goes to your card as a pending charge, and then when they consolidate your room charges for the day at 2:00 a.m. the consolidated charge IMMEDIATELY goes to your card as another pending charge, so for some period of time the cost would actually be DOUBLED as pending charges on your card.
Been there, experienced that.

 

[Hockey89]

Ok what if he was like us , we rope drop to park close every day, and the only time we were near the resort desk was when we were waiting out front for the Magic Express bus, when would we have taken care of it? What if you don't have that much room on your card because you know you had the dining plan, perhaps like us you had tons of Disney rewards to use for souvenirs we did not have a lot of extra money with us. When you have the dining plan that is supposed to cover it you are not planning for having that extra charge. No it is their fault, the should not expect you to waste hours of your trip because they have a problem it is their problem , they are the ones that have messed up it should be on them to fix it on their time and not cause the customer to screw up their trip.

 

[ninjaprincesst]

For me it’s a combination:
1) Disney’s fault obviously
2) Disney needs to fix it
3) Hassling the poor restaurant manager and threatening “consequences” is way over the top
4) Call the front desk and have them handle it
5) If this is an ongoing issue stop buying the dining plan
6) If you let something like that derail your vacation, that is the definition of first world problems and a lack of perspective

Okay it IS the managers fault so he needs to fix it , and Im sorry wasting hours of my vacaction fixing something that is the MANAGERS fault, no I should not have to . I did what I was supposed to do, it is HIS failure it should be on him. It is not my fault that he is too stupid to properly credit my meal and no I should not have to miss fastpasses or waste park time because he is a moron.

 

[RobWDW1971]

Okay it IS the managers fault so he needs to fix it , and Im sorry wasting hours of my vacaction fixing something that is the MANAGERS fault, no I should not have to . I did what I was supposed to do, it is HIS failure it should be on him. It is not my fault that he is too stupid to properly credit my meal and no I should not have to miss fastpasses or waste park time because he is a moron.

Traveling with you sounds like fun!

 

[unmitigated disaster]

Depends if they left the deeds to any property and the soul of their firstborn son at the front desk. If they did then i think they have a case to answer that Disney should sort it ...

When I first started working at this hotel our disclaimer stuff down at the bottom was one big wall o' text. People would look at it and say "what's this?" because it was often 1 AM and they were tired. I'd quickly run down what it said and, if they were nice, add "and we get your first-born child." More people than you might think very enthusiastically replied "OK! "

My hotel uses both Opera and Micros. Despite both being owned by the same company we have had massive issues with their interfacing sometimes.

ETA: there is always someone staffing the front desk. You can swing by at 3 AM and talk to someone about your issue. Night auditors have brains, too.

 

[Hockey89]

Traveling with you sounds like fun!

It would be like traveling with my toddler. Lots of tantrums and can’t eat anything.

 

[Minnesota disney fan]

No, it's expensive. You can achieve near 100% (5 9s or greater) with a good blue/green and geo-load balancing strategy but it comes at a cost, especially if you host it yourself. If you share the load between cloud providers it's much more cost-effective, but still expensive. This can effectively hide outages from your customers and give the appearance of 100% uptime.

If the customer doesn't know something is down when it's down, it's "not down".



Who designs for 4 9's anymore? That's a legacy pattern.



Test upgrades and code changes as canary deployments, and shift your strategy to a container model. Changes (upgrades, deploys, backend outages) don't have to mean downtime. Embrace chaos engineering to help you learn where to tune and adapt your infrastructure for resiliency.

OOOOOhh! You lost me at "legacy Pattern" LOL. Does anyone other than these 2 understand what the heck they are talking about?????

 

[RustySpork]

OOOOOhh! You lost me at "legacy Pattern" LOL. Does anyone other than these 2 understand what the heck they are talking about?????

Designing for 4 9s (99.99%) was popular in the 2000s before the advent of cloud computing and containerization as a way to achieve "good enough" uptime through redundancy of hardware and software with a total downtime allotment of 8.6s per day or 52m per year. The most common practice (pattern) for a three-tier architecture generally used a minimum of two internet connections, active/passive firewalls and load balancers (if the first fails the second takes control of traffic), two or more front end reverse proxy servers, a pair of application firewalls, two or more application servers, a pair of backend firewalls, and a database cluster. This allowed any single path to fail without impacting the application but was not built to withstand a large failure like the data center going dark, nor did it accommodate for application changes that impacted users. It also didn't address scale. The drive to 99.99% uptime was usually based on an operational or service level agreement and the budget allocated to build and maintain it.

With cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud existing and being as mature as they are today, it is much less expensive to build applications that are much more resilient with that resiliency largely built-in, so specifically building for 99.99% uptime doesn't make sense anymore.

Probably more techno-jargon than you wanted, but hopefully it makes sense.

 

[jaklgreen]

Okay it IS the managers fault so he needs to fix it , and Im sorry wasting hours of my vacaction fixing something that is the MANAGERS fault, no I should not have to . I did what I was supposed to do, it is HIS failure it should be on him. It is not my fault that he is too stupid to properly credit my meal and no I should not have to miss fastpasses or waste park time because he is a moron.

Why would you assume that it would be "hours" to fix this? I have had issues at WDW, not this particular one, but nothing every takes hours to get resolved. Talk to guest services, tell them the issue. Most things can be resolved within a few minutes. If it is going to take longer, tell them to keep working on it and call/email/text you when it gets resolved and go about your day. It's like most people have lost all sense of reality here. What kind of life are you all living that things like this never happen? I don't expect everything to be rainbows and unicorn farts and take these things in stride. Most of the time, the issue gets resolved and then it leaves my mind. I don't stress about minor things like this.

 

[lazyboy97o]

Why would you assume that it would be "hours" to fix this? I have had issues at WDW, not this particular one, but nothing every takes hours to get resolved. Talk to guest services, tell them the issue. Most things can be resolved within a few minutes. If it is going to take longer, tell them to keep working on it and call/email/text you when it gets resolved and go about your day. It's like most people have lost all sense of reality here. What kind of life are you all living that things like this never happen? I don't expect everything to be rainbows and unicorn farts and take these things in stride. Most of the time, the issue gets resolved and then it leaves my mind. I don't stress about minor things like this.

So all of the reports of issues taking hours to be resolved are just lies?

 

[RustySpork]

So all of the reports of issues taking hours to be resolved are just lies?

Duh! Obviously the only experiences that are real are the good ones.

I've personally spent days of phone tag working with guest services on an issue before, so anyone who doesn't think things can take a while to resolve there are either intentionally trying to change the conversation or they have never actually had a problem at Disney.

 

[jaklgreen]

So all of the reports of issues taking hours to be resolved are just lies?

I am saying that you don't have to take hours out of your day sitting there while they resolve it. Have them work on it while you are enjoying the park.

 

[KellBelle]

I am saying that you don't have to take hours out of your day sitting there while they resolve it. Have them work on it while you are enjoying the park.

From my experience, guest relations in the park cannot or will not (I am not sure which) address any dining plan credit issues, they send you to the resort front desk. At the very least, I felt guest relations could have given them a call on our behalf and saved us travel time. We were not offered that courtesy. When you are shuffled around from person to person at different locations to be helped, that does take hours in the end. Lucky you that you have had more positive experiences with resolving issues.

 

[ninjaprincesst]

Why would you assume that it would be "hours" to fix this? I have had issues at WDW, not this particular one, but nothing every takes hours to get resolved. Talk to guest services, tell them the issue. Most things can be resolved within a few minutes. If it is going to take longer, tell them to keep working on it and call/email/text you when it gets resolved and go about your day. It's like most people have lost all sense of reality here. What kind of life are you all living that things like this never happen? I don't expect everything to be rainbows and unicorn farts and take these things in stride. Most of the time, the issue gets resolved and then it leaves my mind. I don't stress about minor things like this.

Well i can tell you from the time I found out about Tusker House charging someone else"s meals to our dining plan , and all the run around i got to get it fixed it took about 3 hours. I don't expect things to never happen, I just expect when I am not at fault it should be fixed without taking a major chunk of time and me having to fix someone elses mistake.I8f I make the mistake then it's on me I will fix it. I expect Disney to do the same.

 

[Chi84]

Some things do take longer to fix, and they are not necessarily things that can be done while you go about your day. When our credit card was disconnected from MDE (apparently due to what was then a new credit card authorization policy), we received a message on our room phone while we were getting ready to go to dinner. We were told the matter could not be resolved over the phone and that we would have to go to the front desk to resolve it. We did so, and it took quite some time. As I said earlier, some CMs are better than others. If we had been in a park and needed to use our MagicBand for charging, we would have been out of luck, as several others who had the same issue reported on these sites. It is true that most issues can be resolved, but as far as stating that they can be done so "easily" or "quickly," that has not always been our experience.

Edit: The front desk CM told us the matter had been totally resolved and that we would have no more problems. So we walked over to the gift shop and tried to charge something. Guess what? A second trip to the front desk for a do-over.

 

[Minnesota disney fan]

Designing for 4 9s (99.99%) was popular in the 2000s before the advent of cloud computing and containerization as a way to achieve "good enough" uptime through redundancy of hardware and software with a total downtime allotment of 8.6s per day or 52m per year. The most common practice (pattern) for a three-tier architecture generally used a minimum of two internet connections, active/passive firewalls and load balancers (if the first fails the second takes control of traffic), two or more front end reverse proxy servers, a pair of application firewalls, two or more application servers, a pair of backend firewalls, and a database cluster. This allowed any single path to fail without impacting the application but was not built to withstand a large failure like the data center going dark, nor did it accommodate for application changes that impacted users. It also didn't address scale. The drive to 99.99% uptime was usually based on an operational or service level agreement and the budget allocated to build and maintain it.

With cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud existing and being as mature as they are today, it is much less expensive to build applications that are much more resilient with that resiliency largely built-in, so specifically building for 99.99% uptime doesn't make sense anymore.

Probably more techno-jargon than you wanted, but hopefully it makes sense.

Wow, Rusty! I was really just kidding, you know? Like when Rene Zellweger (I think) says to Tom Cruise, "You had me at Hello". But it's still all beyond me. I just learned how to set up my roku, LOLOLOL!

 

[RustySpork]

Wow, Rusty! I was really just kidding, you know? Like when Rene Zellweger (I think) says to Tom Cruise, "You had me at Hello". But it's still all beyond me. I just learned how to set up my roku, LOLOLOL!

Spoiler