Important Dining Reservation CHANGE Hits Disneyland App…But Be Warned

The way you make your dining reservations is CHANGING in some Disney parks.

At Disney World, a 2-hour cancelation policy was previously introduced, but now something NEW is coming to both Disneyland and Disney World. In early August 2023, Disney announced that the Dining Reservation system would be getting an overhaul on the Disneyland and Disney World websites and apps to make it easier to find available reservation times. And now it seems the updated system is available for some.

On August 9th, one of our team members was able to go into their Disneyland app (you’ll want to make sure your app is FULLY updated through the applicable app store) and get a look at the new system!

You can now search for reservations that are available “all day,” or by specific meal periods. It will then show you ALL available times and you can typically click “show X more” if more are available.

When you search, you should have the option to see ALL of the available times separated by the meal period — breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc. That makes it clearer which menu will be served at each time.

For reference, here are before and after photos showing the changes. You can see the photo on the left (old system) only showed a limited number of available reservations, while the photo on the right (new system) shows ALL available reservations, making it much easier for you to hopefully find a time that works for you.

But here’s the catch — to see the new system, you’ll need to make sure your Disneyland app is FULLY updated. For some members of our team, the update was available in their phone’s app store and they were able to see it. For others, however, their app store did not appear to show an available update of any kind, so it appears (as Disney had indicated) that these updates will be rolled out gradually.

Thus far, we have not noticed a change in the My Disney Experience app for Disney World. And we have NOT seen the updated system implemented on the Disneyland or Disney World websites either.

Previously, Disney said that the Disneyland website would be updated on an earlier day in August, and changes on the Disney World website were supposed to be happening “in the coming days,” so we’ll keep an eye out for those updates.