Did you feel the disturbance in the Force? For a couple of hours on Thursday morning, the Force was strong with thousands of Disney fans, who grabbed reservations to visit Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland from May 31 through June 23. But not everyone was able to become one with Disney's online reservation system, as many fans left the Disneyland website empty-handed, while others complained of a tricky user interface that made it tough to understand where they stood in the process or how to add other guests to their reservation.
All available reservation times were claimed within an hour and 45 minutes after Disneyland started accepting reservations at 10am. So now the only way to get into Galaxy's Edge before it opens to all Disneyland ticket holders on June 24 is to book a stay at one of the three on-site Disneyland hotels, which are still guaranteeing Galaxy's Edge reservation times to their guests during this period.
"We are delighted that our Guests are as excited as we are about the May 31st opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge," a Disneyland spokesperson said in an email to Theme Park Insider after the reservations "sold out." "We can’t wait for them to visit – and we look forward to delivering a great guest experience both now and after June 23rd, when reservations will no longer be required to visit Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge."
If you missed out and see reservations for sale on Craiglist or elsewhere, don't bother. Disneyland required registrants to include the names of everyone in their party when making the reservation. All guests ages 18 and older will be required to show government-issued photo IDs with their reservation in order to be admitted to the land at the reservation time. So unless you just happen to have the same full name as the person trying to scalp the reservations, they won't help you. And don't try Photoshopping anything. Disney's just going to scan the QR code on the reservation form and check the IDs against Disney's record of the reservation.
Not everyone saw the link in the reservation form to add those guests' names to their reservation, frustrating fans who ended up with reservations for one instead of their whole group. But reservations cannot be modified once they are booked, which will help ensure that no reservations end up on the resale market.
Disneyland's reservation page did not tell visitors where they were in line to get reservations but simply asked visitors not to refresh the page. But the page automatically refreshed every minute or so, which some fans found confusing. Some reports claimed that Disneyland's system was simply selecting page requests at random before opening the reservations to all new page requests after the first 90 minutes or so.
Credit Disneyland for keeping its website and systems up during what must have been a crush of requests for reservations. Regardless of how Disneyland's system worked, the fact is that it did work. The next test will come on May 31, when we see if the use of this reservation system has helped to make access and wait times bearable for those fans who were fortunate enough to get reservation times today.
After its Disneyland opening, Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge opens at Walt Disney World's Disney's Hollywood Studios on August 29. No advance reservations will be required to visit there.
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Twenty-eight days away from themed entertainment history. And talk about "momentum"? The TEA stats are usually out in May, right. So Disney's parks clobber the competition (which will be all over the news) followed by the DLR opening of the Star Wars attractions (which will be all over the galactic news).
Looks like this mouse will continue to roar.
This whole reservation thing had all the frustrating parts of Walt Disney World's FastPass+, with none of the benefits.
I wasn't trying to get a reservation, as I intend to stay FAR away from the madhouse of Disneyland during the early days of Galaxy's Edge, but I feel for people who booked vacations around seeing Star Wars Land and ended up without a reservation, or a reservation that doesn't include their whole group.
Avoiding Disneyland during this. The potential crowds sound awful. It'll be a nice addition though.
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It all went very well for me. The reservation page refreshed about every 30 seconds and I got thru at about 10:30, with only about 3 days sold out, leaving many days and times available to choose from. Adding a guest seemed very clear. I was pleased with the way it all went.