Disneyland's Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge opens to all theme park guests tomorrow, but that does not mean that visiting Disney's new Star Wars land will be as easy as just rolling up to the land and walking in.
Disney is promoting that reservations are no longer needed for Galaxy's Edge, but that's just to get into the land. If you want to enjoy everything there is to do inside the new land, you will need to make a reservation before you enter the park.
Starting tomorrow, Disneyland will open reservations for Oga's Cantina and Savi's Workshop at 7am each morning. Reservations will be available for return times the current day only and there will be no stand-by queues for fans once all return times are claimed. Oga's Cantina is Disneyland's first public bar, and Savi's Workshop is a build-your-own-lightsaber experience. Both have proved wildly popular ever since Galaxy's Edge first opened late last month.
You can make reservations for these locations on Disneyland's website or though the official Disneyland app. You will need to have a Disney.com account in order to make a reservation, and you will need to pay a deposit, as well.
For Oga's Cantina, the deposit is $10 per person in your party, while for Savi's the deposit is $199.99, which is the cost of that experience. If you do not show, you forfeit the deposit. For Savi's, you can bring up to two people to watch you make a lightsaber, and your deposit becomes your payment when you arrive.
At Oga's, you must provide the names of each person in your party and Disney says that it will check their IDs before letting them in, as Disney tries to prevent reservation squatting and reselling. When you arrive at the cantina, the credit card hold for your deposit will be released. (You will be subject to Disney's two-drinks-per-person and 45-minute limits inside the cantina, too.)
The advance reservation requirements mean that Galaxy's Edge visitors will no longer have to wait in long queues inside the land to get return times, with many of those visitors ending up wasting that time when they learn that all return times are gone. The advance reservation requirements therefore might help control crowd sizes inside the land, as it's possible that many guests, especially annual passholders, will decide not to visit Galaxy's Edge if they can't get into Oga's or Savi's that day.
Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge has been open for the past three-plus weeks to guests who made advance reservations, which were all claimed within two hours in one morning in early May. But many of those visitors were not able to get into the cantina, especially those whose reservation days fell later in the three-week period, when Disneyland allowed reservation holders to add extra people to their reservation without checking those extra guests' IDs upon check-in, leading both to reservation scalping and longer queues inside the land.
So you should expect many of those disappointed passholders to keep trying to get into Oga's or Savi's by hitting Disneyland's website each morning at 7 until they can score one of these hard-to-get reservations. Disneyland is making no provision for hotel guests to get into Oga's or Savi's, either. That frees up all the return time slots, but also means that more people will be in the pool trying to claim them... and that some people who have planned Disneyland vacations around this opening might be going home disappointed by not getting into what might be the land's most-anticipated attraction.
Don't get me wrong. As a Disneyland Resort annual passholder, I prefer this new system. It's better to be able to know in advance whether I am going to be getting into the cantina before I go, rather than make the drive down to Disneyland and wait in a long queue first thing in the morning, only to be disappointed. It's tough, though, for Disneyland resort guests, who cannot use the advantage of Magic Mornings to position themselves within the park to be in the front of that queue. (Though they will be able to do that to get first dibs on Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run and Droid Depot.)
Still, it's hard not to wish that Disneyland had gone ahead and filled that empty themed building next to Oga's Catina with more floor space for the cantina, rather than leaving it for some future expansion. Yes, the Star Wars cantina is meant to be an intimate space. But if Disney's Imagineers could install a couple dozen cockpits into their Millennium Falcon ride, surely they could have designed multiple intimate rooms for a Star Wars cantina, too. With the amount of money that Disneyland is leaving on the table by not accommodating thousands of extra Star Wars fans with money to spend on drinks each day, I suspect that the order soon will come down from Burbank to get started doing just that.
But for now, if you want to do everything inside Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, including the cantina and making your own lightsaber, the reservation period for the new land has not ended... it's just begun.
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I’d like to know more about the unused themed building mentioned here. Any additional info or links?
This system sounds great. I was there Saturday, 6/22, with an 8pm time slot and the reservation said not to show up more than 15 minutes before my reservation time. Earlier in the day, we saw the 2pm group line up at about 1pm with massive crowds blocking the entrance to Hungry Bear and nothing the cast could do to disperse the crowd. They started moving the crowd in by 1:15 (there were multiple checkpoints and holding areas beyond this, this was just to clear the crowd and keep them before letting them in at the reservation start). Knowing that, I showed up for my reservation at 6:30pm and boy was I glad. My girlfriend and I were right at the front of this mass of people up until 8 (they moved our group in to the holding areas starting at 7:15) when they were letting people in. We had planned for her to get a reservation at Oga’s and me for Savi’s. They kept saying walk slow and single file to get to Oga’s and anyone who beat the leading cast member there would be moved to the back of the line. With our positions in the crowd, she should have been in the first 20 people and I should have been second or third. But people are awful and push, shove, and barricade their way down the path, literally knocking people over and seeing them just get lost in the sea of people, bumping me to about 50th and her hundreds back in the queue. I was able to get the Savi’s reservation, but doing their headcount for Oga’s, the cast member said they’d reached capacity with the person right in front of my girlfriend. She was bummed, pissed, and annoyed at how awful the start was to our time in Galaxy’s Edge, but we hoped they’d miscounted. Thankfully the cast member was directly in front of my girlfriend and they’d been talking since she side stepped out of line for a moment just so I could find her after getting my reservation at Savi’s. We stepped back in together and continued walking and talking with the cast member. Later, another cast member came up and said there was a complaint that we’d cut the line, but he assured that person that we were fine and right where we were supposed to be. The guy behind us didn’t even complain and I’m sure he would have had he really thought we’d cut. Anyway, we got to the front and it’s a good thing we stayed as they had a handful, maybe 10 spots, left when we got there. So we got to do both the big ticket items, but it was just awful and dangerous, and if this can alleviate the problem, then I am all for this. Galaxy’s Edge is great and amazing, and the people working there are fantastic, so luckily the start didn’t ruin our time there, but it sure wasn’t an enjoyable first 20 minutes.
Does anybody know when/if reservations for Oga's and Savis ran out today? I will be in Disneyland for a few days to see Star Wars, and want to plan in advance to make sure I snag reservations for these two experiences...
@linkman621 - I checked online @7:15 AM PDT, and both experiences were out of reservations. I was trying to find where on the app you could make these, and could not find them, so I checked the availability on my computer through the Disneyland website (hence why I was a little late checking). I checked Savi's first, which had today's date already crossed off. However, when I checked Oga's, the date was showing as available, and showing every available time in the drop-down, but every one I selected showed as unavailable. I was going to keep my eyes on how fast these go since we'll be there in 5 weeks. It looks like having quick fingers (and your credit card already stored to your Disney.com account) will be essential to get into these experiences.
Also, as of this typing (8:20 PDT), Galaxy's Edge is already into the Virtual Queue with the MFSR line at 145 minutes (longer than I've seen it at any point during the Reservation Period).
@Russel Meyer Thanks! Seems to be better than I hoped. Honestly, I was expecting stories of Disneyland’s website crashing due to demand and 5 hours waits for MFSR.
It will be interesting watching how this develops the next few weeks, and if Disney ever opens up fast pass for MFSR.
As Robert noted during the media preview, Disney built a FP queue for MFSR, so I doubt they invested the money and space to build that without intending to use it. My guess is that they will start using it a few months after RotR opens and crowds balance out a bit in the land and throughout Disneyland. FWIW, it's up to 160 minutes for MFSR now, but only 10 minutes to get on Space Mountain. Last week, when you needed a reservation to enter Galaxy's Edge, lines were in the 30-45 minutes range for the Falcon, while Space Mountain lines were over 60 minutes all day.
@Russel Meyer @linkman621 Honestly, the best part of MFSR is the queue experience. Walking through is amazing. The ride itself, it was a bit of a miss for me, but pilot is the way to go for sure. I saw the wait time up to 180 minutes at 8:03am, but have seen it as low as 45 throughout the day on the app. Fast Pass definitely isn't in use yet, but single rider is, but again, waiting in the actual line is totally worth it at least once. There are some incredible picture taking opportunities. Unless you just HAVE to ride the ride to say you did it, you could probably walk the line, and skip the ride, just to see all the incredible details throughout. It's more or less an interactive Star Tours. But if Oga's and Savi's are your first points of interest, a fast connection and fast fingers will be key. I could see both of those being nearly impossible to get in to for months. The nice thing is, if you get one of the reservations for Oga's or Savi's, then you don't have to do the virtual queue and you're guaranteed entrance to Galaxy's Edge. Anyway, best of luck in your journey to Batuu! And don't forget to ask the locals their histories!
In response to a comment above, there are a couple of "expansion slots" in Galaxy's Edge, including an empty building next Oga's. Disneyland officials said that they were being held back for future merch/FB space, but it seems blindingly obvious that this one needs to become the Oga's expansion ASAP.
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It will be interesting to see how this works. Inevitably there will be guests that have no idea that this reservation system exists, and will be completely cut out of these experiences, so that should somewhat limit the pool of guests trying to get in. However, my biggest issue is that it handicaps guests who are physically standing in the Esplanade at 7 AM waiting to get into the parks. Those guests will be limited by the speeds of their mobile devices and broadband/wifi connections outside the parks while fighting all of the other guests also queuing outside the gates for bandwidth to make these reservations. Guests sitting at home on their computers will have a distinct advantage to snag these highly coveted reservations. At least everyone will know where they stand before they walk into the parks for the day, which I suppose is a plus, but for someone like me that is traveling across the country with only 3 days to visit Galaxy's Edge, it will be incredibly frustrating if I'm not able to get reservations for both of these experiences.
However, the biggest problem I see here is that it will dramatically increase the lines for MFSR. With guests no longer milling around Oga's and Savi's making and waiting for reservation times, virtually everyone entering the new land will now be in line for the Falcon. Considering that Disney is likely to increase the number of guests that are permitted into Galaxy's Edge at any given time, what was a reasonable 30-45 minute line for the ONLY ride in the land is liable to be closer to the 2-hours initially expected. RotR cannot open soon enough to spread the crowds out.