Free Dining 2016 Version

I was able to book the dining deal just this afternoon at Pop Century no luck on the moderate resorts :(

Check for rooms !!! I was just able to modify and get free dining!!!

I was able to apply the discount to my existing reservation at the Pop Century. I am paying the difference between the counter service offered and the Disney Dining I bought.
The savings for my family of 4 is $700. $100 a day....
It's better than the price I'm paying when I booked the trip. Happy dance!!!!
Julie

Anyone else as disappointed as I am in the availability of this offer and the discounted rooms? Nothing available for us the weeks we wanted to go in Sept and Oct. And the prices were twice the price of what we paid at the same time last year. Ridiculous! This is supposed to attract people to coming down? Why do they even offer these "discounts" if there is not going to be even enough to get past the first day it comes out? The ads make you think that anyone that tries to make a reservation during this time will get these offers. When they say they are limited, they aren't kidding. REALLY LIMITED. I probably won't pay any attention to these offers again. I'm disgusted. We finally got a room for October but it wasn't with any of these discounts and the rooms, period, were hard to get.

mrsstarr;2483716 wrote: We have a family of 8 and when we went for spring break was more economical to get 2 standards adjoining rooms than to try for the larger suites. We ended up at Coronado Springs.

What is more economical is a single room in the Alligator Bayou section or POR-Riverside. But I agree, getting two adjoining rooms at a value resort is most likely a lot more economical than having to go the Deluxe route. Either way, paying for an extra room I don't really want, or having to pay for a level of accomodation that I don't really need.

More like lose-lose than win-win.

The Hitchhiking Ghost;2483509 wrote: They are really putting the screws to families with more than 4 people. I just did a search for our family of 5, for 8 nights starting on 11/26 and the best offer I could come up with was over $8,000. Yeah, no. Saw on their website that between Pop Century and Caribbean Beach that they had over 3000 bookings in the last 24 hours. Basically all I could find was club level at one of the Deluxes.

POR Riverside has always been our favorite moderate, pulling that out of the mix pretty much dooms any chances we'd have of going down there with this offer. As much as I'd love to, no way our budget can handle Deluxe accomodations, so we are pretty much eliminated.

We are in the same boat! We are excluded from all offers too. POR has always been our "go to" resort and since this is a special trip to celebrate retirement we don't really want to stay anywhere else. In addition we picked the dates for our 12 night stay so that we would be there for a few days of the Food and Wine festival and also catch a few Christmas decorations and attend MVMCP. We have a Disney Visa and still didn't qualify for any discounts that way either...mostly because we are staying at POR. Anyway it is worth it to us to pay more to stay there but would sure be great if we at least qualified for some kind of discount. So thankful that Denise at MJ is keeping an eye out for any additional discounts.

Why is POR excluded in the first place? I saw that and wondered what their reasoning is for excluding certain resorts. We are celebrating our anniversary and came last year the same week but the prices this year at the resorts are about double what they were last year. Why such an increase? That is why we tried for a discount or free dining as soon as it came out but weren't able to get anything we could afford until we moved our reservation one week and were able to get a military discount but that was almost nonexistent also. I guess we were lucky to even get a reservation and I guess Disney doesn't want the population to visit them by raising all the rates, ticket prices and offering nonexistent discounts and being exclusive on resorts.

pixiesmimi;2484021 wrote: Why is POR excluded in the first place? I saw that and wondered what their reasoning is for excluding certain resorts. We are celebrating our anniversary and came last year the same week but the prices this year at the resorts are about double what they were last year. Why such an increase? That is why we tried for a discount or free dining as soon as it came out but weren't able to get anything we could afford until we moved our reservation one week and were able to get a military discount but that was almost nonexistent also. I guess we were lucky to even get a reservation and I guess Disney doesn't want the population to visit them by raising all the rates, ticket prices and offering nonexistent discounts and being exclusive on resorts.

I'm gonna say POR is excluded because they're not having problems pulling in the numbers there, outside a discount. From what I understand, the promos/discounts are heavily pushed toward hotels they need to fill, with a few sprinklings of other resort/room types in between. In the past, when POR was the ONLY option for families of 5 (wanting a single room), filling to capacity wasn't an issue. I'm guessing they're still riding that wave.