Hello, Kristen,
Happy Holidays to you! I'm getting excited to celebrate at The Merriest Place on Earth. In fact, I was right there with you, waiting for reservations for unique holiday character dining experiences to become available. My family and I can't wait to enjoy dining with our favorite characters in Holiday style.
Here at planDisney, we are regular Guests like you. So I don't have direct insider information to fully explain the nuances of Disneyland dining reservations in detail. But I'm happy to describe what I've observed over years of making and enjoying dining reservations.
The current Disneyland Resort dining reservation system allows Guests to book available dining reservations up to 60 days in advance. Usually, the system advances to allow access to a new day of reservation availability at about 6 AM Pacific time. The set of available reservations appears to be loaded into the system by individual restaurants. Most restaurants have fairly consistent and routine schedules. So they tend to have their reservation sets pre-loaded and ready to go right at the 60-day mark, regularly available starting at about 6 AM Pacific time.
Some restaurants, especially those that have seasonal menus or events, or that may partner with park entertainment to offer dining packages, or that may have other unique staffing planning approaches, may need additional time to develop their set of reservations to load into the system. In some cases, this may mean their reservation sets are not loaded into the reservation system until later in the day when compared to other restaurants. In a few cases, reservations may also be loaded a few days later than the typical 60-day mark.
Both of these cases appeared to be true for the recently released Holiday-themed character dining experiences. As I attempted to wait as patiently as I could, I noticed that these reservations were scheduled to become available on October 2, a few days after the 60-day mark in advance of the first days of the dining events. Then, I eagerly checked on availability right away at 6 AM on the 2nd. I admit to feeling a bit stressed to find that reservations were not yet available at that time. After all, I had work meetings to attend that morning! But I was determined to get those reservations! I continued to check on reservation availability in between my meetings. I noticed around 9:30 AM Pacific time, the reservations for Storytellers Cafe became available for my travel dates. Finally, I was so relieved to be able to book those reservations. I hope you have been able to do so by now too!
Thanks for visiting us at planDisney, Kristen. I hope your Holidays at the Disneyland Resort are the merriest ever!
~Tony