UpstartCrow
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2010
This post is partly because this has been building up for a while, and partly because I desperately need advice/input, since I’m getting zilch from Disney.
As it stands, we are inviting, at bare minimum, 102 people (and likely more- fiancé has a couple of friends he’s not sure about, and my future in-laws are not unlikely to add more people). A handful live in Florida, but most will be traveling.
Encouraged by our sales coordinator not to overestimate the room block too badly (and thinking that a good deal of our guests will most likely just come down for the weekend, if at all), we put pretty much all of our nights on the wedding night, and the night before the wedding, figuring we could add on later as needed (and hey, Disney hadn’t even released reservations to the general public yet, so surely we were pretty safe).
After receiving our contract about 3-4 weeks ago, Disney finally finished setting up the block and gave us the green light to book yesterday. In the meantime, I’d been asking them if we could/should augment the block, since a few people on my side refined their plans (staying at the Beach Club for a specific week-long date range), so I was hoping I could at least lock them in for that. Disney kept telling us to wait, so we waited.
About two hours after they sent us the link to the room block website, my mom tried to book my parents' stay (one week at the Beach Club) only to find no availability. The other resorts in our block were fine, just not the one my family had been getting really pumped about staying in.
That led the second Disney-induced panic attack I had yesterday (the first one was my fault, but the point is: it was a rough day for wedding planning).
This was after business hours, but I emailed our room block coordinator (good job, self, the poor woman’s been working with you less than 24 hours, and right off the bat you’re sending her panic emails) asking what was going on. Website glitch? Or is the Beach Club really already that booked up? Because if so (say, if a convention is holding 3/4 of the resort or something), maybe it would behoove us to switch our “deluxe” option to the BoardWalk or something, since we don’t want people to be SOL if they want to stay more than two nights, or if they want to stay for a different range of dates than we accounted for?
Heard back this morning (which I have to say was actually a relief- feels like most of my emails from DFTW come at about 4:58 pm). They added a few rooms to our block for the dates I specified, but didn’t address a SINGLE one of my questions about the actual issue. So, I have no idea why it wasn’t showing availability, I don’t know if there’s some kind of event going on at the BC that’s going to make it hard for people to get rooms, and I don’t know if we have the option to switch the rooms to a different resort. She just said to add rooms to the block early (despite the fact that to all appearances, there are no rooms to add), since it’s a “busy time of year” (the wedding is the first weekend in March, but I guess there’s really no such thing as “not a busy time of year” at Disney anymore).
So, what on EARTH am I supposed to do? Assume all 102 of our invitees are going to go for a month, at every resort simultaneously, and eat more money than I even want to take the time to calculate for not meeting our guarantee? Call up every distant relative and demand they tell me their exact travel plans for next year, then and there? Because I only know about the people I *do* know about because my mom, like me, is a little bit hyperactive about this stuff and is pretty much planning the trip for a little bit of my family. I’ll feel awful if we go through this whole song and dance about how we have rooms reserved at a special rate at x, y, and z hotels, but nobody can actually book because we didn’t account for some of the dates that are farther away from the actual event, or we misjudged which hotels people would want to stay at. Plus, it could well be too late to add as many rooms as we might wind up needing at the BC anyway.
Has anyone dealt with setting up a room block for this many people? Or similar issues with availability? Or anything? We’re so lost right now.
As it stands, we are inviting, at bare minimum, 102 people (and likely more- fiancé has a couple of friends he’s not sure about, and my future in-laws are not unlikely to add more people). A handful live in Florida, but most will be traveling.
Encouraged by our sales coordinator not to overestimate the room block too badly (and thinking that a good deal of our guests will most likely just come down for the weekend, if at all), we put pretty much all of our nights on the wedding night, and the night before the wedding, figuring we could add on later as needed (and hey, Disney hadn’t even released reservations to the general public yet, so surely we were pretty safe).
After receiving our contract about 3-4 weeks ago, Disney finally finished setting up the block and gave us the green light to book yesterday. In the meantime, I’d been asking them if we could/should augment the block, since a few people on my side refined their plans (staying at the Beach Club for a specific week-long date range), so I was hoping I could at least lock them in for that. Disney kept telling us to wait, so we waited.
About two hours after they sent us the link to the room block website, my mom tried to book my parents' stay (one week at the Beach Club) only to find no availability. The other resorts in our block were fine, just not the one my family had been getting really pumped about staying in.
That led the second Disney-induced panic attack I had yesterday (the first one was my fault, but the point is: it was a rough day for wedding planning).
This was after business hours, but I emailed our room block coordinator (good job, self, the poor woman’s been working with you less than 24 hours, and right off the bat you’re sending her panic emails) asking what was going on. Website glitch? Or is the Beach Club really already that booked up? Because if so (say, if a convention is holding 3/4 of the resort or something), maybe it would behoove us to switch our “deluxe” option to the BoardWalk or something, since we don’t want people to be SOL if they want to stay more than two nights, or if they want to stay for a different range of dates than we accounted for?
Heard back this morning (which I have to say was actually a relief- feels like most of my emails from DFTW come at about 4:58 pm). They added a few rooms to our block for the dates I specified, but didn’t address a SINGLE one of my questions about the actual issue. So, I have no idea why it wasn’t showing availability, I don’t know if there’s some kind of event going on at the BC that’s going to make it hard for people to get rooms, and I don’t know if we have the option to switch the rooms to a different resort. She just said to add rooms to the block early (despite the fact that to all appearances, there are no rooms to add), since it’s a “busy time of year” (the wedding is the first weekend in March, but I guess there’s really no such thing as “not a busy time of year” at Disney anymore).
So, what on EARTH am I supposed to do? Assume all 102 of our invitees are going to go for a month, at every resort simultaneously, and eat more money than I even want to take the time to calculate for not meeting our guarantee? Call up every distant relative and demand they tell me their exact travel plans for next year, then and there? Because I only know about the people I *do* know about because my mom, like me, is a little bit hyperactive about this stuff and is pretty much planning the trip for a little bit of my family. I’ll feel awful if we go through this whole song and dance about how we have rooms reserved at a special rate at x, y, and z hotels, but nobody can actually book because we didn’t account for some of the dates that are farther away from the actual event, or we misjudged which hotels people would want to stay at. Plus, it could well be too late to add as many rooms as we might wind up needing at the BC anyway.
Has anyone dealt with setting up a room block for this many people? Or similar issues with availability? Or anything? We’re so lost right now.