The official Walt Disney World mobile app, My Disney Experience, continually evolves as guests share feedback and as the parks change. App updates can be as different from one another as a mobile ordering change and a new Disney Gift Card procedure. The app serves many different functions to the Disney World vacationer, and Disney is constantly evaluating how it can be better. A new feature is now live to allow for hotel room changes..
Disney World’s app launched an update that many fans have been waiting for. The new feature allows guests to have more of a say in a crucial component of their vacation. Mickey Visit brings you the latest Disney news and planning resources, including Disney Princess meet-and-greet changes and mobile ordering now available for breakfast at a popular Disney restaurant.
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Disney World App Launches Hotel Preference Requests
When Walt Disney World guests make hotel reservations electronically, a large part of the booking process is out of guests’ hands: the specific location of their hotel room within the resort.
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The cost of the room can sometimes be a clue of the room’s location, with less-expensive rooms generally being those farthest from the lobby and amenities. Guests also choose whether their room has a preferred or standard view, which can indicate its location in some cases. Depending on the resort, guests can also request a pool view room, which can place them near the main feature pool or the smaller pools at the resort.
Beyond these ballpark estimates, though, there has not been a specific way to choose a room in an exact location aside from speaking to a cast member face to face during check-in. A new app feature helps with this issue so guests can request preferences before they arrive. For value and moderate resorts, the location of the room and proximity to transportation and amenities is a big deal. Moderate resorts in particular are known for their large size and are often cited as one of their biggest drawbacks.
Future Walt Disney World guests can now request specific location preferences for their hotel room using the My Disney Experience app.
These requests go beyond cost-influenced factors. Two rooms of the same price may be the same quality, but their geographical differences boil down to opinion. This new function lets guests have a say in these preferences.
This plays out in multiple ways. If the resort is a sprawling campus with multiple buildings, guests can request which building their room is in, as long as the building contains rooms at the price point the guest purchased. For Disney’s Pop Century Resort, guests might want a building close to the Disney Skyliner transportation stop rather than close to a pool, or they might want to stay in the 1970s section instead of the 1950s.
Guests can also request their bed size if rooms of equal prices are available with different bed types. Additionally, guests can let Disney know whether they prefer a ground floor or higher floor, but that has been a requestable feature before now.
There is also an option for guests to prioritize any available room as early as possible rather than a specific room type. Currently, this feature seems to only be available for value and moderate resorts, not deluxe resorts. Perhaps that feature will be added in the future for deluxe resorts, which would be helpful, especially if a preference of being close to an elevator or the lobby was added.
Guests have typically been able to make these requests when booking reservations on the phone with a cast member or when checking in at the front desk, but there has not been an option to input such requests through the app until now. Requests aren’t guaranteed to be honored, especially if a guest only paid for a standard room and they are requesting a preferred location, but it’s helpful to have the option to request the preference on the app.
The new feature arrives several months after unofficial Disney planning site Touring Plans had to retire their popular room request offering. This seems to take the place of that feature, though the easier access to the offering will likely mean more people will put in for specific requests. The Touring Plans feature gave guests the ability to make specific room requests by requesting the room number after viewing the extensive database Touring Plans provides with photos of specific rooms and reviews of their locations.
WDWMagic reported the news on the room request preference feature.
Website Search in Beta Testing
A different tool is currently in beta testing on the Walt Disney World website that aims to help future guests before they book their trip.
Using an interface that launched in September, guests can tell the search engine what they’re looking for in a vacation using descriptive language rather than specific keywords. For example, this could help a guest who’s looking for “a Toy Story hotel room” more easily find Disney’s All-Star Movies Resort even if they didn’t know the name of the hotel.
Mickey Visit attended a media briefing on this new website capability with Disney leadership and saw a demo of the tool. See our report from that presentation.
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More App Changes Coming and Other Recent Updates
Disney has announced a more intuitive search engine coming to the My Disney Experience app in the future. Currently, the search engine is limited to displaying results with keywords that the guest typed, rather than reading between the lines, per se, to understand what the guest is really searching for.
As evidence for why the current search engine is often ineffective, see the screenshot above, which I captured while researching for this story. I searched “room reservation,” hoping to locate the screen where Disney shows you your room reservation that you’ve already made. None of the 8 predictive searches were what I was looking for. The search wasn’t even a complicated phrase. Despite this, the app thought I wanted to mobile order a burger at Caribbean Beach. Once I actually completed the search, the results were equally unhelpful, showing restaurants and various hotels.
Recent changes to Disney World’s app include Spanish translation, with more languages on the way.
Earlier this year, Disney modified the app’s Disney Gift Card capabilities to let guests save a Gift Card as a recurring payment method rather than typing in the Gift Card’s long ID code with every transaction.
Just this week, Disney added mobile ordering for breakfast at a popular restaurant to the app.
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