Joining the walk-up waitlist for a restaurant-how does it work?

[Simba's Mom]

Suppose I want to see about joining the walk-up waitlist for a particular restaurant. First, how close to I have to be and where in the MDE app is it? Is the reason I can't find it now because I'm not even at WDW? For instance, say I want to see what the walk-up wait is at Beaches and Cream? Will I be able to access this information in the lobby of the Beach Club? Or do I have to walk closer to the restaurant? Will the app somewhere give me an approximate wait time? If it's too long (Say, I don't want to go to B&C THAT bad right now), can I just back out? Is there something I have to click in order to join? As you can probably tell, I've never tried it before, but think I'd like to try on my next trip.

 

[Aimeedyan]

Go to "make dining reservation" on your app, put in your party size, click today's date, and hit "now" as the time period. That's how you access the waitlist. You'll see wait times and can join it there in the list.

You can also go the the map on your app, choose dining, and anything with walk-up times will display in the park map. Click on the time and it'll let you join (this also works for Nomad).

You can't join any until you're close enough. I don't know the specific distance but I know a couple of weeks ago, I had to get fairly close to Yacht Club before A&C would let me join the waitlist.

IME, it's extremely hit and miss and I've never seen some restaurants with availability. It's usually less popular hotel restaurants and some in the park. You can look from home to give you an idea but it changes so quickly that it's hard to count on it. We have gotten halfway across Epcot to get close enough to join one and have the waitlist disappear because they filled the tables.

It's definitely worth fiddling with at home to have an idea

 

[Simba's Mom]

Thanks! It won't let me join the waitlist from here, but it will tell me what the wait time is if I'm interested no matter where I am.

 

[Beachmom0317]

Thinking of doing this for ohana one morning Christmas week haha we're staying at the Poly so I'll already be there and close by

 

[Simba's Mom]

It's definitely worth fiddling with at home to have an idea

Shame on you for suggesting that I fiddle around with it. It's been so much fun to find out what's available when in how long. And in case anyone's curious, Beaches and Cream has about a 10 minute stand-by wait almost any time of the day.

 

[HopperFan]

You can also access the waitlist direct from each restaurants page on the app. It is one of the options, Find on Map, Get Directions, Join Walk Up List, Reserve Dining, View Menu.

This is handy if you are only interested in a particular restaurant.

 

[AGoofykindagirl]

Shame on you for suggesting that I fiddle around with it. It's been so much fun to find out what's available when in how long. And in case anyone's curious, Beaches and Cream has about a 10 minute stand-by wait almost any time of the day.

Don’t know when you’re going, but the last time we tried to do walk up list at Beaches and Cream, when we went to sign up, walk-up was counter seating only!!! Did not work for us as one in our party is wheelchair. No other options, so we went next door to Yacht Club’s Ale and Compass. It also had grilled cheese and a great cheeseburger. Then got dessert from to go window.