I do the following checklist anytime I visit the WDW website now. Since I do this, nobody has been “eating” my pages.
I realize this post is quite long, and I expect many members around this board already know how to dodge Stitch. Feel free to skip this post if you've already know how to get quotes/make reservations/FP/ADRs! I hope this might be useful to those who haven't (yet) mastered all the tips.
The checklist:
- Open a new tab (it can be a Incognito tab, but I found it is not required, and the following works fine in regular tabs, as long as you follow all the steps)
- Browse to http://waltdisneyworld.com/
- That website will redirect you to https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/
- If “Sign Out” is shown in the header, IMMEDIATELY click on it.
- Sometimes, the “Sign Out” link will never load, or time out. When this happen, manually browse to https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/ and click “Sign Out”. This time, it will work.
Now, when I want a quote for a next vacation:
- Just after step 5 above, enter the check-in and check-out dates in the “Price Your Vacation” header.
- Optionally, select some hotel or hotel category.
- Click “Find Resorts”.
- Sometimes, this will reload https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/ and not show quotes. When this happens, just click “Find Resorts” again. This time, it will work.
- Now, you will have the “Explore Resort Hotels” page, with all available hotels for your dates. Note that the WDW website will show rates from the last offer you selected, which means all rates might not be shown, in case the “current” offer has no availability for some hotels. To change the currrent offer, do this:
- Select any hotel with availability for the offer you're interested in (you might need to check a few hotels to find one).
- This will load a page dedicated for this hotel, with all the room types, and at the top, tabs that will allow you to switch offer.
- Click on the tab for the offer you're interested in. This will show the rate for that offer.
- Now, click on the (small) “View All Resorts” link, at the top-right corner of the page. This will get you back to the “Explore Resort Hotels” page, but this time for the offer you're interested in.
- Note that, at this point, you have not logged back to the WDW website. If you need to check some rates that requires you being logged in (such as AP, DVC, Florida resident), follow these steps:
- Click on any hotel (the one you are interested in, if possible).
- On the page that says “X Offers Match The Selected Dates And Resort”, there's a link that says “Sign in or update your profile to check for additional offers”. Click that link.
- THIS IS IMPORTANT: only log in using the link above. This is so important because this is the only reliable way to show these rates. If you log into the WDW website using another page or another link, there's a small change that you will be logged in as far as the website is concerned, but not regarding the reservation subsystem, and you will not see the rates you want.
- You will be redirected to a page where you will be able to log in. Afterwards, you will come back to the page for your resort; this time, new tabs will appear for the rates that are available to your profile, if any.
- You may then choose a AP/DVC/Florida rate, and click “View All Resorts” to check this rate on the other resorts.
If I only need to check my account or anything else on My Disney Experience:
- Just after the step 5 in the first list, click “My Disney Experience”.
- On the page that will load, click on the big, green, button, that says “Sign In”.
- This wil load MDE.
If I want to select FPs or make ADRs:
- Log into MDE using the steps above.
- On the MDE home page, click on the blue buttons representing the choice you want: “Make Selections” or “Find A Table”.
- It might also be possible to make ADRs using the Things To Do/All Dining. Most of the time, it will work, but not always.
A few things to remember:
- Sometimes, Stitch or Goofy will appear out of nowhere. Usually, Stitch might be used for transient errors, hitting Refresh might be succesful. On the other hand, Goofy mostly indicate there's a glitch on the WDW website, that you might not be able to workaround.
- When you experience random errors on the WDW website, such as Stitch visiting your screen too often, immediately go back to the first checklist of this post. This will probably fix your issues.
- This one is specific to Safari on macOS or iOS: when you've logged a while ago, you might notice that WDW pages might take a considerable time to load (sometimes you will see the “beach ball” cursor if you're on a Mac). When this happen, go back to the first checklist of this post. You WILL need to logout if you want to browse any page of the WDW website.
- Using a private browser (or “incognito mode” as it is sometimes called) might help you navigate on the WDW website, because it will clear your cookies. Think of it as being a shortcut to hitting “Sign Out”, though it is not required (“Sign Out” usually works great when it comes to clearing your cookies).
- You might use several Disney accounts on the same computers, as long as you follow the steps in this post. Once again, signing out is key to success.
- If you need more insight about how things work on the WDW website, here are some technical background. WDW uses not one but many cookies to track your browsing session, which essentially might be in one of these states: 1) never logged in 2) currently logged in 3) used to be logged in, but no longer (because there is a time-out to logged-in sessions). When you are in state 2) or 3), the “Sign Out” appears on the top of the page. Everything should work properly in state 2), but glitches appear when you are on state 3), or when the cookies get out-of-sync: WDW remembers parts of who you are, such as your first name, but some parts of the website gets it wrong: it believes you are logged in, but fail to read your private data (because, well, you're not really logged in) and the next thing you see is Stitch.
One last thing: sometimes, the WDW website will fail to work as expected. This happens more often than not. For example, I tried to book an AP rate the last week, and the rate did appear on the page with all the resorts, but not on the page for the specific resort I was interested in. Do not hesitate to call a WDW agent: they are friendly, and their backend is NOT the WDW website. Not to say their tool is better or faster, but usually, they are able to make quotes/reservations even when all the website thinks about is to tell you that someone ate the page. (They were able to secure my AP reservation in minutes.)
Now, if anyone has more tips to share, feel free to reply to this post!