NOTE: Annotated on 12/12/20 with price changes to Mouse Dining
There are several great Disney World related companies and services available to the Disneyphile. In fact, I do have a membership to Touring Plans that I’ve used to plan my own park days and choose a specific room at my resort.
So I recently decided to sign up for a free “Mouse Dining” subscription which allows me to create up to six dining alerts. They also have a $10 per month plan that increases this to twenty alerts. Their website is simple to use, yet beautiful and I really like the formatting of their text messages. [As of December 2020, the free subscription only sends emails, while the cheapest paid plan is $9 for fifty alerts].
I wanted to compare their service to what we offer at my Mousekepros and see how well each of them work when looking for the same reservation. My tests had me set up three different December dinner searches on each platform: Le Cellier on the 14th, Brown Derby on the 23rd and Skipper Canteen on Christmas night. None of these restaurants had immediate availability on those dates when I set these up on November 20. [Note that in December, Mousekepros changed the links to be shorter similar to Mouse Dining; the text will also include a note if added to the search.]
We received notifications on consecutive days that Mousekepros had found availability. Mouse Dining also sent text alerts, but they didn’t find matches until much later: on the 24th, 26th and 27th.
Both services found availability for all three restaurants within a week. While Mousekepros did find availability before Mouse Dining in each case, that isn’t terribly relevant nor is the sample size large enough to call that a certainty.
One significant difference, however, is that Mouse Dining has you select a preferred time and searches within one hour of that time. As an alternative, you can search across all breakfast, lunch or dinner times. If you want to go to Chef Mickey’s but don’t care which meal, you would have to set up three separate alerts on Mouse Dining. In the free plan, that uses half of your allocation. The Mousekepros dining tools allows you to specify a time range, so you can say 8a-9p, 11:45a-1:30p, 6:15p-8:45p, etc. Currently we offer unlimited dining searches on all of our plans.
A my Mousekepros subscription offers searches on more than just dining, however. You can also search for “activities” like Savi’s Workshop and Droid Depot. When Bibbidi-Bobbidi Boutique and Harmony Barbershop re-open, those will also be made available.
The dining and activity searches are just a small part of our offering. A my Mousekepros subscription also gives users the ability to join Virtual Queues, book Park Pass reservations and receive Wait Time text alerts. If you only need a few dining alerts and have no need for the other tools that Mousekepros offers, I highly recommend the Mouse Dining free plan.
For more information about a my Mousekepros subscription, fill out our contact form or visit the myMousekepros website.
