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My dining time or set reservation??


jlf21

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We are sailing on Oasis in September with our 7 year old and 14 month old. I originally picked my dining time because depending on the day I am sure we will make it to dinner later then 5:30 pm. My question, how does the my dining work realistically? Can we just show up when we like and get seated or should we anticipate a wait? With a toddler I want to plan accordingly and do not want to set us up for disaster. 

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14 minutes ago, jlf21 said:

We are sailing on Oasis in September with our 7 year old and 14 month old. I originally picked my dining time because depending on the day I am sure we will make it to dinner later then 5:30 pm. My question, how does the my dining work realistically? Can we just show up when we like and get seated or should we anticipate a wait? With a toddler I want to plan accordingly and do not want to set us up for disaster. 

It depends.  You can stand in line and wait, and we observed (when we had My Time Dining reservations), that the stand-by line moved quickly.  Practices vary from ship to ship.  Frankly, I'd recommend you commit to an early dining time (traditional) because once you've located your table, you simply proceed to it each evening without waiting (unless the doors are closed because you are too early).  Your back-up plan would be to eat at the WJ or other venue should you miss the traditional seating.

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We had MTD set for our cruise in June but after reading many reviews on various sites and videos on you tube, it appears there is a good chance you have to wait in line even with a reservation.  As a result, we have opted for one of the set dining times which appears to not result in waiting.

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We did MTD on most cruises with the most recent being last month on Harmony. We haven't experienced the long lines that some people have complained about although on our first night there was a long line as we arrived at our reserved time. We didn't wait long after we spoke to the host. What we did do was to book our meal times on day 1 at the same time as our 3 night dining package to get the MTD times we wanted. All that being said, we weren't travelling with young kids either so our supper times were around 8:00 PM every night.

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We just got back from cruising on the Wonder. We had 5:00 seating at a large table. Two of our table mates did not like Mytime because of the waits (even though the line moved quickly) so they just showed up to our table whenever they wanted. Never earlier than 5:30, but usually 6:15 to 7:00! It was the rudest thing I ever experienced.

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On 2/6/2023 at 1:35 PM, jlf21 said:

We are sailing on Oasis in September with our 7 year old and 14 month old. I originally picked my dining time because depending on the day I am sure we will make it to dinner later then 5:30 pm. My question, how does the my dining work realistically? Can we just show up when we like and get seated or should we anticipate a wait? With a toddler I want to plan accordingly and do not want to set us up for disaster. 

I can only relay our experience with a 9 year old and 6 month old on Oasis for the first time last August. My time dining was an absolute nightmare. I could not believe the chaos that took place. The first night it was so bad we gave up and had dinner on the Windjammer at like 8 o'clock at night. I love the Windjammer but not for dinner. 

It was such a nightmare that I do not want to repeat that we switched to traditional dining for our next 3 booked cruises, 5:30 early dining. 

I don't know if it's a post pandemic thing but before the pandemic did MTD and it worked great. 

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These threads make me nervous! We have done MTD before (pre-covid), and have it booked for Harmony in March.  I booked the same time for every night; last time that meant we had the same table and waitstaff every night.  I picked the 6:30 slot; I can't remember if it was the earliest time available or not.  If it's not, I would love to change it but you cannot see what is available once you have already booked! I was thinking it may be like the DRs office - first slots are still on time, and then everything goes downhill from there? So fingers crossed that 6:30 was the earliest and this works out!

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1 hour ago, jlf21 said:

Thanks everyone! I changed our dining time to the early seating.

I think you'll be happy with the early dining. The wait staff is fresh, you'll have the same wait staff for the whole cruise (I know you can get this with MTD too but is sometimes an extra step), you can get in early, get your food early and be done and out before it gets too busy and loud. We had a family sitting next to us on our last cruise who had two little ones (1-2 y.o. and a 3-4 y.o.) and they were always about halfway done with their meal when we arrived for our early dining. (FYI our schedule was 5:15pm and we were usually there on time or no later than 10 minutes after so they clearly got there early). It seemed like a really great arrangement for them. They also had a high chair set up every night for their little one. They were always done by 6pm when we were just getting our entrees. The staff will usually pack things up for you if you end up needing to leave before you're done eating (at least they would before the dining changes, who knows now...), and the buffet is still open for a while if you need to take a second try at dinner.

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We recently did MTD but made reservations for each night. At sea nights earlier and port nights later.  Had to make the reservations for each person in our group.  There were "lanes" for each reserved time slot that moved pretty quick. If you just went with no reservations it looked to be a long wait... 

 

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