Reservations for "My Time Dining"

[peteukmcr]

It almost seems to me that MTD (which we will try for the first time next July) adds MORE stress instead of making your vacation easier. I'm tired of structured dinner times-6 is too early and 8:30 is too late-but at least it's a no-brainer when to show up!

 

We'll still do MTD, but I am a bit concerned.

Sometimes depends on your sailing as the main seating on our Mariner sailing was 6:45 pm and second seating was 9:15 pm to accommodate the Mediterranean diners who like to eat late. RCI do change the times from. Even those shown online depending on the passenger mix. For many in Europe 8:30 pm is too early and so all they do is turn up late and so RCI end up changing the times to suit.

 

This is our first time doing MTD too and with past experiences with like dining programs, we decided to make our reservations in advance. Early seating at 5:30 is a bit early for us and 8:30 is way too late, so we chose 6:30 each night. Since we’re rather fast eaters, and don’t care to linger two hours over dinner so we chose a table for two. Remembering Freestyle on NCL, you couldn’t even make reservations. We’d show up and ask for a table for two, and the host would say there’s a wait for a table for two but we can seat you right away if we’d share a table. It almost turned out to be like The Cheesecake Factory or the Outback, sign up and wait 30 minutes or more. I’ve read here that people were seated right away by just showing up, but since we know what time we want and want a table for two, making reservations made sense. Looking at our cruise which is two weeks out now, we wouldn’t had been able to book our time now had we not booked earlier.

As above it depends on the sailing as to when main and second seating are scheduled.

[peteukmcr]

After reading all the replies to this thread, I thought that I would go ahead and make the reservation for every night since we usually seem to eat early rather than late. On three different days this week (including right now), I went to my reservation on RCI's web site and got all the way through making the reservation but when I pressed "SUBMIT", I get an error message saying they are having trouble and are working on fixing it. Very frustrating! Also --- even though my cruise is a 16-night TA, when I went to my login page, over on the left side, WITH the CORRECT reservation number, it said my cruise was a 3-night Bahama cruise! When I actually clicked on the reservation number, it did bring me to the correct itinerary. I guess I'll call them and see what's up.

 

MaryLou

Maybe because they do web site maintenance over the weekend is the reason you can't make reservations.

 

On the day of boarding you will find a station set up where you can make your reservations is you want. On Mariner it was set up on day 1 at the entrance to the WJ. On Liberty it was on deck 4 where we boarded in Barcelona.

[Langley Cruisers]

..I am hoping that we will still be able to get a table without waiting for hours....

 

Umm, not sure if you were just being sarcastic but you certainly will not wait for hours. ;)

.

[Gail & Marty sailing away]

We did it on line ...

[poncho1973]

EVERYTHING about having to make reservations months in advance for MTD to me just seems wrong.

 

Fixed that for you.

[lisiamc]

Maybe because they do web site maintenance over the weekend is the reason you can't make reservations.

 

On the day of boarding you will find a station set up where you can make your reservations is you want. On Mariner it was set up on day 1 at the entrance to the WJ. On Liberty it was on deck 4 where we boarded in Barcelona.

 

That's good to know - thanks! At least I can fix it when I get on board, since I'm getting conflicting information on-line and by email, and I'm not sure if I have reservations or not.

[SnappyNappi]

I have done MTD on the Explorer and what I liked to do was to make the reservations for each night ahead of time at about the same time every night. I did it far enough in advance that I got the time that I wanted each evening. However, when traveling with kids and once you are on the ship you will find that sometimes you just want to change your plans, eat earlier or later... so I stopped by the hostess at the Dining Room and asked them to change our reservation time for dinner, we even asked if we could still have the same table or a table that would be serviced by our same wait-staff, and we NEVER had a problem.

 

I believe that when they plug in the times in the system for the MTD, they only allot a number of reservations so that everyone spreads out and they are not overwhelmed with every passenger wanting the same reservation time in the system.

 

I also don't like that people just don't show up for reservations. I wouldn't do it in a restaurant at home, so why would I do it on-board. IF you make a reservation, just change it or if you show up early, just tell them that you had a later time so that they can delete that reservation in the system - they are happy to accommodate you.

 

Don't let your dining time or reservations stress you out... :)