Reserving Restaurants

[raphael360]

I just reserved my restaurants for my upcoming 7th VV cruise.  This is for those who are new to Virgin.

 

My restaurant reservations opened up on 10/29 (today) but what exactly does 'today' mean.  Well in may case it means 12:01 AM last night EST.  At 11:45 PM yesterday I went to the apps  "Book dining" option which was no longer grayed out.  Very exciting!  I attempted to make my first dining reservation by walking through and picking my day and time which led me to the available restaurants.  But no options to book were presented only the list of all restaurants. OK not to be denied, I watched the clock roll over to midnight plus 5 seconds and tried again.  Same results.  However, at 12:05 AM, the available restaurant options appeared and I was able to complete my booking for the Wake, Friday Dec. 18th at 6 PM.  HA! Excellent!! Yeah - success 🙂  Your timing may vary but this is exactly what I expected.

 

As the engineer I did try to fool VV's system by changing both my iphone's time zone and VPN to Sydney hoping I could make VV think I was in Australia and get a jump on booking but it didn't work.   Virgin is TOO SMART for me. 🙂

 

Hope this helps first-timers with their restaurant reservations.  Use the app and book as soon as you can at 45 days out.  I think it's 60 days out for Rockstars but I'm not a Rockstar, just an engineer nerd.

 

Happy sailing.

 

[fmlsprtsfn]

I loved all the ways you tried to trick the system.  🤣

[raphael360]

17 hours ago, fmlsprtsfn said:

I loved all the ways you tried to trick the system.  🤣

Thank you 🙂

 

[Tralfaz1138]

When it came time to book our restaurants it got a bit weird (on the Singapore to Sydney trip).  I basically hit what I think you did (e.g. you could see the restaurants but it basically said no booking was needed for any time slot I chose).  This actually lasted for a few days so I finally called VV and booked things over the phone with someone.  A couple of days after that, though, the system did "wake up" and the ability to book restaurants was available.  I'm guessing the reason for the issue was new itineraries they hadn't properly set up in the system yet.

 

I will say that the fact you can't "edit" things easily in that system was frustrating.  My step-daughter is also on this trip in a non-RS room so I booked for an extra person as well.  I forgot to tell the person, though, it was for a specific person so all the bookings were just for a "person" so she wouldn't be able to see them in her app.  I went in to edit them all and you can't just change the "person" so I had to delete the booking and rebook it with her selected as the +1.

 

 

[tbmrt]

For our last VV cruise in June I stayed up to book restaurants night before as well.  Saw the restaurant listings but could not book til about 11:40 or so.  For our Feb trip I couldn't book or see the excursions until exactly midnight! 

[TheDarkestBlue]

Hi! I found it helpful to go into the app settings and force a stop, clear cache, and then bring the app back up again. 

[Tralfaz1138]

49 minutes ago, tbmrt said:

For our last VV cruise in June I stayed up to book restaurants night before as well.  Saw the restaurant listings but could not book til about 11:40 or so.  For our Feb trip I couldn't book or see the excursions until exactly midnight! 

Strangely, excursions for us actually showed up earlier than midnight EST the day they were supposed to open, so they were on the ball with that one.  Just restaurants were goofed up.  (And I did try the tricks of deleting the cache, deleting/reinstalling the app, etc.  Being a tech person the issues "seemed" to me to be back end related, not app related though).