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Booking Category Changes - no more 'Royal Room Pool View'

Posted: August 18th, 2021, 12:00 pm
by The Sassagoula Sentinel
Summary: Reservation Booking Category Changes - no more 'Royal Room Pool View', and Garden Views have turned into Woods.

When bookings became available for the Port Orleans Resorts last month (Riverside for stays commencing 14 October, French Quarter from 28 October) there were a couple of anomalies that we initially discussed in our Facebook Group.

First, for Port Orleans Riverside rooms, the old Garden View booking category has been replaced with a Woods View option instead. This appears to simply be a direct name change, and you will probably still get the same rooms as you would have done before. Port Orleans French Quarter rooms retain their original Garden View naming.

Presumably some guests who booked a "Garden" view were disappointed when they got an Alligator Bayou room overlooking a swampy forest area instead of seeing neatly manicured courtyard lawns out of their window. I suspect the reverse may happen now though if anyone was hoping for a wilderness style experience, but short of creating two separate categories the wording change probably manages expectations rather better than before.

The second change seemed initially like a database glitch, but it now seems much more likely to be a permanent change. When post-COVID bookings first went live, the Royal Room Pool View category did not show any availability at all for any dates in 2021/22. Even when checking sample dates throughout that whole period the room type was always shown in the results list, but never with any booking availability - not even for a single night. This sort of issue has occasionally happened before when the reservations system releases large blocks of inventory at one time, but several weeks later the issue had not been corrected and the category was still showing with no guest availability at all. I contacted WDW to ask about this, and after looking into it they recently came back to me saying that the category no longer exists on their internal systems either. Since then, even the name has been removed from the online booking pages.

It is now fairly safe to assume that booking a specific Pool View for a Royal Room is no longer a possibility, and I've updated the site info and pricing pages accordingly. Most likely these rooms will have been re-categorised as Royal Room Woods View like their neighbours. In some ways this is a pretty trivial change as it was by far the smallest booking category, covering only 36 individual rooms, most of which didn't even give particularly good access to the Oak Manor/Parterre Place leisure pool. However because of the layout of the Royal buildings it was a handy way to secretly guarantee a short walk from a mansion building to the main buildings, rather like the Preferred Location category for the Alligator Bayou rooms. I somehow doubt it will be missed much in the grand scheme of things though.

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Re: Booking Category Changes - no more 'Royal Room Pool View'

Posted: October 20th, 2021, 4:44 am
by Maxxx17
That's too bad.