Making A Reservation Online VS Phone

After reading a few websites, and checking out a few travel reviews, Allison and I were prepared to get started on actually making reservations for our stay at Disneyland Paris.  One of the best sites that seemed to give a candid review of the hotels in the Disney Paris resort area is the Disney Tourist blog. Our first bit of research we focused on how important it was for us to stay on property VS staying off property.  Staying on property at Disney Paris has many of the same benefits that you get as staying on property at Disney World.  Proximity to the parks is the best advantage, since one of the hotels is actually part of the entrance to one of the parks.  There's also the extra magic hours, these allow you to come to the park early or stay late if you're staying on property.  The only real disadvantage is price, but since we're only staying at Disney for a few days, we figured it was worth the money.

We made a list of the hotels we wanted to stay at listing our preferred down to our least preferred.  Our first choice was the Sequoya Lodge, followed by the New York Hotel. We then went to the Disneyland Paris website ready to make our reservations.  The first thing we noticed about the site was that it doesn't really allow for any flexibility as far as staying at the hotel and getting tickets to go to the parks.  After a quick phone call we learned that if you're staying at one of the hotels the ticket is attached to the price of the room, and you can't separate it.  This is fine, most of the time, but if you're arriving late or have to leave early it might mean paying for a day at the park that you cannot use. So we adjusted our schedule, and proceeded. We managed to pick our first choice of hotel, the Sequoya Lodge, for the days we wanted, but every time Allison tried to pay, she got an error message.  The error messages were both nerve wracking and annoying, so Allison decided to call the reservation number to try and figure out what went wrong, this was the best decision of the night.

Allison called the reservation line and a lovely lady picked up the phone.  Allison explained the situation and instantly the lovely lady on the other end discovered that due to this error and our many attempts to fix it, we had booked the trip twice.  It took a bit of working through things over the phone, but it was fixed and our trip was locked down, but this wasn't the only part of the conversation.  While waiting for the mess to get cleaned up, the lovely operator went over some of the details of our trip with Allison on the phone.  She didn't really try to sell anything else, but instead gave us some valuable information. She informed Allison about all of the ride and park closures that would be happening while were there.  She also got into a conversation with Allison and managed to find out it was are anniversary trip.  She asked if there was anything else she could do to make our anniversary more special.  Allison told her that we liked extra pillows, which we do.

I'm not saying that we're going to get anything special when we get there, and there's no need really, but it was really nice of her to offer.  Allison actually stayed on the phone with the nice lady for a while, she was a fountain of information, and she really put us at ease about our trip plans.  We went from being fairly excited about this trip, to being really excited, all because of this lady on the phone.

Since the call we've received all of the notification that our problem has been fixed, and that our trip is ready to go.  After this experience my best advice to anybody planning a trip to Disney Paris is call to make your reservation.  The website is just not that great (either for reservations or for information), but the folks answering the phones are fantastic.  While the operators may answer the phone in French, many are multilingual, and so far all of them have spoken English.  Best of all, if Allison did try and communicate in French, they didn't stop her.  They would just slow down and let her practice her French.