One of the fun things we get to do here at MouseDining is observe how customers use our service. We measure the typical things most websites track through Google Analytics – things like unique users, sessions, page views, traffic sources, etc. We’ve also set up a few goals so we can see the number of new users, paid users, and how often alerts are being set.

Then we have a bunch of data in our database. Things like how many users we have, how many users have alerts set, how many alerts each user has set, which restaurants are the most popular, which dates are the most popular, which meals are the most popular, and which meal times are the most popular. There’s more, but we’ll just scratch the surface for now.

We use data like this to better understand how our users are collectively using MouseDining. We don’t often look at individual accounts unless something seems out of the norm; that, or someone contacts customer support in need of some help with their account.

Anyway, the reason I tell you all this is because I often come across articles like these: The Most Popular Disney World Restaurants (and Alternatives When They’re Full); Top 20 Disney World Restaurants; Top 10 Disney World Table Service Restaurants; and I think, “MouseDining has REAL data from REAL Disney travelers and these lists are so far off from what we’re seeing.” So I’m making a promise to our users that I will share what data I have so we can all educate one another.

Please do not take this as an attack on the publishers I’ve used as examples. Time passes, new restaurants open up, menus change. I don’t discount the value they’ve added to the overall Disney dining community. I will, however, invite and encourage any and all publishers to use MouseDining’s data as a source for future articles and content published on the topic of Disney dining. If there’s data you think we have that you’d like for your article, contact support and I’ll see your request. Our goal is to enlighten everyone in a positive way so we can all enjoy Disney’s fantastic dining experiences.

MouseDining’s list of Walt Disney World’s most popular restaurants as dictated by MouseDining users, and the percent of total alerts set – January 2018.

As you can see, Be Our Guest makes up nearly 50% of all alerts set by users on MouseDining.com. I wanted to include these percentages so you can see, relative to other restaurants, where the restaurant you seek stacks up.

Now don’t get discouraged thinking this accurately reflects the difficulty in landing a reservation. To measure difficulty, we would need more data, such as restaurant max occupancy, staff availability, average table turn, hours open, etc. Perhaps someday, but for today, this should be helpful, if not interesting to anyone using MouseDining.

I look forward to bringing more data like this to the entire Disney dining community in the future.

Cheers,
Dustin Checketts
President