Reservations for Disneyland’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge Were All Gone in Under Two Hours

By Garrett Martin | May 2, 2019 | 1:47pm

All images courtesy of Disney

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Reservations for Disneyland’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge Were All Gone in Under Two Hours

Update: The online reservations for Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge were all distributed in under two hours. The site went live at 10:00 a.m. PT and all four-hour slots were gone by noon. You can still get a reservation by booking a stay at one of Disneyland’s three hotels, and after June 23 you won’t need a reservation to enter Galaxy’s Edge.

Again, nobody knows how to comfortably manage crowds better than Disney, and the measures they’ve put in place for Galaxy’s Edge this summer, both the reservations for the first few weeks and the virtual queuing system that’ll be rolled out afterward, should ensure that everybody gets to enjoy the new expansion. As Disney spokesperson Liz Jaeger says, “We are delighted that our guests are as excited as we are about the May 31st opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. We can’t wait for them to visit—and we look forward to delivering a great guest experience both now and after June 23rd, when reservations will no longer be required to visit Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.”

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Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, Disneyland’s immersive Star Wars theme park expansion, officially opens in 29 days, and yes, everybody knows how crowded it will be. That’s pretty much the first thing everybody jokes about whenever they talk about Galaxy’s Edge. Disney knows better than anybody how crushingly popular Galaxy’s Edge is going to be, and so they’ve enacted a reservation system to help manage the flow of guests throughout the area’s 14 acres. Reservations opened up today, and if you want to be one of the first people to journey to Black Spire Outpost on the Outer Rim world of Batuu, here’s what you have to do to get one.

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First, a few notes on how these reservations work. A reservation is only needed for the first three weeks (and change) that Galaxy’s Edge will be open, from May 31 through June 23. Each reservation is good for a four-hour block, after which you’ll have to leave Galaxy’s Edge and check out the rest of Disneyland—which, as you might know, is a pretty great place to hang out. Galaxy’s Edge will have one ride operating at launch—Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run—along with a cantina, a quick-service restaurant, and a variety of interactive shops, including opportunities to design your own light saber and droid. If the lines are kept moving four hours should be enough time to comfortably enjoy everything that’ll be open in the early days of the park. (A second ride, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, will be opening later this year.)

The easiest way to get a Galaxy’s Edge reservation is to book a stay at one of Disneyland’s three official hotels between May 31 and June 23. Everybody who books a room will be assigned a four-hour window for Galaxy’s Edge during their stay. Of course this isn’t the most affordable option, but the Disneyland Hotel and the Grand Californian are both awesome places to stay.

If you’re local or on a budget, you can make a reservation without booking a hotel room by visiting Disneyland’s website. You’ll need to set up an account if you don’t already have one. The link to the Galaxy’s Edge reservation queue is at the top of that main Disneyland web page; once you click through you’ll see this page, which asks you to hold tight until it’s your time to set up a reservation. Chatter on Twitter makes it look like you’ll spend a decent amount of time looking at that screen, but be patient: the process works and eventually you’ll make it to the actual reservation screen.

Reservations are free, but you will need to buy a ticket to Disneyland to get in to Galaxy’s Edge.

After June 23, reservations will no longer be required. Disney plans on using a type of virtual queue to handle Galaxy’s Edge admissions after that point, similar to the FastPass system they’ve used for decades.

This might sound like a lot of effort to get into a theme park, but again, this is an immersive Star Wars park from the best designers in the theme park business. Paste got to visit Galaxy’s Edge when it was still just a construction site here’s what to expect, btw), and even then the scale and scope of what we saw blew us away. It’ll be a massive draw, but Disney knows how to manage its crowds, and has a firm plan for how to handle Galaxy’s Edge.