Is DDP worth it for a couple

[Cshel85]

Have never did dining Plan and my husband and I are coming no kids, is it worth doing the DDP? If so which one?

[sharonabe]

Originally Posted by Cshel85

Have never did dining Plan and my husband and I are coming no kids, is it worth doing the DDP? If so which one?

That all depends on how you want to eat and vacation.

The DxDDP gives you 3 credits per person per day. Most people use this one by having a late breakfast/early lunch (1 credit) then do a signature dinner (using 2 credits per person). You get app, entree, dessert, and drink at each meal. It's a lot of food, but for just a couple it would give you a chance to do some foodie things and relax at dinner. The cost is right at $100 per person per day. You also get 2 snacks per day per person.

The regular DDP is 1 table service (TS) and 1 counter service (CS) and 1 snack per person per day. If you want desserts and drinks at EVERY meal and you tend to order the more expensive entrees, then this could work for you. Cost is $55 per person per day.

The quick service plan is difficult to get your money's worth, but if you want the prepaid convenience, you will at least come close. You both get 2 QS meals and 1 snack per day. It is $37.?? per day.

[Cshel85]

But you still have to tip and it does not include alcoholic beverages correct? My question is we arrive about lunch time on our first day and we leave at 8:00 am on our last day, will we have meals to use on those days also?

[TDC Nala]

It totally depends on how you eat on vacation and whether you will use the credits.

Yes, you have to tip at table service (except CRT and dinner shows which include the tip), and no, alcohol is not included (except at the dinner shows). As for when to use your credits, you get them all at once as soon as you check in, and you have until midnight after you have checked out to use them all. So you can arrange to use them all before your last day, if you plan it out properly. Or you can save enough to have breakfast on your last day, although if you have a flight at 8 AM you're probably not going to be having breakfast onsite.

Remember you get credits based on how many NIGHTS you stay at the resort. Not how many days. If you are staying 5 nights and 6 days you get credits based on 5 nights.

[geckodani]

It depends on how you eat. Are you going to do mostly quick service meals? Or do you like a nice sit down meal at the end of the day?

I ran the numbers for my husband and myself after our last trip, and for us the DDP does save us money. Things that factor into this are:

1. We like the have a nice sit down meal at the end of the day. We might have dinner at Kona, or Rose and Crown etc.

2. We are snackers. We get our money's worth out of those snack credits!

3. We don't use our quick service credits on breakfast; breakfast is almost always cheaper out of pocket than a comparable lunch etc.

My advice to you is to go to allears.net, and take a look at what you might order. Be honest too - don't just go for the most expensive thing, look at what you would really order. Then compare those prices to the DDP cost.

I leave alcohol and tips out of my calculations - I have to pay for them either way, so I take that into account.

[Pygoplites]

For most people, I don't think the dining plans are worth it any longer. They just seem too restrictive and it seems like a lot of "work" to maximize the value. Plus, several of the best restaurants (Swan/Dolphin/Waldorf-Astoria) are not on the plan. I can see the benefits for family groups, especially when the group doesn't always dine together. But for 2 adults...not so much.

The exception are the Premium/Platinum plans...those can be a tremendous value if you want to dine mostly at Signatures, take tours, see shows, golf, boat, etc. However, it does entail a very high degree of planning/scheduling in order to get your money's worth. I've done Premium 2 or 3 times and Platinum once and would probably do them again.

[Wood Nymph]

Originally Posted by Cshel85

Have never did dining Plan and my husband and I are coming no kids, is it worth doing the DDP? If so which one?

My husband and I did the DDP for the first time ever on our trip last month. We only did it because we were going with our daughter and her family and they were doing the dining plan. We had great food and got our money's worth only because we did lots of buffets and character meals. We did a little better than break even. But to be honest, we ate more desserts than we normally would just because they were included. The snack credits almost went to waste because we had plenty of treats included with our meals. I ended up buying snacks for my sisters who weren't on the plan in order to use up the snack credits. And we spent far too much time traveling to our ADR's.

We don't plan to get the dining plan again, even if we do decide to do a lot of ts meals. Since it was mostly a break even deal on the meals, I'd rather spend my money on a soup or salad than on a dessert.

[OklahomaTourist]

Here's a very general way to think about this issue:

The more you tend to eat three meals a day on Disney property (hotels/parks), the more DDP may work for you. The more you tend to eat fewer than three meals a day, or have an inkling to eat some at a favorite off-site place (or even have something in-room), the more that pulls the equation back toward no plan (OOP).

As an example for my family, we're only planning to eat 3 full TS dinners on property, plus one CS lunch. Breakfast in room all but one or two days of a week's stay. Might visit a favorite pizza place outside WDW one evening. That tends to suggest OOP for us, and when I do the math, sure enough, OOP comes out (a lot) cheaper for us.

As someone else noted, DDP can work out to as much as ~$100/person per day, and in practical terms there's NO way we're dropping that kind of $ on meals alone.

[sharonabe]

Originally Posted by OklahomaTourist

Here's a very general way to think about this issue:

The more you tend to eat three meals a day on Disney property (hotels/parks), the more DDP may work for you. The more you tend to eat fewer than three meals a day, or have an inkling to eat some at a favorite off-site place (or even have something in-room), the more that pulls the equation back toward no plan (OOP).

As an example for my family, we're only planning to eat 3 full TS dinners on property, plus one CS lunch. Breakfast in room all but one or two days of a week's stay. Might visit a favorite pizza place outside WDW one evening. That tends to suggest OOP for us, and when I do the math, sure enough, OOP comes out (a lot) cheaper for us.

As someone else noted, DDP can work out to as much as ~$100/person per day, and in practical terms there's NO way we're dropping that kind of $ on meals alone.

While I agree this is a general statment, the line highlighted above is not necessarily true. I've done enough looking around at the menus to know my family of four (all Disney adults) can eat THREE meals a day IN the parks/resorts, with at least one TS per day, for around $50 per person per day including tax AND tip. So, OOP still works for us even in this situation. The reason this works out for us is we prefer to drink water with our meals and only two of us like dessert and then only at TS, so we share.

When questioning whether the DDP is for you or not, I think the more general way of looking at it is HOW you want to eat on vacation. Is the food/dining a big part of your vacation? Do you want to do several character dinners? Are you looking forward to having steak and expensive seafood most nights? Do you want your own dessert at every meal? Are you okay with spending "x" amount of hours in a restaurant over spending those hours in the parks?

[kanderson89]

Like other folks have said, it depends on how you roll. For the two of us, here's an example of how we might eat:
- split a quick service breakfast. Most of the portions are huge and suffice. Use our resort mugs for coffee.
- use snack credit on bottles of soda/water or ice cream treat
- split another quick service lunch - Cosmic Rays, for example, gives you half a chicken with mashed potatoes and green beans.
- Use a table service for dinner. Often, we do signature meals, so that takes two credits. On other nights, we might just get apps in the bar and pay OOP.

For us, it works. Is Disney maybe making money off us? Probably but we don't care. Because we eat at a lot of signature places, splitting the quick service meals stretches the meals out for the week for us. I'd also say that we tend to go during discount season. There's also just the hassle factor that the DDP saves us. Frankly, if we were paying OOP, we'd probably eat MORE because we'd get appetizers with dinner, etc. It helps keep us on a diet/money budget

[OklahomaTourist]

Originally Posted by sharonabe

While I agree this is a general statment, the line highlighted above is not necessarily true. I've done enough looking around at the menus to know my family of four (all Disney adults) can eat THREE meals a day IN the parks/resorts, with at least one TS per day, for around $50 per person per day including tax AND tip. So, OOP still works for us even in this situation. The reason this works out for us is we prefer to drink water with our meals and only two of us like dessert and then only at TS, so we share.

When questioning whether the DDP is for you or not, I think the more general way of looking at it is HOW you want to eat on vacation. Is the food/dining a big part of your vacation? Do you want to do several character dinners? Are you looking forward to having steak and expensive seafood most nights? Do you want your own dessert at every meal? Are you okay with spending "x" amount of hours in a restaurant over spending those hours in the parks?

I guess I should further qualify the "Three Disney meals a day" notion by thinking of that in broader terms of "Disney immersion." That is, the more you're going for the "full Disney experience" right down to meals, meals with characters, bigger shows, those kinds of things, the more DDP tends to work. But I'm with you entirely that if you don't normally do desserts, are happy with H2O on the drink side, OOP works very well.

We're a card-carrying OOP family ourselves; we're working on our fifth trip this summer and have done OOP every time. Works out great for us. As with all things, YMMV