Land/Sea add a Night and Dining Package - GRRR

[mousebrat]

We have booked a 4/3 land/sea package. We also added a night to the land portion. Because we added a night, we cannot add the Disney Dining Plan to the land portion of the trip. This was confirmed by our TA and a DCL phone rep. Apparently, that is the deal between DW Resort and DCL. This is crazy.

I know we could book land and sea separately and get the dining package, but the economics did not work out when I last checked.

I just had to vent.

[DisneyDreamerK]

I had to book my land and sea seperately. I bought the DCL reservation first then wanted to add the sea part with the moderate resort and told me I wasn't allowed and made me book a seperate trip for land with the dining plan. It is free dining time so I guess I don't mind, but now I am in a value resort...

[DLW8]

I agree - it's a PITA. We added an extra night to our land/sea, and because of the fact that we wouldn't be able to get dining, we did the extra night as a separate ressie. We are planning to go to Sea World that day so we don't need the dining.

I even checked with free dining as well as the room only discount if it was cheaper to now split it out and we still have a better deal with the land/sea.

Also, if you add an extra night, you still won't get your park passes on the pre-night for the land/sea package. You will get those when you check in for the first day of your land/sea package. Hence the reason we are doing SeaWorld that first day.

We are renting a car and driving from MCO to Sea World, then checking in that night at our hotel for the pre-night. In the morning we will check in for the land/sea and then return the car at the Dolphin and walk to DHS for the day.

I'd price it out all the different ways (especially if you are going during free dining) to see what is the best deal.

I think that Disney needs to re-think this for next year. I mean, we are saying we want MORE days of dining on property, and they won't let us do it. So, in our case, SeaWorld will get our money for the first day!

This is the first year that you can even add the dining plan to a land/sea, so maybe next year, we will see that you can add extra days as well and get dining.

[mousebrat]

I will double check, but our TA said we would get our passes when we check in for the pre-night. There may be a difference between a pre-night room only and adding another day with passes.

[utahkennedys]

At least you won't overeat on your entire vacation, lol! We had dining plan once and we won't again...we felt like we overate to "get the value" every meal, Ugh!

[nydisfan]

We ran into the same issue with our land/sea pkg. and wanted to add post days...and we ended up booking the post days separate so we could get the dining plan for the land/sea and free dining for the post part of the trip...so it all worked out but they do need to set it up to make it easier in the future.

[Waltworshiper]

My friend had problems just booking dinner reservations at the parks with her land/sea package. She was on the phone for hours trying to get it all straightened out.

[mousebrat]

They really ought to make this easier. The land/sea package is touted as a seamless experience. If you want to spend more $$$, though, it starts to become a hassle. We are arriving on 11/27 late and staying at the airport. We will check into the Poly on 11/28 for our extra day before the "official" land/sea package starts. The free dining starts on 11/29 if I remember correctly.

[DLW8]

Originally Posted by mousebrat

I will double check, but our TA said we would get our passes when we check in for the pre-night. There may be a difference between a pre-night room only and adding another day with passes.

we were told even if we added a pre day to our land/sea, we wouldn't get the passes until the first day of the land/sea.

Hope you find out something different! Doesn't matter to us anymore as we will do SeaWorld that first day, but if would be nice!

[mousebrat]

After doing some more searching and confirming with our TA, it appears that we will receive our park hopper passes the day we check in because we booked the pre-night through DCL. This is a huge relief. If we had done a separate room only reservation for the night, we could not get the passes early and would have two separate reservations to deal with.

For the sake of the shareholders, I hope WDW and DCL can integrate systems better to offer as many upsell opportunities as possible. I could not even find where you could book a land/sea package on the new DCL website, so I don't see this happening any time soon.

[kcashner]

Booking separately allows you to have exactly what you want...and MAY save you some money. Sorry, I don't like the regimentation of the land/sea package deal.

[colturn]

We recently tried to add the dining package to our Land/sea package, as we booked the land sea with an extra day at the end over a year ago. We have been told the system will not allow it, because we added a day at the end.
I just don't understand what the difficulty is in paying for a meal package for my normal land days.

Oh well, we will have to make the best of it.

[frdeb1999]

Sad to say that in most cases it is just so much easier and cheaper to do them seperately. You can get exactly what you want and still get the same experience. Makes no sense....but for us it's always been cheaper to do it seperately.

[mousebrat]

For us, we are saving between $800-$1,000 by booking it as the land/sea package. I didn't finish checking with the insurance because it was obvious it was much cheaper to do the package. Not being on the dining plan is really not that big of a deal. I think we would save about $50 over the course of the land portion. It was more of a convenience factor. Vacation for me is all about convenience. We would have probably eaten less of our entrees and ordered dessert on the plan, but I didn't factor too many desserts into whether the dining plan would have saved us money.

We were on the gold plan before and enjoyed being able to take some chances on our entrees because we knew there would be plenty to share if we didn't like something. At the end of the week, we were a little tired of eating at table service meals to try to get our money's worth. So, perhaps it is a blessing in disguise.

[DLW8]

Originally Posted by frdeb1999

Sad to say that in most cases it is just so much easier and cheaper to do them seperately. You can get exactly what you want and still get the same experience. Makes no sense....but for us it's always been cheaper to do it seperately.

We priced our vacation out both ways and the most cost effective way is the land/sea with an additional room only ressie for our extra night. I think it depends on if you want your ship and land room category to match (ours do) or not. If you want to choose a value or mod hotel but a verandah room, it may be better to do it separately.

Our friends tried doing the Poly with a Cat 12 room and that was more than doing the Poly with the Cat 6 (which matches up). You just have to price it out all the different ways.

With the new free dining, I tried to see if we would save money by splitting out our land from sea. Nope, it will cost us $560 MORE than what we paid for the package and I did it with a 4 day hopper instead of the 5 that you get with land/sea.

The room only discount would also cost us more money if we split it out.

So, we have a room only for Saturday night (we will go to Sea World) and then the land/sea "officially" starts on Sunday.

I'm glad you can get your passes for your pre-day, mousebrat. I guess it was because we have our pre-day separate so we COULD get the dining plan. To me, it doesn't make sense that you get a 5 day hopper when you are on land for 4 days, so we will have an unused day. Oh well....

I agree that they need to figure out how to let people add extra days AND the dining plan. It's all money for Disney, and I don't see how it can be that hard to do! In the meantime, like I said, they will only get our hotel money for Saturday, the rest will go to SeaWorld!