That was my original plan but the family looked at me like I was crazy when I asked what they thought they would eat lol !
Just trying to get a good estimate in.
Well, you could try to guess what they'd probably get, especially since you are just trying to get a good estimate, anyway! Or, what I have done for myself and DD24, is to pick the most expensive thing off the menu(and dinners, we often do get the steaks so that's a pretty good guess, lol), figuring in drinks and possible desserts, and calculate using those numbers. Then I know the most it'll probably be. I may be off with too low of an estimate, maybe we get dessert when not planned or an extra drink, but other times we're too high, so it all evens out.
Now the suggestion to do the CRT oop isn't a bad one actually. That will cost each person 2 dining credits. I don't know exactly how much they cost these days, but say it's about $60. And say you spend 10 on a counter service meal and 5 on snacks, so that's like getting your dinner for $45 each day. Obviously not including tips, either. So that's $90 value, at least, eating that crt meal on the
ddp will cost each adult, much more than the actual cost of that meal. My DD24 and I were going to Le Cellier last year and were figuring out the now signature cost there. We realized that would be much more expensive and when we went we actually spent about $120 there in cash for both of us. If we had eaten there using the ddp, we each would have used 2 credits, that's two dinners worth, and then had to pay for another dinner. So no deal at all. Not so bad if it was one credit. Anyway, hope that wasn't too confusing, lol!
I will say that last year my DD24 finally convinced me to try dining oop and it definitely was cheaper! We made a spread sheet of each day, which meal we thought we'd get from the menu or the most expensive thing. It was cheaper than what the ddp would have cost us for the 8 days, and even after we ended up adding a day. And we had, I think, about 13 TS meals along with cs and snacks. And we included some alcoholic drinks as well. We did save even more by having the TIW card(saves 20% at many places), which was nice.
Do remember that if you have the Disney Visa, many places give 10% off so use that to help your oop dining!
If you were going to do the two cheapest meals, I bet that'd be the two lunches.