Thank you everyone who has offered advice so far!
Here are the specifics that I think I have figured out for us. I definitely know that we want a dining plan--I think the savings and 'ease of use' would make for a better vacation for my family. Deluxe is definitely out of our price range, but I was looking at a Moderate resort--Port Orleans, French Quarter.
I know that my family would definitely want at least one table service meal everyday. I was looking at the standard
Disney Dining Plan with 1 table, 1 quick serve, and 1 snack, but to be honest, that doesn't really seem like enough food for my family. The Deluxe package seems like too much. I think we may just go with the standard package and purchase some meals out of pocket, as the need arises.
I love to plan vacations (when my extended family goes on vacation together, I make arrangments for all 15 of us!), so the planning aspect doesn't bother me. Just need to jump in and do it!
Thank you!
POFQ is a great resort, especially with a little one. It's very compact so there's not a lot of walking, you won't be sorry on that choice.
What WE do on the
DDP is we typically eat our breakfast in our room out-of-pocket (OOP) - we pack some food with us (cereal, pop tarts, bagels) and buy a 1/2 gallon of OJ and Milk at the resort. The prices are high for that (may $5 for 1/2 gall OJ) but still cheaper that buying 16 oz every morning for $2.69.
The meal plan itself is MORE than enough food for the rest of the day. We use snack credits on any snack purchase over $2.50, but usually end up with some left-over at the end of the trip.
When we've gone in August / September for free dining, we usually did our TS meal for a late lunch (around 1 PM), just because it was so nice to take a break in the heat of the day. These meals tend to be pretty filling between the meal and desserts. The CS meals are also usually good sized.
Good to see you are a planner...using the meal plan DOES require a lot of forethought. You have to figure out which parks you will be going to which days, and book restaurants accordingly. And if you want to try restaurants at the resort, you have to plan on that as well, as unless you have a car on property, getting to/from the resorts is much lengthier than getting to/from the parks.
I can't imagine using the Deluxe Dining Plan EVER. Every sit-down meal takes about 90 minutes out of your day, if we did that twice a day, it would really eat into park time, especially since it doesn't include transportation. Plus, the amount of food would be ridiculous. I suppose if you were only going to eat at Signature restaurants it would be worth it, but not for us.
One other piece of advice to spread your dining plan meals out: With the TS meal, the credits are designated as Adult or Child credits - for example, if you have 7 days of DDP, you will have 14 adult TS credits, and 7 child TS credits. However, the Counter service / Quick service credits are not specific to adult versus children. Therefore, if you want to stretch the credits (get more than 7 meals out of them) you can pay for the kid's meals OOP - and use the CS credits for adult meals only. We usually stretch our meals to 8 or 9 instead of 7 this way. (This is considered "illegal" by some on the DISboards, and I might get flamed for even mentioning it, but since Disney does nothing to stop it, it is obviously permitted. When the DDP first came out, they did the same thing with the TS credits, no difference between adult and Child, and people took advantage of it, so they separated the credits back in 2007 - they haven't done that for the CS credits, so they obviously don't care.)
Another FAQ you may not have heard - the # of credits you get is based on the # of nights stayed, NOT on the # of days. So if you have a 7-night package, you get all your credits on the day you check in. You have until midnight on the day you check out to use them up. And in case you haven't realized it yet, you don't have to use 1 TS, 1 CS, and 1 snack EACH DAY. When your package starts, you get all of them at once, so you can use them in any order you want. (Say you want to eat 2 TS meals one day, and eat only CS meals the next, no problem.)
Hope that helps, not everyone on here likes the DDP, and in fact some hate it because they blame it for the downgrade in quality of food. While I disagree that this has even occurred, I also think one is not related to the other.
