How much do you plan daily per person, per child for food and incidentals?

grandmajan

Earning My Ears
Joined
Jun 22, 2003
Messages
14
I know it depends on lots of things but we are trying to get some ballpark figures. We are thinking of DUI g one character meal then lunches at the park and maybe dinners outside the park, or dtd.
 
For our family of 5 (1 is a baby) we aim for $300 per day total because we often have two sit-down meals per day. That was upped from $200-250 since my eldest now counts as an adult! On character meal day, it usually breaks down to:

$150 Character Breakfast
$30 Lunch
$70 Dinner
$50 snacks/items.

I'd say that's more than most people spend on food (many bring in their own food) but we don't go out to eat often so when we go to Disney, we like to experience as many places to eat as possible :)
 
We also plan about $300 per day for our family of 5. We do eat breakfast at our hotel each morning & budget for $300 for food drinks & snacks per day. We do leave the park & eat outside for dinner usually.
 
I usually plan $60 per adult per day, $40 for kids, then add on if we are doing special meals (ie Club, character, Napa, Steakhouse.)
 

For the family of 4 we "budget" $200 per day on food, and $50 per day per person for incidentals (shopping, DTD, etc). We ALWAYS go over this in the end. Last trip we were well over $300 a day for food, but we did do several special meals, and were just over $1800 for the 7 days we were there for all the rest of our purchases. I don't think that Disney is a place to skimp on a vacation.
 
We eat at CS restaurants only and get one souvenir per child for the entire trip. Obviously, kids are a little less in the food area and adults a little more, but here's the average if we eat all meals in the parks and don't bring anything from home:

Food: $50/day including 3 full meals, 2 snacks, and a few beverages
Souvenirs: $25 (usually only for the children)

So, for our family of 5, that comes to about $250 per day not including tickets, special events/character meals, etc.
 
I actually need to sit down and figure this out myself. With the recent menu changes, I need to decide on all new places to eat. (i.e. - no more sharing a Harbor Galley potato for lunch). We are thrifty, but if we were going to go "all out", I'd say the 60-40 rule would be good. Of course I'd do what I've always done and pre-purchase character meal vouchers and put those savings into another meal. I'd say we are more grazers than meal eaters too, so that would be something I would take into consideration.

As for incidentals - I'm not big on buying stuff at the parks, so that is pretty minimal for us. I think 200-300 for our 5 day trip will be more than enough.
 
$50 per day per person has been my rule... when dd was younger she was a little less than $50 and hubby and I were more... so it evened out.
 
Are you trying to stick to a budget? I can offer up some great ideas for saving money if that's what you're interested in. I spent 14 days at DLR and I probably spent maybe $150 on food. I looked for every way possible to stay well fed and fat-walleted.
 
Do share some of your ideas.

-Target is awesome. It's on Harbor and is worth the few dollars worth of a cab ride or there's an ART stop across the street. Get bottled water (SERIOUSLY get bottled water! Anaheim water is gross and bottled water is expensive at the parks), juice boxes and portable snacks and even some frozen microwave foods if your hotel fridge has a small freezer. We got $5 deli trays of meat and cheese and a box of crackers and that was a nice snack at night with some substance, but would also be fairly easy to take into the park in a ziploc bag with a cold bottle of water to keep the cheese and meat cool in your backpack. We froze our water and juice boxes and they were mostly slushy by lunchtime and still cool by dinner, so I REALLY advise that! They also help keep YOU cool when carrying them :)

-I see from some of your other posts that you're staying offsite. If you haven't booked yet, try to find a hotel with free breakfast. Our hotel included breakfast, and almost every day I would have a PB&J out of the bread and condiment packets, which kept me full til lunch. You're going to be spending a minimum of $10 PP on breakfast if you eat out, so that saves you a bundle already. Plus, most kids want to get to the parks so trying for a sit-down meal will probably waste your money most days. Save that for your character breakfast!

-Granola bars and other stuff you might find in a school lunch for a snack will be your best friend for adults and kids alike. If everyone is getting a little hungry between meals, you could end up spending $5+ per person on something as simple as trail mix, a cookie, or a pretzel. A special treat here and there is worth the money, but it'll add up fast. A box of granola bars is much more economical and will satisfy kids just as well.

-You can always bring actual lunch in as long as it's already prepared (ie no jars of mayo). We brought in Subway (corner of Harbor and Katella) which was great. A footlong ham was $6 and fed me and my mom. If you make it a meal for something like $2.50 more, you get two cookies and a drink which is, again, easy to split.

-Check websites of restaurants to sign up for email mailing lists. Buca Di Beppo has one, for example, for a free 'small' pasta, which you can get to-go (which I highly recommend!). What that actually equated to was a massive tin-foil takeout container of pasta that fed me for at least 4 solid days, 2 meals a day! Plus they included some paper plates and a loaf of bread. You could easily feed your whole group a meal off of that one free coupon.

Other restaurants offer free starters, buy-one-get-one offers, etc. Places also occasionally offer kids eat free with paid adult meal, Denny's and iHop usually do this.

Mimi's down by Hojo offers a free 4-pack of muffins or croissants with a $5 purchase if you sign up for their email club. My mom and I got a French Dip with side soup to split and that was enough for a meal for us, and the muffins made for good snacks later. One muffin could easily be a filling snack for a kid.

-The Pizza Press is across the street from the entrance to DL a favorite of mine for good deals. There is a discount coupon usually available for it. One pizza is $10 and you can load it with whatever you want, which means you can half-and-half it. That brings your cost down to $5 per person, potentially with leftovers and everyone gets what they want. Earl of Sandwich in DTD is also fairly inexpensive, $7 per sandwich and they're large enough for younger kids to split. I'd say you get about as much as a kid's meal at Subway if you split it. If you have juice boxes in your bag, that cuts down your costs even more, so a sandwich lunch meal costs under $4 PP if the kids split a sandwich. Even if you have your own at $7, it's one of the more filling cheap meals there is in DTD. You can take the monorail from Tomorrowland to DTD and back. Splitting meals is a BIG money saver, one way or another and I highly recommend peeking at other people's plates when deciding where to eat. Rancho Del Zocalo's meals, Royal Street Veranda/Pacific Wharf bread bowls with soup, etc. are large enough portions for even adults to share.

-Counter service restaurants inside DL and DCA are your best bet for most meals. They're cheaper than table service and you can find most of the same popular foods served CS as you can TS.

-I didn't try this myself, so someone else will need to confirm, but I read a tip before I went about purchasing a double cheeseburger in the parks and asking for a second bun for a small charge. Boom, serves two. Smokejumpers Grill in DCA has an extensive toppings bar that can turn a fairly plain burger into something a lot more substantial.


That's all my brain can squeeze out for now, but I hope that helps a bit at least!
 
Seconding a lot of what offwithyourhead said. We love pizzapress (we usually stay at one of the hotels across the street.) It's great with little kids, because they do takeout, and they are often tired or need to decompress before we go back for fireworks or whatnot. Grabbing a pizza that they can just eat in the hotel room before bath/bed or heading back to the park is easy. I usually bring snacks from home, specifically portion cheeses, applesauce pouches, etc. Even PB&bread. For smaller children, often the snacks available can be ridiculously priced given how much they're going to eat if they're distracted. If we do a huge breakfast buffet with the characters, often lunch tends to be a bit more grazing.
 
We are cheap/frugal as well. This last trip we stayed at the Wyndham and used the shuttle but the downside was this was the first hotel we've stayed at that didn't have a breakfast included. We ended up bringing our own cereal and bought a gallon of milk at Target across the street. So we did breakfast in the room every morning. we always brought a large insulated bag that fit over the handle of our stroller which was packed with water bottles and capri suns along with other snacks like crustables, carrots, ranch dressing, chips, granola bars and fruit snacks. When we left for our afternoon break we would usually go to the Mcdonalds on Harbor. There is a 10% of coupon there on the visit anaheim site (don't remember the exact website name) we would also fill out the survey on the back of the receipt which usually gave something like a BOGO quarter pounder. We also signed up for earl of sandwich club which gets you a free sandwich on your birthday. They also occasionally run groupons for this place. When we went in the spring we bought $30 worth of groupons for $15 and I love how accessible it is with the monorail. I think we probably ate for less than $40 a day for our family of 5. and we ate fine. We also like to eat at Tortilla Joes which i feel is pretty reasonable price wise. If we're going to do sit down and splurge a bit we like the ESPN Zone in DTD. It has huge portions which can be split easily. We will get something like an appatizer sampler for the kids to share and my wife and i will each get something for ourselves. Our kids are ages 8,6 and 2.5 and it baffles me how much food they waste/don't eat so we usually buy them the bare minimum and if they are still hungry we will get them more. I found this is a lot better than getting them each their own kids meal and having half of it go in the garbage can.

All this said, We are doing an adult only visit this October for my Wife's birthday and I'm surprising her with a late lunch at the Blue Bayou. Thanks to those on this site I saved 15% buying target gift cards and purchasing disney gift cards with those gift cards to take some of the edge off of that upcoming purchase. haha
 
We usually allow for $100 a day for our family of 3. But we also supplement, by bringing in snacks and protein bars for my hubby (who is a personal trainer with Crohn's Disease who eats every couple of hours). We bring a refillable water bottle that my hubby attaches to his shorts with a caribiner. We are going to splurging a little bit on this trip by having a BTMBBQ meal with friends and then a birthday (late) lunch/dinner at BB.
 
It totally depends on the kind of trip we are doing (and its only the 2 of us: hubbie and myself)... if we plan on a fancy dinner or just something fast like Earl of sandwich or even make our own meals and bring them inside the park or do what we do most of the times and just have 1 meal there and, of course, some drinks @ DCA :dogdance:... so each of one takes about $100 per day but honestly I wont spend it all, maybe $50 if we dont drink :rolleyes1
 
We're pretty frugal with Disney dining too. People were talking about spending $300 a day, we spent a little more than that in 6 days in May for 4 people. We stayed at Desert Inn and ate the continental breakfast each day before going to the park. One day we did a Character breakfast, but we went after 10 and counted that as lunch instead of breakfast. We brought snacks from home like trail mix, string cheese, fruit, and juice boxes. My husband and I usually ate CS for lunch, but the kids usually got the stuff from home because I'm not crazy about the kids' meals. Sometimes we had park snack food for lunch so we could try some new things. We also ate CS for dinner. We LOVE Rancho De Zocalo. Two adult meals feed all 4 of us. We did eat at Earl of Sandwich. DH and I both have May birthdays so we each had a free birthday sandwich and I had bought a $10 groupon for $5, which paid for the kids' food. We did not feel like we were skimping on food at all, and no one was hungry. We also had a treat each day like ice cream or something from a candy store. We used our Disney Visa and when we left the parks we still had about $50 left in reward money. Before the trip I had expected to spend all of it plus $50-$100 out of pocket.

When I figured how much we would spend pre-trip I looked at the menus online. I noted the places we would eat and then determined how much we would likely spend depending on how many items we would buy. Most CS meals cost about $10-$12 per adult. The kids's meals are around $6-$7. Snacks are generally $3-$5. Table Service costs a lot more. Initially we were going to try one out this last trip, but in the end I decided it wasn't worth the money and time for that trip. We have eaten out of the parks before to save money, but because we were using our reward money we saved by eating at the parks.
 
Our mainstay for breakfasts is actually... Denny's. It's right across the street, and the food tends to be consistent. They also give you a lot and are great about packing up extras/giving you a to-go cup for your coffee. We usually have a pancake or two and some toast left over, so the kids sometimes munch on those if they get hungry, but it's pretty filling.
 
We're pretty frugal with Disney dining too. People were talking about spending $300 a day, we spent a little more than that in 6 days in May for 4 people. We stayed at Desert Inn and ate the continental breakfast each day before going to the park. One day we did a Character breakfast, but we went after 10 and counted that as lunch instead of breakfast. We brought snacks from home like trail mix, string cheese, fruit, and juice boxes. My husband and I usually ate CS for lunch, but the kids usually got the stuff from home because I'm not crazy about the kids' meals. Sometimes we had park snack food for lunch so we could try some new things. We also ate CS for dinner. We LOVE Rancho De Zocalo. Two adult meals feed all 4 of us. We did eat at Earl of Sandwich. DH and I both have May birthdays so we each had a free birthday sandwich and I had bought a $10 groupon for $5, which paid for the kids' food. We did not feel like we were skimping on food at all, and no one was hungry. We also had a treat each day like ice cream or something from a candy store. We used our Disney Visa and when we left the parks we still had about $50 left in reward money. Before the trip I had expected to spend all of it plus $50-$100 out of pocket.

When I figured how much we would spend pre-trip I looked at the menus online. I noted the places we would eat and then determined how much we would likely spend depending on how many items we would buy. Most CS meals cost about $10-$12 per adult. The kids's meals are around $6-$7. Snacks are generally $3-$5. Table Service costs a lot more. Initially we were going to try one out this last trip, but in the end I decided it wasn't worth the money and time for that trip. We have eaten out of the parks before to save money, but because we were using our reward money we saved by eating at the parks.

It's been 2 years since we've been, so can you remind me what Desert Inn offers for breakfast?

I'm debating between going back to DI&S or Park View Inn for a full breakfast. At first the full breakfast appealed to me, but then I thought, I don't really want my kids being THAT full walking into DL you know?
If all they want is pancakes and sausage, I can pick up some microwavable ones when we grocery shop.
 












Receive up to $1,000 in Onboard Credit and a Gift Basket!
That’s right — when you book your Disney Cruise with Dreams Unlimited Travel, you’ll receive incredible shipboard credits to spend during your vacation!
CLICK HERE











DIS Facebook DIS youtube DIS Instagram DIS Pinterest DIS Tiktok DIS Twitter DIS Bluesky

Back
Top Bottom