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