With the addition of a new seasonal peak pricing for the regular DP, Disney has added the surcharge to all DP plans regardless of what restaurant one is eating at. They seemed to have figured out that people were getting the DP in order to avoid the holiday upcharge - I can't imagine they would actually charge another upcharge on top of the $46.99 price, as that would cause chaos in regards to payment, etc.
I'm someone who has done all forms of dining at Disney, as we don't really use our villa for meals, and if you fall into certain categories, particularly kids between 3-9, it's pretty impossible not to save some money on the DP. We just returned from 13 nights, with 2 adults, 1 child and 1 toddler (free) and we saved over $600.00 based on actual receipts. Once you take out beverages and desserts that we don't normally order, we were still at a savings of over $400.00. This number would actually be higher though, as we would have purchased our very hungry toddler kids' meals, which we didn't have to do, as we used desserts (fruit, ice cream, milkshakes) as a way to fill up DH, and then we shared our meals with the baby. So we would have saved at least close to $500.00 using the DP. I went through every receipt - we only order what we can eat, drink water with meals (an occasional milk or juice for kids), and don't order dessert at every meal at all. Sometimes we shared 1 dessert for all of us...
Based on the new seasonal pricing, I can only assume that Disney will raise menu prices again, in order to add value to the DP. It's a vicious cycle that Disney is at the helm of...
Tiger
