Annual Passes/Meal plan problem - advice?

[LovesHerTaurus]

So Disney gives us two free annual passes with our Escape wedding - yay!... until my wedding man Joe points out that with my plans I won't be able to use them!

We're going with my two daughters who eat like truck drivers and must eat every few hours or their temperment melts So we're going with the meal plan 100% for sure and plan on hitting every buffet we can find!

Has anyone come across this problem - the whole "everyone must be on the same plan" muddle? I could use our annual pass (yaa $700+ for me! since we are staying 9 days!) - and add the meal plan on for the stay - but Joe said he THOUGHT that it would go awry since we would be annual pass vs. 10 day passes....

And don't get me started on the Park Hopper/Water Park option.

So advice anyone? Joe said most likely save the annual passes for the "future" - we're from Canada and not likely to come back until we're both done our second degrees!! But Joe is a Disney sales guy when you think about it!!

 

[lurkyloo]

I think what Joe is saying is... the problem is not that you have Annual Passes - APs are now allowed to add the meal plan to their room-only reservations. The problem is that (you mentioned on another thread) you booked a package that requires you to buy tickets for most of your stay in order to take advantage of the $750 gift card promotion.

In the past, AP holders were able to book packages to get, say, free dining or whatever the promo was, by buying just a 1-day ticket for each person. But this gift card promo requires a minimum of a 5-day ticket for each person.

If you cancel the package you can book a room-only stay with your AP discount and add dining. You will have to give up the gift card, but you might get an AP discount of up to 40% on your room - and that may be a better deal than paying rack rate to get a $750 gift card. Either way, you still have to pay for the dining plan.

If you can't bear to give up the gift card, you could keep the package but only buy 5-day tickets for everyone. Have the truck drivers- er, the girls activate and use their passes, and then upgrade them to whatever length of ticket they need (10 days?) at Guest Services.

Don't activate the other two hoppers - use your APs instead. Go to Guest Services and have the two 5-day tickets (virtually) taken off your Keys to the World room card and turned into physical tickets. As long as you don't start using them, they will not expire. Then you can use your APs for this trip and save the physical tickets for when you inevitably want to come back. This is what we did when we had APs but had to buy 1-day tickets in order to get free dining.

However, the second idea could be a whole lot of hoops to jump through for not much gain - you'd need to figure out the cost of buying everyone the tickets of your choice for 5 days and adding 5 more days to 2 of them for the girls vs. the cost of just buying 10-day passes for the girls, giving up the $750, and (potentially) saving on your room price.

P.S. I am writing this at 1 am, so I apologize if it's super-confusing!

 

[Lilo+Stitch]

We've had similiar issues trying to get the free meal plan promotion when we already had passes.

The easiest thing to do is to just buy 1 day- 1 park tickets for everyone and then upgrade the tickets that you need for days for at guest services. That way, you can use your annual passes and get the meal plan while your guests have tickets and a meal plan.