DDP Question

[crelange1]

We are going to in late Aug for the free dining. We are staying 8 nights. DH, me, DD10 (light eater), DD7 (also picky). We have booked the Hoopty Do Review the last nights (2 TS). My question is.... am I better off buying my 10yo kids meals for 3 TS and save her credits to use for our Hoopty Do Review? Any other ideas?

 

[HaleyB]

Well.
Strictly speaking your 10 year old needs to pay adult prices even off the kids menu (they do adult "sized" portions of kids menu items for twice the kids price, or they used to.)

I would take another approach. It is way more food than you need and after 8 days you will be tired of sit down meals. Instead of saving credits and going oop, I would take a day off from sit down meals somewhere in the middle of the trip. Trust me, you will have plenty of CS credits to do this. My advice is to go oop on nothing until you run out of credits, unless it is for something not on the plan at all.

Encourage your picky eater to try new things. You can always get them grilled chicken or whatever they will eat if they order something they don't like, and how often do you get the chance to say 'go ahead and order that $22 entree, no sweat if you don't like it, don't eat it"? My very picky son learned he likes shrimp and crab on our free dining trip last year. I was astounded. He had three 'protien' foods he would eat (four if breaded and grilled chicken breast [boneless only, preferably strips and with zero skin or fat on them] count as two things) so this almost doubled his list of acceptable foods!

 

[pooch]

have to agree. We were on (free) dining for 10 days last year and by the seventh day no one was hungry. We split a lot of CS meals so you could easily stretch them to cover a full day of meals and save 2 TS for HoopDeeDo. We found 1 CS fed 2 of us (all adults) very well and when we tried to all eat our own, we wasted a lot of food.

 

[thunderbird1]

Since HDDR is 2 credits for one meal, I'm not sure there would be any bigger value in using her 3 credits for that instead of for regular TS meals. Most restaurants will accomodate picky eaters, and will do things like let her get an adult appetizer and dessert but a children's menu entree.

Although it is a lot of food, I personally would find it more complicated to say "we'll use 2 adult and 1 child credit and the 3d "adult" in our party will be ordering off the children's menu and we'll be paying OOP for that." I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, I just wouldn't want the hassle of having to keep track of which credits to use where.

Plus, my dh's golden rule (along with many others on here) is "use up all your credits before paying for anything OOP." Not only is the DDP a lot of food, but unexpected things happen and plans change. Although it pains me at times to use snack credits for things like bottles of water (when we have a case of it back at the resort), too many people have reported paying OOP to "save" credits, only to end up with a bunch of leftover credits at the end of their stay.