Heard somewhere that if you book by a certain time you can earn food credits. Is this true and how do I go about doing this?
When you stay at a WDW owned-and-operated resort, you can BUY something called the
Disney Dining Plan. You have to pay for it for each person in your room, and for each night you are staying. It costs $38 per adult per night, and $10 per child (ages 3-9) per night. For that price, each person gets one waitress-service meal per day, one counter-service meal per day and one snack per day.
Disney sometimes offers incentives when they feel they aren't selling enough rooms. They figure if they offer incentives, they'll sell more rooms ... make sense so far?
One of the incentives they've offered at very specific times over the past few years is offering the Disney Dining Plan FOR FREE. This has generally been offered for the slow time of late-August through mid-to-late-September or so. Most people refer to this offer as "free dining."
No one knows for sure if Disney will offer it for this year. The hot rumor is that as of April 10 you can make reservations for stays with free dining for stays in September and thereabouts.
The free dining plan isn't available for all rooms. They only offer it for rooms that aren't selling as well as Disney would like during that exact time frame. Once enough of a particular room category is filled up, Disney no longer offers that free dining incentive for that room category. If a room category is already pretty full, then they won't even make the offer available for that room category at all.
I hope this makes sense, and helps you kind of understand the idea.
What is the best way to book a DW vacation?
Travel Agent? Expedia? the old do it yourself and call hotel, airline, etc. directly? Thank you for your advice.
There's a wide range of opinions on this one. If you've never been to WDW before, it might be a great learning experience to use a
travel agency that is specifically geared towards Disney travel. Don't go to your local travel agent on the corner, unless you know that travel agent has very specific knowledge in all things WDW. For my first trip (well, my first in 12 years and my first with kids), my mother-in-law insisted we use her travel agent. Her travel agent insisted she knew all about WDW ... she truly thought she did, but I knew way more than her just from being a DIS member! I ended up teaching a lot of things to the travel agent, but knowing her she forgot it all by the time she had another client going to WDW.
