OK so here is the breakdown
Free Dining for 8 night at PORS 1704.92
AP Rate for 8 nights at CBR 980
My question is will we REALLY spend 724 dollars in food??
Does anyone have a good caluclator for estimating food consumption? It is just DH and I. We will have a rental car so I'll pick up beverages and snacks at
walmart (with hubby's discount).
I am torn between which one to do. I mean I have done the dining plan and love not having to budget out food money but I'm not sure if we paid out of pocket if we would rack up 724 dollars in food!!
Please let me know your suggestions
Ok...take this with a big grain of salt, because I'm only planning our first trip to WDW (done DL several times, but never WDW). But....I've also been number crunching and reading these boards for months now, trying to decide whether to do the dining plan for us (DH, me, 2 kids age 11, so money wise it's 4 adults, eating wise, the girls don't eat adult portions).
8 nights = 9 days presumably. $724 divided by 9 days is $80.44 per day for food. Or...$40.22 per person per day.
Now...you need to figure out what your normal eating habits would be.....if you and DH go to a TS, would you BOTH order an appetizer and BOTH order a dessert if you were paying OOP? Or would you be more like our family and order 1 appetizer for everyone to nibble on (maybe 2, but NEVER 4), and either 1 or 2 desserts to share as well. The other question you have to answer is if you were eating OOP, would you do a CS meal every day AND a TS meal every day? Are there character/signature meals you would do? Once you know what you would do IF you didn't have the dining plan.....it's just a matter of doing the math.
Being our first time, we want to experience the TS's....normally we wouldn't do that many "fancy" meals a week even on vacation.
We poured over the various menus at allearsnet and pretended we were sitting there ready to place our order. Then we added up the cost. Almost every night at a TS was certainly over $40 per person per day, even at the more inexpensive places. For CS lunches we did the same thing and averaged about $10-15 per person (hamburger/fries/drink are $10+ anything fancier is even more). Now...with all that food for CS and TS, I'm not sure we'd do snacks.....but if you do, figure $4 max allowed, but even just a bottle of water is $2. So....the numbers say we'd spend at an absolute minimum $40 + $10.....so at least $50 (plus an occasional snack not even included). And that was NOT at an expensive TS where it could easily double that $40.
Some of those TS will not be dinner for us....with kids we gotta do some of the character breakfasts....those seem to vary widely in price...I've seen some at $18 and others at $38 (and some cost 2 TS). The days we do an $18 character breakfast we might only break even on the cost of the dining plan....but the night we do Coral Reef, for example.....we'll be saving at least 1/2 our cost, probably much more.
But.....if you are going to only eat at CS's and the occasional TS, then the numbers wouldn't be as good for you....if you did 2 CS that's only $20-$30....so you wouldn't save anything, in fact it would cost you more. If you threw in a TS occasionally it would really depend on what you'd spend there....because you should figure you're "losing" $10-$20 a day when you only use CS....but if you then did just one TS that cost you $80 per person, well, then you'd have made up the COST...but the problem is I don't think you can use TS credits at CS....so you'd be paying for TS's you wouldn't use?
Ok...so that's generally how I crunch the numbers......but your best bet is to decide tenatively where/how you'd eat and crunch the numbers based on your plans.
Now...throw into the mix that if you're going in 2008, there are RUMORS that you will no longer have the gratuity included in dining plan....so add 15-18% on TOP of the cost of the
DDP....but then no one knows either whether the DDP is going to stay the same cost, go up (unlikely it'll go down even if most of us feel it should if we now have to pay gratuity)...or if they'll change it totally and completely and that's why the 2008 packages aren't out yet and some RUMORS say won't be out for a couple months (meaning perhaps they're still working the details of the "new" DDP). That's the boat we're in...if they raise the price or change the benefits substantially, we may just have to forego that experience and do our normal eating habits of mostly CS with a few character breakfasts added in, and maybe one nice TS. Or...if they raise it AND the RUMOR that room rates will change based on what days of the week you're staying....they may just price us into thinking it'd be better to just stay offsite, eat breakfast/dinner off site and we'll pocket the savings for another week in Florida visiting the other attractions (something DH wants to do, to him a hotel is a bed, nothing more...to the kids it's "DISNEY". lol).
We also found that our days were centered around where we had ADRs, instead of just enjoying ourselves in the parks or at the resorts. 
