I have already booked a WDW vacation for the last half of August that includes DDP. My question is, if they offer the DDP free for Value Season in the Fall this year will I have to rebook or will it be automatically deducted to my prebooked vacation? I'm going anyway no matter what but it would be nice to save that money if they are offering it.
Some have theorized that if the resorts are pretty heavily booked, Disney may not feel it needs to offer the promotion to the general public. Or, even if they do offer free dining, if a resort is already nearly full, the number of rooms available on the promotion may be very small or nonexistent.
So my philosophy (and what many others have recommended) is, if you will go free dining or not, book now and if you can add free dining later, it's a nice little bonus. If you'll only go if free dining is offered, it's probably better not to book, since you could be hurting your chances of getting free dining at all by booking too early. HTH!