How does the free dining work?

[marianos]

Me and my dh and dn will be going the 2nd week of Sept and have already booked our trip ( land and sea) with AAA. We are staying at GF we have dining package. Would we be able to get FD? Do you get a room that doesn't have a good view or that is old and run down as the trade off?

 

[eliza61]

Me and my dh and dn will be going the 2nd week of Sept and have already booked our trip ( land and sea) with AAA. We are staying at GF we have dining package. Would we be able to get FD? Do you get a room that doesn't have a good view or that is old and run down as the trade off?

First call Disney immediately and see if they have any rooms at the GF under Free dining. Many times there are only a limited amount of rooms under the package. Not sure of the view but I would hazard a guess that they are standard views.

 

[Blondie]

Free dining = mind game.

You pay rack rate for your room and then you eat for free. Either way, it's still costing you. I still don't get the allure of the free dining scheme. I'd rather have a deeply discounted room and worry about where I'm eating later and pay out of pocket.

Sorry to be negative, just my humble opinion, as always.

 

[safetymom]

If you have a land/sea you would need to contact DCL.

 

[jw50]

Free dining = mind game.

You pay rack rate for your room and then you eat for free. Either way, it's still costing you. I still don't get the allure of the free dining scheme. I'd rather have a deeply discounted room and worry about where I'm eating later and pay out of pocket.

Sorry to be negative, just my humble opinion, as always.

If you are staying Deluxe then a 40% room discount may be worth more than the free dining but at a Value for 2 adults and 1 child the free dining saves you more than the cost of the room.

 

[LittleStinkerbelle]

You pay rack rate for your room and then you eat for free. Either way, it's still costing you. I still don't get the allure of the free dining scheme. I'd rather have a deeply discounted room and worry about where I'm eating later and pay out of pocket.

I guess it depends on what type of room you get. Free dining for 4 people staying in one room at a value is worth a lot more than a deeply discounted value resort room. But if someone has 40% of a Deluxe, and it's just 2 people, then yeah, by all means the discount works out a whole lot better than the 80 bucks or so you save a day with free dining.

 

[Blondie]

I guess there's a good argument for both camps. We don't eat big meals, and only one a day at that. It's a total waste of food for us to do a dining plan as we aren't big eaters.

But families with big appetites and who like 3 squares a day, then by all means, spring for the so called "free dining."

But it's still not "free" by any stretch of the imagination.

 

[lclark0621]

I guess there's a good argument for both camps. We don't eat big meals, and only one a day at that. It's a total waste of food for us to do a dining plan as we aren't big eaters.

But families with big appetites and who like 3 squares a day, then by all means, spring for the so called "free dining."

But it's still not "free" by any stretch of the imagination.

We had a AAA discount on our room, and so far it is the only discount available to us. We are AP holders & hope to see an AP discount. But we didn't get an Pin Code or offer. So AAA was all we could do right now.

We switched to free dining and are going to save quite a bit of money. We are not huge eaters by any stretch (and the base dining plan is only 2 meals a day). But overall, we figure we would actually save about $500 doing the free dining vs. a AAA rate.

But if an AP rate comes out, then we will do the math. Depending on the type of AP discount released, we will still save money on free dining.

We usually do 2 meals a day, and there is only so much counter service I can do for a week. So we usually like doing a good table service meal for dinner or a character breakfast (we have a 4 year old) each day. Then we usually skip lunch or just get a snack. And if you add one table service and one character a day, it looks like paying rack rate does save you a couple of hundred dollars overall. It isn't 50% by any means. But for those of us with no Pin Codes attached to our names, it saves us at least a couple of hundred over all.

 

[PrincessTiffany]

Free dining = mind game.

You pay rack rate for your room and then you eat for free. Either way, it's still costing you. I still don't get the allure of the free dining scheme. I'd rather have a deeply discounted room and worry about where I'm eating later and pay out of pocket.

Sorry to be negative, just my humble opinion, as always.

We have six people in our family, 2 adults, 1 disney adult and 3 kids, so we got two rooms at POP last September for 8 nights, 8 day hopper passes, 48 Table Service Meals, 48 Counter Service Meals and 48 snack credits for $2600.00. That saved us $1,300.00 off what we normally pay for our Disney vacation. Even with the 40% off code we have for this December we will never ever save as much money as we do with the free dining promo. And call us crazy we eat breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday of our lives, even at Disney World! lol

 

[Crisgw]

We didn't have a coupon for the resort we're staying at in Sept (WL) but the free dining really was an amazing perk to our timing! I only found out about it by being on this site Thanks DIS!!

 

[denman007]

But it's still not "free" by any stretch of the imagination.

Uh, yea it is. lol

 

[Blondie]

Uh, yea it is. lol

Okay.

 

[CarolA]

Uh, yea it is. lol

Well....maybe.

It's a discount. If they didn't give you this they would give you a discount on the room.

So.. the only thing they did was change the "name" of the discount to "Free Dining" and folks were all over it. And for SOME people it is a bigger discount then the 40% rate for example.

But let's use a solo traveler like me as an example.

Free DIning is a $35 value.

So that's my discount. Flat discount. However, if I got 40% off on a deluxe room that cost $250 rack rate, my dicount would have been $100!!!! So, "Free Dining" would have COST me $65. IMHO, that's not FREE

Now the big question is would I spend $100 a day on food. In my case the response is no. So I would still be better off with the 40% in that case. (Savings made worse by that ticket I don't need LOL!)

The math actually works the other way on a value where the FD discount on my trip is better then the room rate discount.

But I don't think of it so much as free as "that's the discount" And even on here when folks talk about "Savings" it's from the package price. So it's really a discount off the package IMHO>

 

[KarlaG4Kids]

I find it to be a great discount for a family in a lot of cases. The best discount I have gotten lately was a 30%. Because we have a couple of large trips this year we decided to book a value resort. Obviously the Deluxe resorts save you more $$ on a 30% discount, but we felt the value was going to be fine for this trip. It was going to cost us $65 per night with the discount. When buying discount tickets the savings are not terribly great. I figured we would save about $10-15 dollars per person for the tickets we were going to buy. By getting the dining plan for free we are paying $88 per night and the extra $50 for the tickets BUT we are getting $100 worth of food per day. (2 adults, 2 kids). Therefore for our 6 day stay we are saving $600 less the $50 extra for tickets and $138 more for the room (over the 30% discount). Net savings $412! Of course we might not have spent quite $600 on food but it did allow us to treat our granddaughters to 3 character meals and we also get to eat a couple more nice meals that we might not have gotten otherwise. To me it is a great promotion. We have used it twice before and LOVE it! Of course if you are staying at a Deluxe with a good discount it may not pay for itself in the long run.