Hypothetical Free Dining Question

[PlutoTheDog89]

I doubt we go during Free Dining, but you never know. I've been wondering, though...

So we just bought Annual Passes. I understand that with Annual Passes you can't get free dining and that in order to get Free Dining, you need tickets.

Last year, Disney comped us each one 2-day Park Hopper. We transferred those over to a dummy account so that it wouldn't use the tickets this past trip. We're saving them for when we'd get the most value (i.e., when we only wanna go for 2 park days.)

So here's my question. Let's say we wanna go in October and our trip happens to fall during Free Dining. Would we be able to make, say, a 3 or 4-night resort-only reservation, then transfer the tickets from the dummy account to our accounts, call Disney to have the free dining added, then transfer the tickets back to the dummy account and use our APs? Or would you have to purchase the package all at once in order to get the FD?

 

[Disneylover99]

You need to purchase a minimum of two day tickets with hopper or Waterpark for FD. It's purchased as a package. So no, you can't do what you're suggesting.

You can always save those additional FD tickets to use another time if you have an AP though. That's what we do.

 

[wilkeliza]

That won't work. Comp tickets and/or AP tickets and even pre-purchased non-package tickets do not count towards free dinning tickets. So the entire package has to be bought (or a previous package modified) at the time of booking to get free dinning. If you want to use your AP or other tickets there is no way to get free dinning on top of those tickets.

On the flip side when free dinning is out there is typically a pretty good AP rate at the hotels which is what we use and then apply the nightly difference towards our food budget.