Is purchasing the DP in my situation a no-brainer?

[frannn]

I've been trying to convince myself the DP is the way to go for DH, DD4, and I, even though we have APs and will have to buy 1 day tickets. If there is free dining, the point will be moot, of course. I figured if we went OOP for our 10 night trip, we would get DDE and do 5 TS meals, and the rest CS, spending about 740 total. This 740 takes into account the cost of the DDE, sharing all meals with DD, and just a few snacks/drinks, if any. The DP would cost 890, and the tickets would cost about 203. So, you can either look at it that the DP would cost an extra 150 or 353 over paying OOP. We applied the cost of last year's 1 day tickets to new AP's, so we don't need to do so again on this trip. The addition of the DP would give us 5 more TS meals, 10 CS meals for DD, and 30 snacks. Is this a no brainer financially? I wasn't thrilled to constantly be running to ADR's last year, but we love character buffets, and this gave us some good downtime. We always stay at the AS, so it makes sense to splurge a bit on food, right? right?

 

[bicker]

In my personal calculations, if I already have APs, the Dining Plan would not have been worth it to us. We would have bought DDE and be done with it. However, it was pretty close. We probably would have saved money with the Dining Plan over DDE, but not enough given the restrictions necessary to make sure we saved money (i.e., no signature meals -- with signature meals we'd definitely have been better of with DDE over the Dining Plan).

FWIW, I think the Dining Plan is almost never a no-brainer. If it was, then Disney did something wrong. It should be a difficult decision, not much better or not much worse that the alternatives.

 

[PrincessTrisha]

In your case it may not be "a no brainer". If the DDP is going to cost you an extra $353 (you'll end up with expensive 1 day tickets you don't need) - that's a lot of extra meals for your family.

$353 buys a number of character meals for your family (4-7 depending on which ones and which meals).