Is the dining plan a mistake?

[icarus]

We have purchased the dining plan for our upcoming trip, but now I'm not sure if it was a wise choice.

No one in my family really eats big meals. The last time we were at WDW we really didn't eat much either. I guess I thought it would be nice to pay for some of the meals up-front.

Is the Dining plan a mistake for not big eaters?

 

[rcraw45425]

We have decided against it because of that reason. We normally skip breakfast, eat CS for lunch and frequently split TS entrées with our girls, allowing room for dessert. Our calculations came in at ~$130 a day for the DDP, we spend less than that so we opted out.

 

[carol-lamb]

We just went through this yesterday while booking our June trip. We picked our restaurants and then made our ADR's and then went through each menu deciding what we would most likely order and then added everything up, including tip. We were roughly around $120 a day. That was actually the highest total we came to - some days were less. It would cost us approximately $160 per day for the dining plan so for us it clearly isn't worth it. And we also know that on some days we might not feel like eating big meals and that if we had the dining plan, we would feel we would have to in order to get our moneys worth.

We went last August during free dining and at several meals we split appetizers and desserts. We just can't eat that much food. I should also mention that we are 4 adults. We told ourselves from the beginning that we would not waste food by ordering and not eating it just because it was free and we kept to that.

It really has to be a choice made by your dining habits. Look at some of the menus and see what you might spend and then do the math.

 

[DCDisney]

For us it costs about the same as previous trips where we ate more frugally so we went ahead with it. If you have a child who is considered an adult who eats like a child and you don't want all the desserts with CS and don't eat most meals at restaurants where you order off a menu the dining plan doesn't seem to help financially. We paid about $100 per day for the dining plan and averaged about $120-150 per day in food eating about half our meals as character/buffet/flat rate type meals. If you subtracted out the CS desserts we took but mostly didn't eat it was about break even most days. My son will be 10 on our next trip and still will prefer kids food at menu restaurants so it will be very break even for us on our next trip so we aren't sure though it's nice being pre-paid and you don't have to think about it.

Yvonne