Is your big meal lunch or dinner on DP?

[jessiesue]

DH and I will be on the DP for our trip in Feb. Was going to make all TS ressies for dinner, but started to think that might not be the best route to take. We will eat small breakfast in room. If we eat our TS for lunch then we can get our CS for dinner whenever we are hungary again. Also, if we get tired by dinner time we could just go back to our resort for CS. I know you do not get the most bang for your buck this way but I was curious when you all plan your big meal and for what reason. By the way these are the table services I am planning: Le Celliar, Chef De Les France, Boma(will have to be done at dinner), Wolfgang Puck Cafe, and Kona.
Thanks for your input.

 

[PolyAddict]

I am interested too. bumping

 

[kellyg403]

For our trip next week, I planned a few dinners and a few lunches. Most of our dinners are on our days we don't have a particular park planned. I was worried too that we would be too tired to eat a later dinner so opted for the bigger "lunches" around 2 on our park days.

Kelly

 

[Manon]

DH and I will be on the DP for our trip in Feb. Was going to make all TS ressies for dinner, but started to think that might not be the best route to take. We will eat small breakfast in room. If we eat our TS for lunch then we can get our CS for dinner whenever we are hungary again. Also, if we get tired by dinner time we could just go back to our resort for CS. I know you do not get the most bang for your buck this way but I was curious when you all plan your big meal and for what reason. By the way these are the table services I am planning: Le Celliar, Chef De Les France, Boma(will have to be done at dinner), Wolfgang Puck Cafe, and Kona.
Thanks for your input.

When we went in june we had only one TS for lunch and the rest on them was for dinner, and we prefered it for dinner!! It was so hot, that by that time it gave us a break of the heat !!!

For this trip in 18 days, we are doing the same thing!!!

 

[WAHMto5]

We also planned a mixture of TS for lunch/dinners, depending on what we had planned for the day.

 

[Sissy35749]

All of the ADR's for our upcoming trip are for dinner - except for charachter breakfasts on our first and last day. I figure if we eat a big breakfast or an early lunch, a snack will keep us from starving to death before dinner time. Most of our ADR's are for about 5pm for dinner and 8am for breakfast.

 

[abaldacci]

last trip we did big meals for dinner, but next trip it will be for lunch because we take a break in the afternoon and it just works out better that way for us.

 

[Merriwind]

Not on DP, but we doo variety. I actually like trying to do our big meal at lunch--more time to walk it off!

 

[aviva5675]

We are going to mix also I think. For our dinners I hope to do a few signatures (CG, Citricos), and do a CP lunch. We will only have 5 days worth of credits so thats all the TS--except I hope to give the DD (14) the appetizers and a dessert from the dinners, so that will save up some TS credits...hope that works. Trying to figure out the breakfasts now, all CS or eat in room, except Boma (more TS!) one morning before AK.

 

[skent10]

I've been wondering the same thing. We make our ADR's next week and I think I've about decided to do our big TS meals at lunchtime. We're in a villa with kitchen so will eat breakfasts before we hit the parks (except on character breakfast days), then do late lunches, and back to the resort for rests. Then we can hit the parks again right about the time everyone else is either leaving or sitting down for TS, and the CS will be a little less crowded (wishful thinking?) than they would be at noon.

I still have to check out some menus to make sure that if there's something I really want to try at a certain restaurant, it's available on the lunch menu as well as the dinner menu. That may affect our plans for a couple of the days.

Anyway, that's the plan for our June trip. If it doesn't work out, we'll know better for next time.

 

[Marimar]

We are doing variations of lunch and dinner depending on the shows/attractions that we really want to do.

 

[jann1033]

we have yet to use the new dining plan but we usually do dinners for places only open for dinner or when we get a large breakfast ( husband likes brk buffets so we do a couple a trip)
we usually eat a large lunch later in the afternoon( llike 2 or so) , a small cs breakfast( coffee and pastry type thing) and small cs dinner if we are hungry later or skip the brkfst and just eat an early large lunch and cs dinner. ( the most usual) we usually are at the parks at opening so if we don't have brkfst by 12 or so we are plenty hungry.2 meals are plenty for us a day
even though we'd have better savings at dinner with the dplan i think i'd still rather have the nice longish lunch break as a rest mid afternoon. that way we never go back to the resort mid day since we go off season and during shorter park hrs.(we usually wait till we leave the park for dinner if we are having a ts dinner and eat at a resort)

 

[staci]

Well, I knew that we would get a better value for our money if we did the dinner as the sitdown, but we didnt. For a few reasons, we ate most of our sitdown meals at lunch and our counter service at night.

1) We knew we were pretty much skipping breakfast (only had little cereal bars), so we knew we would be hungry at lunch.

2) DS is pretty predictable at 11:00 am, but after a day in the parks I had no idea how he would be by 6 (or whether or not we would even still be in the parks by then). So I didnt want to plan our ps for dinner and not be able to show up.

We loved our meals and the dining plan, we got in on the free offer and it was amazing! My dad kept saying 'this cant be free, they are gonna charge me somewhere'. I think he breathed a sigh of relief when we got on the airplane without a castmember running after him with a long dining bill!

 

[daisyduck123]

We will be at DW in January for 7 nights on the Dining Plan. We've scheduled our table service meals for each dinner. 6 of the dinners will be character meals & the 7th will be the Fantasmic Dinner Package.

The reason we've scheduled all these character dinners is that at least we know the kids will have a good time at dinner & get to see characters without waiting in line.

 

[vfb2girls]

All but one of our meals will be TS at lunch, I personally never eat a large dinner and neither does my husband. And as far as getting the most bang for your buck I didn't even take that into consideration. For me just the fact that the dining part of our trip is already paid for is a huge plus, one less thing to worry about. And also we have found weh eating our larger meal at lunch time it gives us plenty of time to walk it off, not as much weight gain if that is even possible in Disney!

 

[bleeps]

Just back (12/3 to 12/10) and used DP for first time -- me, DH, and DS(7). I got way more than nutty in my obsessive planning and worrying over DP, but finally came to my senses and it all worked out great!

1. We used TS for character breakfasts, for lunches, and for dinners -- it all depended on where we were going to be on any given day and what made sense. This worked perfectly -- I would say plan your vacation around what you want to do and what makes sense on any given day and not around trying to squeeze a few more bucks out of the DP. Do not worry -- you'll get your money's worth!

2. We found the DP to be an incredible value with more than enough wonderful food. We left 3 CS credits and 1 snack credit, with no regrets (and we could very easily have used them but DH didn't want to carry food to the airport for lunch -- he's funny that way).

3. We did use DP at Chefs de France for lunch -- a lovely, lovely meal and, again, plenty of value for the $$!

Have fun, enjoy, and make plans that make sense to you -- the money/value will all work out.

 

[kaybird]

We use all three too, TS for our christmas trip consists of 1 character breakfast, 2 TS dinners, and 3 lunches. It is my practice to make our TS at "off" times, the ressie people love us because I usually pick the restaurant and the day, and take either a late lunch or early dinner time. One of our TS this time is for the canle light processional. We will use the CS along the way, probably splitting meals as there are about twice as many CS I want to try as days this time. (We do not normally use counter service at all, so looked at all the menus to find the most interesting options!)

We have gotten several dining plans over the years, and have always found them to be convenient and of good value.

Have a great trip!!

 

[handicap18]

We did 2 breakfasts and 5 dinners. Both breakfasts were character meals and 3 of the dinners were character meals.

I think next time I might throw in a lunch at Crystal Palace to ease things up at night for the kids. Some times having the dinners can really extend the day.

We used most of the counter services for breakfast at the hotel. The others were used for lunches.

We definately got our money's worth. Only left 1 snack. Used all the CS and TS.

 

[Hanover]

We are doing mostly dinners as our main meal of the day, but we will be trying Le Cellier for lunch on our next trip. When we were there in August, it was too hot to want to eat a large lunch. We also did 2 TS breakfasts, but will probably skip those on future trips because we felt trapped in the restaurants during the park's emptiest time of the day. We were also too full from breakfast to want to eat lunch those days. We are going in January, and know it will not be too hot to eat a big lunch, but we want to have as much time in the parks as we can since they close so much earlier than in the summer.We also decided to eat at a couple resort restaurants (Boma, WCC) on days we plan to spend at AK (it will be closing at 5PM). That way we will have a great dinner, but not miss the most of our park time.

 

[lovinpoohbear]

we had the dining plan and what we did was share 1 breakfast, share 1 lunch and eat a big ts meal in the evening. by sharing breakfast and lunch we avoided paying out of pocket for our breakfast. my husband and i are both big eaters and felt so stuffed by splitting those two meals, with dessert and all, it was too much food for one person to eat imo.