Late Dining pros and cons

[HappilyEverAfter80]

But to get a good seat, you need to arrive 20-30 min ahead of time.

Also for breakfast the next morning, you can go to Cabanas later if you don't want early breakfast.

Just stating why late dining didn't work for us personally. Everyone has their own preferences.

For sure - we usually arrived 5-10 min early for the show and find seats no problem but you're right for some shows had to be early. Like Tangled.
We will actually be trying the cabanas option for breakfast last morning our next cruise but I think going have to be there by 7:30 too.
We'll see

 

[Judyat]

We prefer early dining and then do the show for that night. Otherwise we would have to do the show early and then late dinner. Really don't like to go to bed full.

 

[monarchsfan16]

I think it really depends on family dynamics. When we booked our cruise, early dining wasn't an option. I was nervous about late dining, because I usually eat early and we were using "hangry" to describe me before it was a widely used term. But, as the cruise got closer, I decided to stick with late dining, rather than trying to change it. For us, it worked out well. But, we aren't the typical Disney demographic. We're 29 and have no kids. Late dining would probably not work out well for us on the west coast, but for the east coast, it was fine.

Pros:
The kids around us all fell asleep during dinner, so we didn't deal with the complaints I often see here of kids running through the MDR.
Hanger can be dealt with by ordering the cheese plate from room service while getting ready to go to the show. The cheese plate was enough to tide me over without leaving me too stuffed to eat that 4 course meal.
Because we let Disney do its thing with seating, we ended up at a table with 3 other couples our age and had a blast! Had we changed seatings, that probably wouldn't have happened. It did seem as though more tables contained couples than families at that seating, on that sailing.
I didn't feel rushed at dinner. We got to spend our time chatting with our table mates without feeling like we were holding up the next seating.
The time after the early show but while first seating is still eating is a great time to hit shutters, photo stops, etc. It was also a great time (at that time of year: April) to catch the sunset.
Late dinner means late breakfast. We didn't have to be at breakfast until 8 which is when we needed to be out of our stateroom anyway.

Cons:
The couple nights I went to bed immediately after dinner left me not feeling well for a bit. The nights where I stayed up for another hour or so, I was fine. So, I need to plan to be up and about for a couple of hours after dinner.
I consumed more calories by having that pre-dinner snack. But, realistically, there probably would have been an after dinner snack had we had early dinner.
Late dinner means late breakfast. This meant we were behind the masses leaving the ship, and waited in line for quite some time to get through customs the last morning. Like an hour.

 

[JanBlessed]

My family always does late dining - regardless of ship or line. We do like a longer day to enjoy ports/beach/pool/etc. There is a more relaxed feel to it. I would see the early diners rushing their kids off to dinner while we leisurely returned to our cabin for showers and getting ready.

One thing about a cruise: there is always food somewhere. I eat three full meals and two hearty snacks plus something before bedtime. I'm never hungry on a cruise. And I'm not worried about finishing this meal or that meal. I eat to my hearts content and when I'm done, I'm done. I turn vacation mode ON the minute I board, and it stays that way.

My DS was 3 yrs old on his first cruise (RCI) and late dining was no problem. I would feed him something beforehand. I then could enjoy MY dinner and he would happily munch on fries or something else, play with the servers, color, etc.