Magic Plus Dining Recommendations

[imlazar]

Hi, we'll be at Disney Wilderness Lodge for 8 nights in March. We are a family of four, with two kids ages 3 & 5 at time of travel.

We're trying to decide if the dining plan makes sense for us. We plan to go to the resorts about five days, and stay the other time at the lodge.

Should we buy the meal plan? AAA is offering it for $40 a day for adults, $10 for kids.

 

[thelionqueen]

You should ask youself a couple of questions to determine if it is right for you.

1. Will you mostly be eating at the resorts and parks?
2. Do you regularly purchase snacks & counter service meals
3. Do you like doing character meals
4. Would you like to dine places you otherwise might not?

I think these questions are some examples of why you should purchase the plan if you answered yes.

We like the dining plan, it saves us tons of $$ and we get to go to places we wouldn't normally dine in if we had to pay cash.

I love having it paid for before we go, and not having to worry about what to order and how much it costs. There is plenty of food for everyone, and you get treated to some wonderful restaurants. Just my .02

 

[imlazar]

thanks for your comments - we won't have a rental, so we'll be eating at the parks/resort the entire time.

 

[eeyore45]

We had the dining plan in Oct, it was worth it for the Character meals we booked - I made a chart of the places we were planning on eating anyway, than I factored in the cost - and it worked in our favor to do the dining - then I added a couple of the 2 TS places (Hoop de Doo is one, Contempory is where we chose@)

Check this website for more info:

http://www.touringplans.com/MYWDining.html

it gives you a great sense of how to evaluate for your needs!!

 

[WDWBetsy]

We used it last week and loved it. In IMHO, it was definitely worth it.
I'm planning on jotting down what items we chose to see the actual savings, but I can pretty much say that we did save a lot using the plan.

Didn't have any problems using it. Hope they have something similarly priced for our next trip in a few years.

Would definitely recommend it.

 

[Hopefully]

We (3 adults) used the dining plan in October and saved over $450. We had looked at where we would like to eat, then looked at the menus and costs on allearsnet.com, and decided we would benefit from the plan. We ate what we wanted, not the most expensive items on the menu, and certainly did save. I also liked having it all included at the time of our trip, and not worrying about the cost of each meal.
We have been to Disney many times, so we don't feel we need to spend every minute touring the parks. We also enjoy a sit down meal at the end of the day. You need to factor in the time a sit down meal takes - an hour to an hour and a half - which is coming from Park touring time. Some posters have complained about the time spent eating on the plan. But for us it was just what we wanted.
If it was offered in the future we surely would do it again.
Hope this Helps.

 

[Lulu's Mom]

We think that it is such a good deal... but we go to a sit down place once a day and me DH love to eat steak, so it saves us tons of money. It is a lot of food though and you hear a lot of people say that they would never eat that much if it wasn't for the dinning plan. But in my experience if you skipped the appetizer the plan would still pay for itself and or equal out.

I highly recommend it, we never had any problems with it and we booked it for our next package. I also agree about not having to worry about the cost once we get there, to us it helps the trip feel more like a vacation.