Meal Plan with Food and Wine Festival

[jeep360]

Hi all, My family and I are planning to go to the Food and Wine Festival this year but we cannot decide if purchasing the meal plan would be a good option price wise. First, my oldest is 11 therefor we get charged for her as an adult and for a family of 4 on the meal plan would cost over $1200 for the week. Second, I just don't know with the F&W festival if you are able to use the meal plan there or is it even cost effective to do so. Any Thoughts?

 

[rlovew]

The only entitlements you can use at F&W are the snack credit. You can use those for basically anything that was non-alcoholic in the past no one will know for sure what is available with snack credits till it opens this year.

 

[Hopefully]

Hi all, My family and I are planning to go to the Food and Wine Festival this year but we cannot decide if purchasing the meal plan would be a good option price wise. First, my oldest is 11 therefor we get charged for her as an adult and for a family of 4 on the meal plan would cost over $1200 for the week. Second, I just don't know with the F&W festival if you are able to use the meal plan there or is it even cost effective to do so. Any Thoughts?

We get the basic DDP while visiting the F & W festival.
We normally have been able to use all our snack credits (and then some) for food at the booths.
We usually have a light breakfast in the room, a CS lunch and a TS dinner.
We use our first TS credit on arrival day and our last CS credit on departure day.
On our DHS day we usually have a TS lunch and Graze around the festival for dinner.
We also do one day at Epcot where we have a CS lunch and another graze around the booths for dinner. We use that days TS credit and combine it and have 1 2 credit Signature dinner during our week.
Other days we have a snack or two at the booths before or after our credits as appetizer/dessert.
Lots of folks will advise you not to have the DDP, but this works for us and we have a blast!!!

 

[AmyB2006]

Lots of folks will advise you not to have the DDP, but this works for us and we have a blast!!!

This sums up the DDP for me. For some it works great. For us, it's a lose lose situation.

If you think it will work, go for it. For me, that's a lot of money. And the F&W festival, sometimes after sampling, I'm not hungry for a sitdown dinner. But now I have this credit I HAVE to use otherwise I lose that money. Oh, and they force me to order dessert on the DDP in order to get the full value of my money.

Not for me. TIW works better for us. But like pp said, it's all in what works for your family and how you guys eat.

 

[jsebsirois]

If you're planning on getting the dining plan just for F&W, it's not worth it since you will only be able to use snack...

 

[bookgirl]

I do not normally get a DDP but this year we are there and fell into the Free Dining group. We will be there 4 nights so 4CS, 4TS, and 4snacks each.

We are probably going to have extra credits as we are only doing three days of parks and two of those are at F&W. We plan to use our snack credits to lunch/dinner one day and to lunch on the other so that is three meals we will not need meal credits for. We have two ADR's that are 2 TS credits so that will take care of those. We are really not huge breakfast eaters and will probably do a bagel or kbar with coffee in the room.

However the cs credits are troublesome. We will do a CS for dinner on arrival day and maybe CS for breakfast on departure day but that still leaves us with two (possible 3) cs credits each. I doubt we use them unless we can get a cashier who still allows the 1 cs=3 snacks.

If I had not saved money with the FD package there is no way I would have payed. If you are going to do a lot of F&W I'd say skip the dining plan.

I think DDP does work with those who have young kids as the DDP is a significant savings on those meals but with 'adult' kids you may just be better off OOP for meals for the kids and then F&W OOP for the adults.

 

[Brian_WDW74]

I've moved this thread to the Dining Plan board.