Meal plan worth it?

[monique5]

Looks like original poster has made his decision. But FWIW, the Deluxe DDP (appetizer, entree, dessert) works extremely well for us. Especially since DD is under 10. DD6 loves the characters & WDW now has Mickey Check Meals (meat, fruit, vegetables/ @Sanaa DD had grilled fish, salad, fruit, cookie to decorate), all buffets have fresh fruit & salads, fruit available in parks as snack options.

I believe in the no cooking, preparing snacks, etc on vacation. We eat 3 meals a day @ home. At WDW we some do 2 & make most out of snacks, some days 3 meals. No stroller now, so sitting down is great time to relax in the air conditioning. Also, do not have to worry about carrying trays, etc @ CS locations with kid & day backpack.

Last month trip receipts totals were over $200 what we paid for dining plan. CRT, H&V, Akershus, GG, TH, Boma, Sanaa, BoG, Sci-Fi Galactic Breakfast, Jedi Fanstasmic! Meal @ H&V, Rainforest Cafe, & CP. Resort refillable mugs. Snack credits.

Going back in December with the Deluxe Dining Plan.

 

[Maleficent Dragon]

Personally, I do not think so. We have done Tables in Wonderland, the Dining Plan and paid out of pocket and we find that out of pocket always has us spending less, only ordering what we will eat and it allows us to share meals and not have to worry about breaking even or leftover meal credits.

I might also add: when we are on vacation, my husband loves to eat at table service restaurants. Dining is part of his vacation and out of pocket is still the best deal for us.

 

[sharonabe]

We've decided that we'll skip the meal plan this trip. Even though our youngest eats all the time, it didn't add up for us. I like the idea of gift cards so thanks for that idea!

Happy you've found what will work for you.

One tip: Somewhere in all of this, someone said they had a hard time keeping track of how much money was left on which gift card. The easy way to take care of that is to charge everything back to your room and then use the gift cards when you check out to pay for what's on your tab.

 

[TDC Nala]

There's some that don't like Ghirardelli Ice Cream, HoB, and I think Wolfgang Puck Café.

Of these, the only one that doesn't take the dining plan is Ghirardelli.

 

[hawkeyesparks]

Have two young boys and we will be heading to Disney the first of August. Is the dining plan worth the extra expense?

YES! For me, it frees me from the anxiety of worrying if I'm budgeting enough for Food. By doing the plan, it's already taken of.

 

[hawkeyesparks]

Have two young boys and we will be heading to Disney the first of August. Is the dining plan worth the extra expense?

YES! For me, it frees me from the anxiety of worrying if I'm budgeting enough for Food. By doing the plan, it's already taken of.

 

[luvsJack]

It is for us. And I found it MORE worthwhile when dd became an "adult" on the plan. The child menu choices in a lot of CS places and some TS places just aren't that great, so knowing she could order from the adult menu and get what she liked is great. Does she eat all the food? No, but she wouldn't eat it all if I was paying oop either so that's really neither here nor there.

I have plugged in the prices of the places we like to eat and what I think everyone will order a dozen times and it always comes back to breaking even at least. So, for us, yes it is worth it.

 

[Baptist]

If you plan on doing character dining with kids, the meal plan is great. Character dining is expensive, plus the food (for the most part) is the same for a child or adult.

Now my daughters are 8 and 10. Now, the dining plan is not a good deal for us. My oldest won't eat enough to justify the adult price and my 8 year old sometimes prefers the adult menu. Plus, we only plan on one character meal (Chef Mickey's) for our upcoming trip this December.

It sounds like you are in the "sweet spot" for the dining plan with younger kids.

Oh, I forgot about the desserts. Just too many. We found the QS desserts to be just o.k. We did not need the extra calories because we were using our snack for a treat too. The TS desserts are a different story, there are some really nice ones out there. The most memorable was at The Wave in the contemporary where they give you a nice sample of a few desserts. Plus, the kids can get a smoothie/shake for their drink. It was an unbelievable deal on the meal plan.

 

[mi*vida*loca]

Also are you sure you want to do a TS every day?

My kids got into a mini funk at times last trip because of our TS meals. They would rather do CS or just TS for lunch. We do midday breaks and they didn't like having to come back to the parks to do a dinner ADR and then ride rides. Doing lunch right before our midday break was much better because by that point they wanted to get into the air conditioning and relax. Although they would have still preferred CS. They would stop whining when I told them after we left we were hitting the pool.

On the DDP doing lunch TS meals cuts into the value of the credits. You get more bang for your buck by doing dinner ADR's.

 

[luvsJack]

Also are you sure you want to do a TS every day?

My kids got into a mini funk at times last trip because of our TS meals. They would rather do CS or just TS for lunch. We do midday breaks and they didn't like having to come back to the parks to do a dinner ADR and then ride rides. Doing lunch right before our midday break was much better because by that point they wanted to get into the air conditioning and relax. Although they would have still preferred CS. They would stop whining when I told them after we left we were hitting the pool.

On the DDP doing lunch TS meals cuts into the value of the credits. You get more bang for your buck by doing dinner ADR's.

We found that the best way to do it was to stop worrying about the "best bang for our buck" and just eat when/how we wanted to.

We normally do TS for breakfast or lunch. We are freed up to park hop or do whatever in the evenings.

For us, no matter which way we did it, we still broke even to paying OOP and everything was prepaid. It helped a lot to stop feeling like I had to make sure we were getting a "good deal" in the whole thing. As long as we are not paying MORE to have the ddp, its still something we like to use.

 

[ladyjubilee]

This year will be our first trip with the plan. A friend gave us a pin code for free dining and since we are going are going for Christmas when the parks will be busy.

Normally, the dining plan just involves too much time in restaurants-away from attractions and things to do and too much food. We normally just snack most meals, then eat at a nice restaurant every other day.

 

[Jenn55]

So I'm incredibly glad I'm not going till dec 2015 cause I seem to change my mind every few hours at this point! Scrapping universal this trip, moving it to its own trip in 2016. With that being said I'm thinking super cheap dec 1-10th at all star sports and then splurging on my dream resort, the savanna view at animal kingdom lodge the 10-13th. My question is dinning.. When I did a split stay in January it was cheaper to buy a package with the first hotel (with tickets to cover the whole vacation) and room only for the second resort. I'm looking at the dinning plan.. Does that mean I have to do 2 packages this time or can I add dinning to the first resort and have it cover our entire vacation?

 

[jco_direwolf]

So I'm incredibly glad I'm not going till dec 2015 cause I seem to change my mind every few hours at this point! Scrapping universal this trip, moving it to its own trip in 2016. With that being said I'm thinking super cheap dec 1-10th at all star sports and then splurging on my dream resort, the savanna view at animal kingdom lodge the 10-13th. My question is dinning.. When I did a split stay in January it was cheaper to buy a package with the first hotel (with tickets to cover the whole vacation) and room only for the second resort. I'm looking at the dinning plan.. Does that mean I have to do 2 packages this time or can I add dinning to the first resort and have it cover our entire vacation?

Dining is per night at the booked resort with the remaining credits expiring at Midnight of check-out.

if you book Dining for dec 1-10 you get 9 sets of credits. You can not "buy more" and all the credits expire on the 10th at midnight. If you want (assuming you are not booking DVC or have an AP) the dining plan for the 10-13 (3 more sets of credits) you'll have too make it a "package" room and tickets.

If the second stay is DVC or you have an AP you can book Room-Only and buy the dining.

The other option is to spread your 9 credits out over the whole trip, by eating TS mostly the first 9 nights, then going to Mara on day 10 on check-in and caching a bunch of QS food and Snacks in the room.

 

[MaryKatesMom]

Thanks for all the input, it is going to boil down to what food options are at the restaurants. PP is correct, we do not eat much fast food and eat lots of fruits and veggies. My youngest eats more than the rest of us combined and we were trying to avoid having a backpack full of food to lug around. From what I have read so far, even if we did opt for a dining plan, we'd still need extra snacks for him. So, if you're at Disney August 9th - 15th, we will be the family pulling the cooler behind us.

Another thing to pay attention to is the appetizers. Some of the most interesting options are on this part of the menu, and not included in the DDP. We would order an assortment of apps, entrées, and sides for our family of three to share. Even with eating at several signature restaurants and often ordering wine, our most expensive meal was Akershus.

I get this. And if you are one adult with two kids in the 3-9 range, it shifts things as much as possible to favoring DDP.

Even with DDP, you still need to factor tips. I don't say that to suggest you wouldn't think of it, I say that because it's quite a bit- more than eating out at home costs.

Part of why we did DDP for several years was to keep one relative from complaining about food costs. They got it all out of their system before they arrived, and their company was much more enjoyable.

It's probably also worth noting in this thread- since it's about dining- WDW now has a $10 per person cancelation fee for no shows/same day cancelations for all ADR's. We rarely cancelled, but still....I'm less inclined to book ADR's with that hanging over my head. Getting my group to agree is like herding cats. That fee is the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm not going to pay for any extended family member that backs out of meal same day! no way! I don't even want to think about that happening. I suppose that's part of my thinking about DDP too - it's not just me- it's having prepaid meals for our whole group. For our trips to be successful, I have to gamble- 180 days out that nobody in our group is going to say, they just feel like a salad. did I mention we've got a vegetarian in the family?

Oh, one more thing....for those of you talking about saving $....There's one kind of easy-peasy thing you can do. If you have a Target cc, you can go to Target and buy Disney gift cards, and get the 5% savings. Mark them with a sharpie as soon as they get used. It's kind of pain using tons of them AT WDW, because if you lose one, or neglect to mark it- too bad.

BUT- I call WDW as soon as I buy them, before the trip (mostly)- and use them to pay for our WDW package/hotel right away. Not huge, but it is pretty foolproof, and 5% of a WDW trip adds up. It's nearly free money, as long as you pay off the Target CC. It also could make sense to give your kids a gift card. Incidentally....you are allowed to pay your Target cc balance right in the store, before you leave.

We've decided that we'll skip the meal plan this trip. Even though our youngest eats all the time, it didn't add up for us. I like the idea of gift cards so thanks for that idea!

Happy you've found what will work for you.

One tip: Somewhere in all of this, someone said they had a hard time keeping track of how much money was left on which gift card. The easy way to take care of that is to charge everything back to your room and then use the gift cards when you check out to pay for what's on your tab.

Excellent tips here. We get the Target Disney Gift Cards and appply them to our room. DDP never worked well for us at any age. My yougest was our big eater also, but not a sweet tooth. We ended up buying extra or trading my husbands TS meal for her. She likes steak so we would switch plates.

My older one is a picky eater with a very small appetite and now they are really cracking down on ordering kids meal even paying out of pocket. You have to be under nine and some of the signature restaurants have not much on it she likes. I really don't like throwing out decent food and her not ordering what she wants.

Since we normally do not order desserts it really extended the length of our meals.

I think WDW missed the boat on the Tween/teens when it comes to food. We can't do buffets anymore because it is too much money for a couple of chicken tender and a side of mac and cheese which is all the older one eats on vacation.

 

[over50visits]

Have two young boys and we will be heading to Disney the first of August. Is the dining plan worth the extra expense?

No, in no way. Disney wants you to think you save (you don't), they want you to think it's so easy to not worry about expenses (there's really no difference), and they want you to spend a couple of hundred dollars per day, every single day, for a family to eat. Wow.

Probably the best thing to do is not set up a spreadsheet, pore over menus, and all the other things people try to do to justify the plan. Instead, take the hundreds or even over a thousand dollars the meal plan would cost you, and put it in your pocket, and add say 15% or so for the tips since they are no longer in the DDP. Eat what you want, when you want. Don't scrimp, don't stress, don't skip a dessert, get snacks when you want, buy drinks as you go (the overpriced mugs tend to make you drink more than you normally would because it's "free").

At the end of the vacation look at all the money left over!

DDP was a brilliant marketing plan by Disney; it has increased their profits hugely, but the unfortunate downside is crowded restaurants, lower quality food offerings, and unreasonably high prices on buffets and character meals. But, that's done, and we have to live with what they offer now.

We eat royally at Disney, and love it, and never have come close to what we would have spent on the DDP. And we don't stress one iota.

 

[mickeyluv'r]

When I did a split stay in January it was cheaper to buy a package with the first hotel (with tickets to cover the whole vacation) and room only for the second resort. I'm looking at the dinning plan.. Does that mean I have to do 2 packages this time or can I add dinning to the first resort and have it cover our entire vacation?

The quick answer is that you are better off doing a package for the first stay (w/duration tickets), and a room only for the second half, like you describe. If you want a package with dining for the second stay, usually you have to buy tickets to get the dining plan. The way tickets are priced, it's not a good idea. (Prices are front loaded, so one set is best.) Also, I'm not quite sure about all details, but with MDE, having only one active ticket linked to your account is best.

There's one more option you should very much explore- getting an Annual Pass. If you go multiple times a year, AP is likely the way to go. This is just the quick version, but AP holders can book a room (w/discounts)+ just dining packages. (without having to buy tickets) You only need ONE AP to use AP discount, though under new MDE - a full round probably makes sense if you go this path. (The lead name on the reservation has to be the AP holder.) AP discounts for your dates may not be out yet, but when they do, you can usually convert- if you've booked room only. I think the parent site has AP discount info. Otherwise try mousesavers. That site spells out all the terms and details well.

Then again...I will repeat what I've been saying too many times in this thread already, you may better off getting an AP and TiW, or just use the dining discounts that come with getting an AP.

There's one more important plus for doing room only bookings...they don't have to be prepaid. I know, you like prepaying for your vacations. But really, non-package room only bookings have better cancelation terms. five days before you go. Packages have to be prepaid at 45days, and refunds are more complicated. Call me crazy, but I think generous cancelation terms are like getting free, hassle-free trip insurance. I make sure I can fund my vacations in full, but still think holding on to my money as long as possible benefits me.

I DO use the DDP as a $ guide. Or use receipts from past trips +10%, and you'll be within a few $ of actual costs. Or come to the dark side...Club level!

 

[mickeyluv'r]

I think WDW missed the boat on the Tween/teens when it comes to food.

 

[isaboo]

No, in no way. Disney wants you to think you save (you don't), they want you to think it's so easy to not worry about expenses (there's really no difference), and they want you to spend a couple of hundred dollars per day, every single day, for a family to eat. Wow.

Probably the best thing to do is not set up a spreadsheet, pore over menus, and all the other things people try to do to justify the plan. Instead, take the hundreds or even over a thousand dollars the meal plan would cost you, and put it in your pocket, and add say 15% or so for the tips since they are no longer in the DDP. Eat what you want, when you want. Don't scrimp, don't stress, don't skip a dessert, get snacks when you want, buy drinks as you go (the overpriced mugs tend to make you drink more than you normally would because it's "free").

At the end of the vacation look at all the money left over!

DDP was a brilliant marketing plan by Disney; it has increased their profits hugely, but the unfortunate downside is crowded restaurants, lower quality food offerings, and unreasonably high prices on buffets and character meals. But, that's done, and we have to live with what they offer now.

We eat royally at Disney, and love it, and never have come close to what we would have spent on the DDP. And we don't stress one iota.

 

[Jenn55]

The quick answer is that you are better off doing a package for the first stay (w/duration tickets), and a room only for the second half, like you describe. If you want a package with dining for the second stay, usually you have to buy tickets to get the dining plan. The way tickets are priced, it's not a good idea. (Prices are front loaded, so one set is best.) Also, I'm not quite sure about all details, but with MDE, having only one active ticket linked to your account is best. There's one more option you should very much explore- getting an Annual Pass. If you go multiple times a year, AP is likely the way to go. This is just the quick version, but AP holders can book a room (w/discounts)+ just dining packages. (without having to buy tickets) You only need ONE AP to use AP discount, though under new MDE - a full round probably makes sense if you go this path. (The lead name on the reservation has to be the AP holder.) AP discounts for your dates may not be out yet, but when they do, you can usually convert- if you've booked room only. I think the parent site has AP discount info. Otherwise try mousesavers. That site spells out all the terms and details well. Then again...I will repeat what I've been saying too many times in this thread already, you may better off getting an AP and TiW, or just use the dining discounts that come with getting an AP. There's one more important plus for doing room only bookings...they don't have to be prepaid. I know, you like prepaying for your vacations. But really, non-package room only bookings have better cancelation terms. five days before you go. Packages have to be prepaid at 45days, and refunds are more complicated. Call me crazy, but I think generous cancelation terms are like getting free, hassle-free trip insurance. I make sure I can fund my vacations in full, but still think holding on to my money as long as possible benefits me. I DO use the DDP as a $ guide. Or use receipts from past trips +10%, and you'll be within a few $ of actual costs. Or come to the dark side...Club level!

Lol, I can't afford to come to the dark side and do club level! AP passes just aren't in the cards for us. It's too much on airfare to go down more then once a year, as it is, we were there January of this year and won't be back till ded 2015 so almost 2 years later. I still have plenty of time to think about it, so I'll crunch the numbers

 

[mikeyg1479]

YES! For me, it frees me from the anxiety of worrying if I'm budgeting enough for Food. By doing the plan, it's already taken of.

Honestly, what I would do is price out the dining plan you would plan to purchase for your family- instead of actually buying it, put this money aside as your food budget to take with on your trip and then go on vacation book your restaurants of choice and eat normally as you would have on the plan and pay the checks yourself.

I all but almost guarantee at the end of trip you will spend less than the amount you are budgeting-it would take some REAL work to go over- booking multiple table services a day instead of one like the standard dining plan allows, ordering the most expensive dishes everywhere you went, or eating above your specific eating plan (primary table service, signature, or counter service meals). Obviously, if you over reach- you will go over, but stick to eating similar on the plan, and you won't spend as much.

There is a reason Disney offers these dining plans- they almost always come out on top based on what they charge for the plan vs. the amount of food you actually redeem.