Welcome Home!
The
DDP currently is $38.99/person and requires booking for every night of your stay for every person in your party...
It gives you 1 snack, one table service and one counter service meal per night of your reservation. The credits are on your room key (key to the world) and come in bulk. That is, for example, last week there were four of us there for five nights...each of our KTW cards showed 20 tables service, 20 counter service and 20 snacks, and each card was appropriately reduced (automatically, by computer), as we used the credits. There's no rule about when/how you use the credits, so long as they're used by midnight of the last day of your stay--so you could do two TS (or three or four!) in one day...you don't have to use them at the rate of one/day...for us, this is pretty much never an issue on "real meals" (counter service or table service), as we pretty much always eat together...but we laugh over the snack credits...no one quite knows, at any given time, just how many are left--each of us grabs a cold drink (which counts as a snack) or something to eat separately as often as we do so together!
It's a LOT of food...the table service credit entitles you to one appetizer, one entree, one dessert, and one nonalcoholic drink. COunter service lets you choose a meal, a side, a drink (again, nonalcoholic), and a dessert. The snack is (generally; there are a few exceptions) anything priced under $4 that is "ready to eat or drink" (frozen Stouffers entrees priced at under $4--like the mac 'n cheese--do not count as a snack)...
We LOVE it, altho there is an "issue" in being tempted to order based on maximizing your value...we were laughing about that, too...we were able to get a reservation at LeCellier for lunch, but not dinner...and of course lunch food is less expensive than dinner food...there was a short, good-natured "argument" about whether we'd "get our money's worth" if we ate at LeCellier at lunch instead of dinner on the DP! (We soon got over that, tho, as the DDP is a great value no matter what, if you want pretty much all the food it entitles you to...it's certainly possible to eat, and eat reasonably well, at WDW for less than $38.99/day...but we found we used the cost of our plan, per day, just on the TS meal most of the time, making the counter service and snack "free")...
SO far, we've all come home "neutral" in terms of calories in/calories out...we do eat far more on the DDP...but we also walk, swim, and generally move about considerably more than we do when at home...and it is SO fun to, as my son says, "eat our way around the world"...it's especially fun at Epcot, where the international restaurant offerings give you lots of variety and even some "delicacies" that aren't readily available anywhere else ...
So...if you can deal w/two desserts/day; appetizer w/entree at dinner each day, etc. you'll love the DDP...just remember, there's no flexibility at all in the rules..everyone in your room has to buy it, for every night you're in the room...
Happy vacation!
