Odd Question...the total

[kimbac3]

For those of you who say "I saved x amount of money on my meal" how do you know? Do you figure it up yourself or are you given a receipt with the actual total you would have spent?
I'd like to figure out how much we saved but I'm not sure if I should keep notes or just rely on receipts.

Thanks!
Kimba

 

[2forMe]

I am pretty sure that you get a receipt for the total amount.. so if you tallied up your receipts for the day and subtract the DDp daily fee.. then you see how much you saved

 

[LizinSTL]

For those of you who say "I saved x amount of money on my meal" how do you know? Do you figure it up yourself or are you given a receipt with the actual total you would have spent?
I'd like to figure out how much we saved but I'm not sure if I should keep notes or just rely on receipts.

Thanks!
Kimba

For counter service you need to just look at the cash register before they swipe your Key to the World card. The total before they take the DDP CS credits off will be displayed.
You need to sign a receipt and then they give you a copy that is zero'd out. You can jot down the figure that you saw on the register.

For Table service the bill you are brought for your signature will have the total on it - the receipt you are given after you sign will be zero'd out and show you the credits deducted for the meal. You can, again, jot down the figure that was on the first bill.

I have a bizarre memory so I recall that kind of stuff easily. It's easy to remember that your bill at le Cellier was $161 for 4 .... because you are so amazed and excited that it cost you a mere 4 TS credits.

 

[ha1264]

If you are on the DDP you do save money. If you were to pay for each item individually at a TS meal it would cost you more than you paid for the entire day on the meal plan. This is what you need to look at. If you weren't on the plan would each adult in your party get thier own appetizer and dessert. That's all included in the plan. We may get one appetizer and share but never dessert. If your off the plan and still don't get appetizers and desserts at TS meals you will still pay more. If you eat a CS, snack and TS without the plan it's going to cost you because the food is pricey in the parks. The thing I hate about the plan is you have to plan every meal months in months in advance of your trip.

 

[bicker]

It is all relative, though. I never bothered to add it all up, because we would never have ordered what we ordered if we were paying extra for each item. So the only way to compare AFAIC is to compare the prices of the Dining Plan itself to what we would have ordered if we were paying OOP, and so it basically means going back to the menus and adding things up separately from the receipts.

 

[mrp4352]

For TS, the first receipt you get (before you give your room card) has the dollar amounts on there. The waiters were always very nice making sure I got a copy of that to keep when I asked. For counter service, the register will show you the amount, and I would have a pen handy to scribble it on the receipt. I had an envelope in my camera bag to put the receipts in through out the trip.

My friend laughed - but when I was able to add everything up and show her what we had 'spent' it was worth it! (plus, the receipts and the adding machine tape make a really fun scrapbook page!)

 

[kimbac3]

Thanks for the replies everyone!! I'll be sure to use a little notebook to keep track. For me, it's just one of those things I like to know. I'm a little OCD when it comes to my vacation planning and I like to keep track of what we spend from year to year. Yep, I'm that weird!!

Thanks Again!!
Kimba

 

[Nancyg56]

It is all relative, though. I never bothered to add it all up, because we would never have ordered what we ordered if we were paying extra for each item. So the only way to compare AFAIC is to compare the prices of the Dining Plan itself to what we would have ordered if we were paying OOP, and so it basically means going back to the menus and adding things up separately from the receipts.

I did not add it up the last time for this same reason. The first time I took the total and compared it to the plan price, but we would not had ordered this way at each meal. I figure that if we use our TS credits and our snack credit the rest is a bonus and that is fine with me. I don't want to get bogged down with the numbers because the first time we used the plan I made myself crazy for a while as I checked prices and was actually choosing meals by price rather than menu and location. Sanity did prevail before I made our ADR's but now I know that there is a value for us and let the rest go.

 

[JimMIA]

So the only way to compare AFAIC is to compare the prices of the Dining Plan itself to what we would have ordered if we were paying OOP.

I agree. To compare the menu prices -- which are overpriced considerably to begin with -- to the cost of DDP doesn't give you an accurate picture at all. That's where the Disney marketing kids come up with their 40% savings! If you are going to use that calculation, just accept their 40% claim.

I calculate what we would spend in the real world without DDP and compare that to DDP. For starters, that includes eating many of our meals offsite, not eating at any Disney CS outlets at all, and not a lot of snacks. If we were dining OOP, we would probably only eat a dinner at Le Cellier plus one character meal...probably a breakfast. We would still eat well OOP, just not in Disney restaurants.

When I do those calculations for our family, I usually find that we save about $100 per trip (our trips are usually 4-5 nights) using DDP. For us, that is a real-world savings, not marketing hype.

There are other reasons for getting DDP -- we also enjoy the convenience and the fact that our food costs are set before we go.

 

[mom2aredhead]

It is all relative, though. I never bothered to add it all up, because we would never have ordered what we ordered if we were paying extra for each item. So the only way to compare AFAIC is to compare the prices of the Dining Plan itself to what we would have ordered if we were paying OOP, and so it basically means going back to the menus and adding things up separately from the receipts.

We did not do DDP last trip, and at first I was going to try to add up what we ate to compare, but it really isn't a true comparison (and frankly it would have been way too much work.) I think we may have saved a little money if we had done DDP, but not a tremendous amount, and we ate what/where we wanted to the entire trip, including 2 Character dinners, 1 character lunch, Mickey's Backyard BBQ, RFC (would have been OOP either way) and a few CS thrown in the mix.