So how many Disers don't do much dining while at WDW

[MelissathePooh]

Off topic, but wanted to pass on that the new Miller's Orlando Ale House that opened by the AK Target/429 on 192 has been up and running - we had lunch there Sunday and were thrilled with the cost, portions and quality. If you're at Kidani, its about a 5 minute drive. Its nice to have one on that side of WDW.

 

[goofydad621]

I will miss some of the experience's at the meals as well as the meals themselves but realy wanted to try something different, we have wanted to try the vacation club rooms before we buy and I always get a car anyway. As far as cooking goes I consider cooking a stress release more then work, and since we are not using points they will clean the kitchen everyday, not that I would leave a sink full of dish's or pans.

either way we will be at Disney..

Love to hear everybodies opinions

Thanks again

 

[eliza61]

generally we'll go for 8 days in August and at most I'll make 3 adrs.

1) I can never seem to get my schedule right 180 days. since we go to disney a lot we hate having to follow a plan.

2) not that crazy about disney restaurants anymore. IMO they are ridiculously over priced (which I expect for a tourist destination) but lousy-mediocre food.

3) off site is pretty easy for us, we've never gotten lost.

 

[Tiger926]

As DVCers, we have our 1 bedroom and full kitchen, love that!

For our March trip, eating all meals in villa, except for 1 TS (maybe T-Rex for kids).

For July, we are wanting to do a few character meals, as the kids are asking for some, and because we stay for 2 weeks, so we may be doing the DxDP for 2 nights, and spreading out over 4 days. It is cheapest to do the DxDP.

We used to do TIW and eat 1-2 TS meals per day, but not anymore, as food and service have gone way downhill. We have a few favourites, that we will spread out amongst our trips, but for shorter trips, like 6 days in March, we are eating all meals in our villa.

This will be our first time doing this, so we are excited to see how it goes!

Tiger

 

[bookwormde]

when we have a full kitchen in a villa we almost newvey do disney dining, if we have a studio we may average a meal every day or 2

Endjoy the villa, you will be spoiled.

bookwormde

 

[Sheepdog23]

I have been to wdw 15 times and last year was the first and the only year I used the dining plan. I felt that it wasn't worth it because I couldn't eat that much food and I only broke even on 2 of the 6 days. I am also not at all thrilled with the quality of the food compared to how it was 15 years ago and I refuse to pay lots of money for a lot of qs that is essentially an overpriced mcdonalds. Not to mention that the mickey waffles used to be enormous! I am glad that we have become dvc members because I now can cook my family meals in the room that are healthier than disney's and save a considerable amount of money. Disney should be ashamed of itself charging so much money for something so disgusting and then claiming to be an exclusive restaurant. I may do dp for a few days just because the kids like chef mickey's and that is overpriced and easy to break even with, but as a normal occurence, never again. I have vowed to pretty much stop eating at disney restaurants after the nasty service and food I got last year for the tons of money i paid. It is just not worth it with all the other options out there.

 

[Eliza32]

We probably have a different view to those of you who live in the US, but we prefer to have a car, and often go off property to eat, and combine it with a little shoppping here and there because there are stores and restaurants that we don't have at home (Bahama Breeze and Cheesecake Factory being the two current favourites!!)
We have been lucky enough to visit the states 11 times, 7 of these to WDW. We stay on site because we love being part of the magic. 2 trips ago, we got the DDP for free and we planned and took full advantage of every TS credit. We had some wonderful meals, but we don't go to Disney just to eat. Last year, we didn't qualify for DDP, so we carefully chose 5 TS meals we wanted, then either ate QS OOP, or went off site. We now agree that we would not get DDP ourselves again (although if it was free, then obviously we're not going to say no!) The amount of food some people put away at WDW scares me anyway, so we still buy bagels, muffins etc to eat in our room for breakfast some days, or we go off site to Denny's or whatever. In the evenings if we're not watching fireworks, we like to go off site to eat, then go to a mall for a couple of hours. I understand that you guys probably don't get this, but you have access to the shops and restaurant chains all of the time. I think most Disney QS stuff is good value, but the TS meals are overpriced for what you get generally.

 

[Zeebs]

For us - from the UK, part of our trip is also to experience other things that part of America can offer that we can't get in the UK.

Like shopping and other eateries, (like the Cheesecake Factory) we stay offsite and I enjoy even a trip to Walmart, which many of the Americans don't want to do on their holiday.

I read the reviews on the places to eat while on Disney property and choose a few we would like to try and book them and then the rest of our eating is done offsite without reservations or in the house.

Kirsten

 

[OKW Lover]

We're probably different from most WDW visitors because we go so frequently that we don't have to try to maximize our park time. We usually plan a couple of nice dinners during our visits.

 

[Mamu]

I've never used the DDP, we have AP's and prefer to take the discount. Our last 4 stays we have stayed CL. With 5 in a room it pays for itself in breakfast alone.

We do a few TS lunches but mostly CS, we like the freedom to come and go without meal schedules.

We also find the CS offers good food for 1/4 the price of TS. Over the years we've notices a decline in the quality of TS meals. There are still favorites that we enjoy and we usually have lunch at them we find the lunch meals don't seem to be as rushed and the food seem to be prepared with a little more care.

 

[goofydad621]

The picking a couple of favorites is what we are leaning towards this year and the rest in our Villa or off site, 8 nights gives us the time to relax a little, Having a car meakes it easy to get our own food or go off site. Counter service is way plenty of food for us while touring and given my wife's developing seafood alergies we don't always feel safe at buffetts anymore anyway, just a little cross contamination from shrimp and she may be sick in room for 1-2 days.

We still love Chef Mickey's, Crystal Palace, Ohana and a couple other TS restaraunts that make us feel we are in WDW so we will most likely pick 2 out of 3 of those.

If they should offer free dinning again in the fall (which I believe they will Disney numbers were down 7% last quater they want to fill rooms) then we will drop first three days of our reservation we have now, switch to a moderate for first three days and get free dinning and hit the places we would consider a must then move to the villa.

Hope everybody has a Disney day

Goofydad

 

[LeesyUD]

While I understand where you are coming from this is not us, but, there were times where we were not hungry at "lunch time" but knew if we ate later we would not be hungry for our ADR later. Or we would go ahead and eat then not be hungry when we went to our TS ressie and then eat just because...

Even this trip I am making sure we have some evenings with no dining by doing Signature, so we have more flexibility with park touring.

I feel the same way. So on our upcoming 10 day trip we will probably have just 1 TS most days but not all of them will be dinners. So we are thinking of:

5 TS Dinners (2 or 3 Signatures)
2 TS Breakfasts
1 TS Lunch

We usually plan the breakfasts in a way not interfere with the parks. Either we will go before park opening or on a non park day. So therefore out of 10 days we only have 6 days where we will need to be conscious of ADRs.

But this time were are refusing to do a TS lunch and dinner on the same day bc we get too full. If we happen to do 2 TS in one day it would be brkfst and dinner and even that I want to avoid if I can. All other meals will be CS.

For DH and I, we tend to be indecisive, so having some ADRs helps us in a big way because we don't feel as much pressure to decide where we want to eat last minute. We just say time to go to XXXX for dinner and head it that direction and it is so easy.

But I can definitely understand that it is not for everyone.

 

[Planogirl]

We eat offsite a lot and most of the other dining is at a few favorite CS places. I do try to make two or three ADR's but that's it for the week.

 

[canopynut66]

To answer your question...NO
We use the Basic dining plan. We have Wego shop bring our breakfast groceries so we can start off by a breakfast in our room. Then we all do our own thing in the parks meeting up around the table for a TS meal. We find that we like the idea of flying in and taking Magical Express to our resort and staying in until Magical Express brings us back to go home. We like that we pay for the Dining Plan ahead of time so any other money brought to WDW is for spending and the "little extras" like small snacks.
Unless they take more from the dining plan or change the menus or quality of the foods even more, we will be happy on the dining plan...

Agree 99% but do book character breakfast very early say on the days were going to AK and also book at resorts if not going in a park that day (as we stay 14 days) so I move ADRS around in parks and out to the resorts. We upgrade to MYWD so we have a snack a day also and a CS. We are just not into breakfast in the room were up and out to wherever. We have in the early years tried the rent a car and go to off site to eat and man was money wise eating us alive with rental and gas plus food. So when WDW started the dining plan we tried it and been doing it since. Some think it takes up to much time but I just plan our days THEN do my ADRS and it works for us. What we found over the last 58 trips is park hoping waste way to much time--- not the eating.and also we make these ADRS months out and if we go to a TS that they tell us be half hour we ---leave--and then do a CS and rebook somewhere else another day. the whole idea of reservation is to have table ready. This by the way has only happened at Tony's and O 'Hana's

 

[DeerIsleDisney]

We did the dining plan last trip for 7 nights and it was too much food and a little stressful trying to make ADRs each day. On our upcoming trip, we have the deluxe plan for our first day and we'll get 3 character meals in. Then we switch to a DVC villa for 7 nights and will have breakfasts in the room, lunch counter service or at the villa, and plan on dinner either back at the villa or at Downtown Disney - or counter service if we are still in the parks.

 

[Kim1964]

We did the dining plan once and didn't enjoy having to stop what we were doing (usually swimming at SAB) to make it to an ADR (and we didn't want to skip it because we'd already paid for it). It seems that each year we go now, we reduce the number of TS meals we eat onsite. For this coming year we are planning on 2-3 in a 10 night stay. We've found several offsite restaurants that we like that we don't have at home, and we are renting a townhome with a full kitchen and will eat some meals there.

 

[PlutoLuvr]

We eat a couple lunches at the world (TS as well as CS) and maybe one or two dinners at non-DDP restaurants, if that.

Ten years ago, we were that captive audience that stayed on WDW property, ate every morsel on property and never left.

Now we either stay in our offsite timeshare or we stay at one of the Universal resorts and venture over to WDW for some of our trip to Orlando. We still have our annual passes, and some years we buy the DDE, n/k/a TIW depending on how many TS meals we might be eating during a year at WDW.

We never bought into paying rack rates for hotel rooms for a discount on food (plus having to buy park tickets on top of that). Add to that the frustration of having to book dining reservations months in advance for quickly-detoriating food, well, I'll just say we adjusted our Orlando vacations ... for the better, I might add.

The Golden Spoon awards just came out for Florida restaurants, and Orlando has some excellent restaurants. We'll do some "theme parking" at WDW, maybe enjoy some lunch CS at Epcot, but the bulk of our dining dollars are now spent offsite or non-Disney owned restaurants like the Ravenous Pig, Blue Zoo or Tchoup Chop. Better food and a much better value. You also don't have to book reservations months in advance.

ETA: While Disney food is seeing less of us, Disney alcohol is seeing more of us with the addition of La Cava de Tequila. Epcot + La Cava de Tequila = seriously good times.