stand dining plan vs counter service????

[disneyseniors]

This has probably been on here before, so bear with me, as I am new at disboards My husband and I always get the fdp when offered and save money with it. We get the standard one with one sit down mean, one counter service and one snack. BUT, I'm beginning to resent having to make dining decisions 6 months in advance and trying to coordinate that with our daily park plans. I'm beginning to question doing this, and have considered the counter service plan. It would be wonderful not having to plan where we have to be every day months in advance. I'm the one who always plans our trips, so I have to do the planning, arranging, changing, etc, etc!
I was just wondering if anyone else out there in WDWland has switched from standard dining plan to counter service and how it's worked out??
My hubby likes the standard plan, but I find it hard to live with. He thinks we will only be able to get hamburgers with the cs meals, but I'm trying to persuade him differently. Huge thanks for the imput

 

[smitch425]

This has probably been on here before, so bear with me, as I am new at disboards My husband and I always get the fdp when offered and save money with it. We get the standard one with one sit down mean, one counter service and one snack. BUT, I'm beginning to resent having to make dining decisions 6 months in advance and trying to coordinate that with our daily park plans. I'm beginning to question doing this, and have considered the counter service plan. It would be wonderful not having to plan where we have to be every day months in advance. I'm the one who always plans our trips, so I have to do the planning, arranging, changing, etc, etc!
I was just wondering if anyone else out there in WDWland has switched from standard dining plan to counter service and how it's worked out??
My hubby likes the standard plan, but I find it hard to live with. He thinks we will only be able to get hamburgers with the cs meals, but I'm trying to persuade him differently. Huge thanks for the imput

The QSDP is great, but we would never buy it. We only use it during free dining. The value is not the same as when it came with two snacks. There is TONS of variety on the plan, but we would always come out ahead if we paid OOP.

 

[mom2AidanAndEli]

For us, the TS dining is part of our vacation experience. I can't imagine not having one sit down meal every day. Yes, it's a pain to schedule 6 months out. But you don't absolutely have to. If you're flexible withe where you eat, you can still get reservations much closer to your vacation time. There's really just a handful of places that end up completely booked right away.

 

[JustCallMeMommy]

I NEED that sit down/recover time at least once a day.

You only have to plan 6 months out if you want the most in-demand restaurants. We have had good luck making day-of reservations on several occasions, but you have to be flexible. Especially with MK - you might have to go to one of the resorts on the monorail loop.

 

[minushka72]

We enjoy the flexibility of the QSDP. I book one or 2 TS meals (usually outside the parks so it doesn't need to change if my park days change.) Anyway, we like Columbia Harbor House in MK. I get the shrimp. We love going to Wolfgang Puck Express at DTD Marketplace. They have great food that is covered by a QS credit. Show your DH some of the QS menus from Allears.net so he can see for himself that it won't just be burgers, etc...

 

[disneyseniors]

thanks everyone for the imput! I am torn between the 2, Right now we have the standard dining planfor November this year and all reservation are booked! Couldn't get into Be our Guest, though. Might try lunch. I find that by the end of our stay, we don't want to go to Epcot, etc, for our sit down dinner, just too tired of all that running by then, so we skip and eat at our resort. We don't use at least one scheduled sit down each trip. I think our next trip we will try the CS only and see what happens. We can pay OOP for a sit down if hubby wants it. I'll post and let you know how it goes. thanks for the suggestions of wolf gang puck (never thought of that) and the Columbia Harbour house. I will check out those menus! love disney

 

[sharonabe]

We were on the QSDP on our trip in 2009. We stayed 6 nights and I only had ONE hamburger and NO chicken nuggets the entire trip. The cheeseburger I had was what I wanted. There are so many different options at EVERY park, you can do QS and eat very well!

 

[ericstac]

takes me back to our first WDW trip.. free DP and we didn't know anything about Disney so we were just stoked to be able to go to the park.. never even realizing it was 4 parks spread out all over lol.. anyway, that 6 day trip I ate cheeseburger and fries every dang day lunch and dinner.. They were good, plenty of protein but it got old.. after that first trip I don't think I've ever ordered another QS burger again though. lol.. I learned about WDW and all the great food there so even when we do hit a quick service it is something special and not a burger joint.

tell your husband its not just burgers.. you can get one with cheese, one with bacon, and even one with two patties lol.. those were the changes I made each time

 

[disneynewbee]

On our last trip we had the free qs dining since we were staying value. Up until a week before I fretted over whether or not to pay the extra and upgrade to the regular plan with ts meals. We had always done the regular plan in the past and I was scared to make the change. I finally decided to just stick with the qs and see how it went. Well let me tell you it was amazing and I felt so free. We still found nice air conditioned cool places to take a break and eat. I ate lots of things, salad, roasted chicken, fried shrimp. We had soooo much more time to really just relax and take everything in. I felt like we got so much more done yet I felt like we had a much more laid back relaxing time. I will never go back to table service meals. Didn't miss it at all.

 

[nooneshome]

The QSDP is great, but we would never buy it. We only use it during free dining. The value is not the same as when it came with two snacks. There is TONS of variety on the plan, but we would always come out ahead if we paid OOP.

This applies to us too. We will do one TS meal each trip. We also bring breakfast stuff so we only get a couple of breakfasts at the food court. It stinks that you only get the one snack credit per day. With two we always seemed to have plenty to splurge with. Also we don't like being tied down to ADRs.