unsinkable
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2009
- Messages
- 25
Final Thoughts Part One!
Just to reiterate, I do NOT watch Jerry Springer, I just happen to find the phrase necessary!
At first I was going to make it one huge post, but thought I should just break it up into two parts makes for easier reading I think.
So let's get right in to it...
The Cost: We did 2 TS breakfasts, 7 TS lunches, and 7 Sig Restaurants (would have been 8 SR, but remember our little mishap with Yachtsman??) So we had to use 2 of those credits towards dinner later that night back at CSR after we slept off the alcohol
and then the final 2 credits we used back at CSR towards sandwich meals at the Pepper Market for the flight home! That worked out perfectly for us! Unfortunately, I didnt have the receipts for those meals, so this total is going to be without those two meals so keep that in mind that the total would be a little bit higher if I added those in.
Kona Café (B) $37.64
Artist Point (D) - $149.10
Flame Tree BBQ (L) $24.78
Hollywood Brown Derby (D) - $130.20
Tonys Town Square (L) - $68.51
Narcoossees (D) - $193.04
Le Cellier (L) - $87.81
Flying Fish (D) - $144.16
Cape May Café (B) - $40.45
Chefs de France (L) - $60.02
California Grill (D) - $157.08
Teppan Edo (L) - $84.89
Citricos (D) 146.21
Sci-Fi Dine-in Theater (L) - $68.51
Jiko (D) - $143.72
The Wave (L) 69.58
Total = $1, 605.70
Also keep in mind, this total is without the tip (we tipped every meal between 15-20%) and without those two meals that we didnt include, I would add about $40-50 towards the total.
ALSO, this is NOT including the 32eek
snacks that we had to use up, so if we averaged about $2.50 a snack, that would be around $80.00. But even thats pretty low, considering DH wanted to make sure he got the most out of his money, so if it was close to $4.00, he got it!
Now the Deluxe Dining plan is $79.99 per person, per night of your stay.
$79.99 X 2 ppl = $159.98 X 8 nights = $1,279.84 TEACHERS, do you like how I worked out my math?!?!Im not sure if the 79.99 is including tax???
OOP → $1,605.70
DxDP → - $1,279.84
$325.86 Total Saved(add about $40-$50 from the other 2 meals and add about $80 for snacks = $445.86)
So is the Deluxe Dining plan a good deal???
1.) Do you love food? If you answered heck-to-the-yes, then this is your BEST option! Youll be in food heaven if you go this route. The Basic Plan is good, in that it also allows variety between CS and TS, but this goes above and beyond The Basic Dining Plan and permits you to try some of the best food thats offered at the Walt Disney World Resort! Remember that you get 2 snacks per person per day, which also means MORE food! We found ourselves having lots of snack credits left over at the end of the trip, so we just used those credits towards packaged food that we could take home and give out to family, if we wanted to .I didnt I ate it Im stingy when it comes to WDW snacks!
2.) What is your ultimate goal: Rides or Food? Keep in mind that if you want to make the most out of the DxDP, you should be using your credits towards TS and Signature Restaurants, otherwise it will be a big money waster. So if youll be doing TS and/or SR, youll more than likely be making ADRs, which means youll probably have 2 or 3 ADRs per day. This means youre going to have to find a way to tour the parks efficiently if you want to see/do a lot of the attractions. We couldnt do some things that we wanted to do, because of time constraints. Which leads me into my next point..
3.) What time of the year are you visiting? We visited the World during the Off-Season, in which the parks closed early everyday. Soooo that means whatever was on our to do attractions list, had to be scrunched into a specific time period in order to make our ADRs on time. For some reason I never took that into consideration when making ADRs or my touring plans.
I would honestly recommend the Basic Plan during the off season if your main goal is to do and see everything, but still have some great food options.
The Deluxe Plan I would recommend for the regular/peak season when the parks open earlier and close much later. This allows you to do BOTH the attractions/resort hopping/DTD, etc AND eat at some fabulous places!
4.) Are you willing to travel? I say this because it seemed like we were always on that DANG bus! We would leave our resort, get to a park and stay at the park for 2 hours, get back on the bus to make our ADR, be back on the bus to go to a park for a few more hours, then be back on the bus again to make our dinner ADR, etc etc EVERYDAY! Phew, that was exhausting to even write that, let alone think we did that! If your answer is Yes, then make sure your ADRs are somewhat close in proximity to you what youll be doing around that time, whether it be at your resort pool swimming, at DTD shopping, etc.
Im actually VERY glad that we went with the Deluxe Dining Plan. When I was making our plans for that trip, I had actually had the Basic Dining Plan down my DH looked it over and wanted to upgrade to the Deluxe, since there were a lot of SRs that he wanted to do. Im really glad that he changed that part of our trip. I probably would have been to scared to make those plans on my own!I do believe that everyone should try this plan once, just to expand your dining horizon
In the real world, would I have ordered an appetizer? No, I would have opted for dessert. Would DH have ordered a dessert? No, he would have gone for the appetizer. Even though this was a lot of food for one person, we were able to try things on the menu that we maybe would have glanced over, if we only had to get one appetizer. TIDBIT: Our server was telling me that Disney was thinking about modifying the Deluxe Plan so that each person had an option of either doing the Appetizer or the Dessert and not both. If this was the case, it would work out perfectly for DH and I! I also wouldn't feel so obligated to get both the app and dessert even though I wasn't hungry. Have you guys heard of this??
Anyways, YES, there was a lot of food, yes there was a lot of running around, but it was fun and adventurous! We only did one repeat restaurant on this trip, which was Chefs de France, so all the other restaurants were very next and exciting to us! Which is what Disney is all about .Disney gives you the opportunity to be bold and daring, where perhaps, you may not be in the real world!
Will we be doing the Deluxe Dining Plan again?
YES! But only during the peak/regular season...if you went back and looked at our ADR times, youll see we had to eat dinner early pretty much everynight. That was because we wanted to be able to go back to the parks after dinner. However, we would have preferred later dinner slots like 7-730 everynight. If we were to do that during this past trip, we would have never made it to the parks because they all closed by 10pm. Had we gone with the Basic Dining, we would have had a more open appointment book. But Im so thrilled I was able to do the DxDP, because how else was I going to report back to you with some amazing food?!
So that was A LOT of talking and critical thinking .although Part 2 will be even harder for me to do because Ill be choosing my fav 3 restaurants and for the first time EVER, DH will be making an APPEARANCE and choosing his favorite three!!!![]()
So stick around!
P.s. if theres something specific you would like to know for my last update, let me know!!!![]()
Hi, Lesha!
What a great trip report!
About the travel time on the bus...did you ever take a cab? I can't remember if you ever did that.
We are a fam of 5 and we took a cab a few times. It was totally worth the extra $15-20.
I actually think if I was going to splurge, I'd splurge on cabs at Disney!
Take care!