Which dining plan should we chose?

[brooke.jax.gia]

I have no clue which one would suit us best, so hopefully some of you who are more knowledgeable than me can help!

We would like to do character breakfasts, TS meals and possibly signature dining. I'm assuming we'll do some CS, but also probably a lot of snacks. My kids are huge snackers, as am I! I'd hate to book the DxDP and not use it, or book the DDP and have to pay OOP.

We are staying Value, so I saw in another thread that signature dining can be a hassle to get to. How much of a hassle are we talking about? We will be traveling with DS6 and DD2.

TIA

 

[3Minnies1Mickey]

I'd look at what meals you'd be interested in doing and going from there. If you'd like to do 2 TS meals a day or a signature every day, then usually the Deluxe is a good value. Start by looking at the menus on allears.net or http://www.wdwinfo.com/wdwinfo/dining.htm. Compare where you'd eat, what you'd order, calculate tax, then compare what you'd pay for the Deluxe Plan.

As far as difficulty getting to signature restaurants from values: buses go from resorts to parks, not resorts to resorts. If you don't have your own vehicle, you'd have to take a bus from the value to a park, then another bus to the resort you want to dine at or take a bus to the TTC and take the monorail to one of the monorail resorts. for dining.

For example, say you were staying at POP and want to dine at the AKL. You would take a bus from POP to AK, then catch another bus from AK to AKL. Your other option would be to take a cab, but that is more difficult when you have a child in a car seat.

 

[Colleen27]

If you're looking to do both character meals and signature dining, it would definitely be worth looking into the deluxe plan. On the basic plan, you run out of credits in a hurry if you do any signature dining.

As 3Minnies suggested, a good place to start is looking over the menus and narrowing down your choices. Think about where you'd want to eat if money was no object, just thinking about time and travel and other intangibles. Then count up how many of which types of credits you'd need to do that, and decide which plan more closely matches.

We've done the deluxe plan twice now and have tried every signature restaurant except Citricos and Flying Fish (well, those and Le Cellier, which isn't signature now but will be by the time you go), and we haven't found transportation to be a big issue.

Most of the signatures are easy to get to. Four of them are in the MK area, and work well on MK park days or after short days at early closing parks because you just have to take a boat or monorail to MK to catch the bus back to your resort. And there are (will be) two in park signature restaurants, three if you count CRT which is 2 credits but not signature quality in terms of food. All of the dinner shows are also at MK area resorts if you're interested in those.

The Epcot area resort signatures work best on Epcot days, or on Studios days if you have park hoppers since you need to cut through Epcot to get to the buses (Studio buses often stop running too early, unless you have an early dinner or the park is open unusually late). Jiko is the only one of the signature restaurants that's a pain to get to in my opinion, because AKL is so out of the way that any transfer means two long bus rides. We did that last trip, transferring at Epcot to get back to our room at CBR, and decided next time we'll just call a cab.