Which Dining Plan Would You Do?

[brandigregory]

Have 2 adults and 1 4yo girl and 8 nights of stay. Regular Dining Plan is $953 and Deluxe is $1675. I need 7 QS and 15 TS credits for my plans/reservations.

Regular Plan leaves me covered on QS and 8 TS. So, is it worth the plan upgrade for 7 meals at $103/meal? Or should I go cash for those? I have a Chase Disney Visa so I get a 10% discount at a couple places.

Here is my list:
California Grill (2)
Hollywood & Vine lunch (1)
50's Prime Time dinner (1)
Akerhaus lunch (1)
Garden Grill (1)
Wave of Flavor breakfast (1)
Sanaa dinner (1)
Liberty Tree Tavern lunch (1)
CRT dinner (2)
Marakkesh lunch (1)
Biergarten dinner (1)
BOG dinner (1)
Chef Mickey's breakfast (1)

I am thinking I could go the cheaper route and just study menus and see if we can order for less than $103 per meal at 7 of the restaurants above.

What would you do experienced Disney travelers??

Thanks! Brandi

 

[Spunky946]

Having done both, the deluxe plan is too much time in restaurants ans planning on getting to the restaurant. There were also a few times where we would have taken a break but did not have time to before our ADR. We discovered one a day is enough for us.

If you are going to keep all of them, then I'd run the numbers.

Www.allears.net has all of the menus and prices.

 

[jawa7400]

I've always purchased the regular plan, but have heard that the deluxe plan is great if you know you want to do a lot of table service or signature dining ADRs (which it looks like you do).

If you go with the regular plan and just pay for the extra meals, I would look at menus ahead of time and use my DDP credits on the most expensive restaurants and pay cash for the cheaper ones.

That being said, I wouldn't want to spend my vacation doing calculations to make sure we stayed under the $107/meal. If it were me, I'd purchase the deluxe plan and enjoy all the ADRs you've made!

 

[MSSANDRA]

If you decide to do the Deluxe, I would for sure trade some of those CS or TS in order to make the deluxe a better deal. Now whether you want to do that with a preschooler or not is up to you. You really are right between DDPs. Are there a few more TS meals you would want to add to make most of your meals TS?

 

[MandiC]

Look at the menus, write down the prices of the things your family typically orders or you think they will order. Add it up, and go from there. I was going to switch because we had several signature meals
We had
Planet Hollywood
Akershus
Cinderella's Royal Table
California Grill
Le Cellier
Tusker House
Hollywood and Vine

For us, it was not worth upgrading to the deluxe. It would have left us with SO MANY TS credits even with the signature dinners and then I found myself thinking about adding more TS meals...which just isn't for us. First off, dining plan covers the TS meal but not the tip, so adding meals you wouldn't normally have gone with because of the dining plan will most definitely not save you any money. Second, how much time do you want to spend in restaurants. We did two TS meals one day of our trip and that was just too much time on dining for us, in the future we will definitely be sticking to 1 a day.
So for us, we didn't upgrade. We paid Planet Hollywood, California Grill and a few CS meals out of pocket and it was definitely cheaper than the cost of upgrading for *us*. It was a little tedious but I am glad I went and added it all up, you can find menus on one of the planning sites, I think the Disney site might have them as well, I really can't remember at the moment which I found mine on.

 

[quakechicago]

We always do the deluxe and do as many character meals a day as possible. When DD3 is older, since we're foodies who are lucky to live in a big city, I can see us doing this to enjoy many signatures (I'll miss the character meals then lol).

We don't think it's too much food probably because we're not at all in the mindset of needing to tank up for our one big meal for the day. In fact, I'm not a huge breakfast fan (picky) so I sometimes just have a plate of fruit or something small and coffee and then a luscious lunch!

We have breakfast at 8:00 or earlier, lunch at 1:30, and dinner at 8:00-ish. Consider we are walking on average our last trip over 15 miles a day, and it's fine. I like not worrying about what I'm going to order cost-wise and with all that walking, we're hungry.

The snacks are nice if DD or DH needs something (or heck if something looks great like those carrot cake cookies, a mickey ice cream bar, or a dole whip) and we use those left over snack credits before we go home to get a big bag of treats to bring with us to kinda keep the magic going. A mickey rice krispie treat on the plane home is a MUST. Feeling the post-trip-blues? A popcorn is in order!

In fact, we're doing an extra park day with a late flight home and we're going to go over our credits with CRT. sigh.

Have a great trip.

 

[monorailsilver]

I would just get rid of 7 TS places and just do the regular dining plan. Two places you are going to twice so pick 5 more that you don't think your dd will like.

But...I don't do dining. When we are at Disney, I can't be tied down to eating at a certain place at a certain time other then my planned non park days. Some nights we don't know if we want Epcot or the MK.

Good luck!