Additional Information

Are you planning to add a Dining Plan to your Walt Disney World vacation and are wondering, “is the meal plan worth the money?” 

Well I add few pointers here that I hope will help you make a decision.

My family have used the Dining Plan and also opted not to use (and instead pay out of pocket). The Disney Dining Plan can be a good or poor value depending upon how you will use it. 

Lets start by the basics. The Disney Dining Plan is a prepaid meal plan offered at Walt Disney World so guests can budget their dining costs in advance and (potentially) save money. It provides guests with credits that can be redeemed for snacks, counter service meals, table service meals, or fine dining meals. These credits are stored on the guest’s MagicBand, and you can keep track of your credits with the receipt you will get after every meal or snack purchase.

To add meal plan to your vacation you need to purchase a vacation package that includes Walt Disney World Resorts hotel + tickets. This means that if you want the Disney Dining Plan, you cannot save money by staying in off-site hotel.

Disney offer three kinds of dinning plan:

Quick Service Disney Dining Plan

This is the lowest tier of the Disney Dining Plan. This is the tier of the Disney Dining Plan that is typically included with Free Dining at the Value Resorts.

For each person on the room reservation, the Quick Service Disney Dining Plan includes:

o two counter-service meals (per night)

o two snacks (per night)

o  a refillable drink mug (per stay)

The per night price of the Quick Service Plan is $52.50 per adult and $23.78 per child ages 3-9.

Standard Disney Dining Plan

This is the standard tier of the Disney Dining Plan (Disney refers to it as simply the “Disney Dining Plan.” To avoid confusion, we’ll call it the “Standard Disney Dining Plan”), and what’s typically included with “Free” Dining at the Moderate, Deluxe, and Deluxe Villa Resorts. For the price difference between the plans, you can upgrade from the Free Quick Service Dining Plan to this plan at the Value Resorts.

For each person on the room reservation, the Standard Disney Dining Plan includes:

o one counter-service meal (per night)

o one sit-down meal (per night)

o two snacks (per night)

o  a refillable drink mug (per stay)

The per night price of the Standard Disney Dining Plan is $75.49 per adult and $27.98 per child.

Deluxe Disney Dining Plan

Excepting the Premium Package or Platinum Dining (both over $200/night per person!) that are not recommended for anyone, this is the upper echelon of Disney Dining Plans. By default, no resort tier receives this package for Free Dining, but you can pay the difference to upgrade to it.

For each person on the room reservation, the Deluxe Disney Dining Plan includes:

o three meals at your choice of counter service restaurants or table service restaurants (per night)

o two snacks (per night)

o one refillable drink mug (per stay)

The per-night price of the Deluxe Disney Dining Plan is $116.25 per adult and $43.49 per child during regular season, and more during peak season.

 You can save on the Disney Dining Plan, but you have to be a certain type of eater and not waste any credits. If you are a big eater who likes steak and would like to order it at every meal, you can save money with the Disney Dining Plan. This requires that everyone in your party is a big eater, and that all of you use all of your counter service and snack credits wisely.

If your teens are human garbage disposals and the adults in your party love steak, the Dining Plan can offer some savings. As soon as anyone in your party starts ordering chicken or pasta, those savings disappear to the point that you start losing money on the Disney Dining Plan. No matter what they order, a vegetarian will lose money by using the Disney Dining Plan–without exception.

With the Disney Dining Plan, anyone who enjoys a drink or two per day will also come out ahead. The cost of drinks at Walt Disney World restaurants average around $8-14, if you get two glasses of wine per day, you’re looking at around $20-25/person every day.

But if you’re non-drinkers or using the Quick Service Disney Dining Plan and spend most of your time in Magic Kingdom (where alcohol isn’t served at counter service restaurants), you come out behind. Alcohol is the huge new wildcard to the Disney Dining Plan, and can really swing the pendulum of value. Whether that’s in your favor or out of your favor depends almost entirely upon how many alcoholic drinks you enjoy per day.

If you are planning to visit Walt Disney World during Epcot Food and Wine 

Festival or any festival; you can take advantage of this value that does not only require drinking–this is also about snacking!

Some of the best snacks at the Epcot festivals can cost as much as $10 and can be purchased using snack credits. This is effectively double the value that Disney ascribes to the snack credits. We highly recommend stockpiling snack credits and using them during your Epcot days, as not only are these festival snacks a great use of credits, but the Epcot festivals are a ton of fun, and this is a way to avoid the sticker shock of paying out of pocket.

If value is your main concern and you aren’t a steak-addict, it can take a lot of pre-planning to save money by using the Disney Dining Plan. Because the margin of savings can be so low, in many cases the Dining Plan causes guests to order the most expensive item on the menu to get “value” out of the plan.

The same goes for choosing more expensive restaurants. There have times on the Dining Plan when a cheaper menu item sounded good, but there was that lingering thought in the back of my mind that if I didn’t order something more expensive, the Dining Plan would actually cost us more than paying out of pocket.

Also if you planning to do Character Meal experience you will save money with the Dinning plan taking in consideration that the average meal per person is around $55 adult and $35 child.

It’s good to pre-plan where you want to eat at Walt Disney World regardless of whether you’re on the plan, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but using the Dining Plan increases the amount of pre-planning that’s necessary–if you care about saving money.