Can someone explain the disney dining plan?

[disaholic]

I'm confused, I dont think it would work out for us but can you explain the disney dining plan and what we get for the money??

[Mari]

I can only tell you about the regular dining plan, which is the one weve used

you get 1 sit down credit (meaning a meal at almost any restaurant, they have menus and you choose 1 entre, 1 main dish and 1 dessert), 1 quick service credit (a burger, hot dog, or something like that) and a snack credit (ice cream, soda, pop corn, etc) per day of stay.

For some restaurants and shows (Mickey's Backyard Barbecue, Cinderella's Royal Table, for example) you need two sit down credits.

You get the total number of credits on your keys to the kingdom card and you choose how to use them, you can use them all inone day if you so please of one each day or all the snacks in one afternoon, etc...

[JStrickPhoto]

We've used the dining plan about 3 times. If you have young children, I'd opt not to sign-up. However, teens? Sign-up!

As previously stated, the basic plan is a snack (soda, water, ice cream treat, etc), quick-service meal (think park fast-food) and a table-service meal (think sit-down restaurant).

Each meal, you use your room key and the receipt clearly states how many entitlements of each remain.

We found it best used on longer stays as you will save money on dining. That being said, both the quick- and table-service meal include dessert. So, you can easily over-indulge!

We tracked our usage using MS Excel and found we saved well over $120 in our group of 4. But again, would you get dessert all the time if you were paying for it?

The Disney website does a really good job of explaining the different plans.

Regardless of whether or not you choose to use the plan, as soon as you decide you are going to take a Disney vacation, go to the Disney website and start making dining reservations! Many ( and I mean A LOT) of the sit-down restaurants no longer have good availability due to the dining plan. You really need to plan ahead now since a larger portion of guests are staying at Disney Resorts using the dining plan.

Also, just because you are at Magic Kingdom for the day doesn't mean you need to dine there. We had a reservation for a great restaurant in the Grand Floridian. We monorailed over and back!