August 24th, 2009
Discount Disney Family Vacations – Enjoy Disney World Restaurants While Saving Money
Our family loves visiting Disney World, and love to save money while doing it even more! In order to visit as often as we can, planning a discount Disney family vacation has become a bit of a hobby of mine, so in this article, I will explain some ways that our family uses to save money on food while at Disney.
I have to say that visiting Disney World is, for use, a great excuse to eat! There are so many great choice, and most of the sit-down restaurants are good quality. In addition, it is so much fun to try new things, so we truly enjoy the eating experience at Disney World. But to do this, it can be expensive, so we have found a few ways that work for us to help save money while still enjoying the food options at Walt Disney World.
To begin with, we signed up for the Disney Visa card, and we use the rewards to pay for our meals. Our visits are usually about once year, so by saving our Disney dollars for the entire year, we manage to accumulate a pretty good amount that we use just for meals. Please know that I am not suggesting opening a credit card to just run up the balance to pay for meals! But for us, since we use one card for everything, the Disney card is the one that we use for that purpose, and then we pay it off each month. It works well for us, so that in many years, we pay hardly anything at all for meals on our Disney World vacation.
Next, we are big fans of the Disney Dining Plan. The way the plan works, if you are staying on Disney property, you have the ability to choose from several levels of the Dining Plan, basically pre-paying for nearly all of your meals. And with several choices (providing snack, counter service, or in some plans, table service meals) there is an option for nearly any budget. For our family, who like table service meals each night, we choose the Plus Disney Dining Plan and get one snack credit, one counter meal (entree, drink, and dessert), and one table service meal (entree, drink, and dessert) per person, per day. For us, the snacks generally work well most days for breakfast, and the others will be used for lunch and dinner each day. It is frankly more food per person than we can usually eat, and so we often take our dessert with us since we are so full! For this level, the cost per day for our family of 3 is less than we would have paid just for dinner, so we are saving quite a bit of money using the Disney Dining Plan.
Related to the Disney Dining Plan is another great way to possibly save hundreds of dollars on your Disney vacation: plan your trip to be eligible for one of the Free Dining promotions that Disney offers from time to time. In the past, this has been a traditional late summer/early fall offer, but the economic climate this year has prompted Disney to offer Free Dining for most of the summer, and now through mid-December as well. Is there any better way to enjoy Walt Disney World than by eating for free?
I must say that, with all the wonderful food our family eats while at Disney World, it is a good thing that there is so much walking involved! We have definitely found that by saving money on food, it has truly helped us to plan a fantastic discount Disney family vacation on a regular basis.