Affordable Disney Vacations – Save Money on Food with These Five Tips
I have to say that visiting Disney World is, for us, 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. In this article, we will look at five simple strategies that can really help you have an affordable Disney vacation.
1. Think about cooking and/or eating a few meals in your room. If you plan to stay in a vacation home, villa, condo, or even a hotel suite, you should have access to a kitchen. Even with a traditional hotel room, you will probably be able to have a small refrigerator: use this to store milk, juice, and sandwich fixings.
2. If you bring your own water, juice, snacks etc, you can save quite a bit of money since you won’t have to pay park prices.
3. It can be a great idea to share meals, since Disney portions are typically pretty large. Whether you want to have 2 kids share, or an adult and child, this can be a great strategy for saving money…and not wasting food…and still have everyone eat more than enough food.
4. You may also save some money by eating off-site, especially if you can use discount coupons or promotions. If staying off-Disney property, ask at your hotel for any they offer, and you can also look at local Orlando websites. Or purchase a local Entertainment book to get Orlando area restaurant coupons.
5. Last but definitely not least, I have to say that we love using the Disney Dining Plan. This is basically a pre-paid “meal plan” that allows you to choose from one of several levels of options, each providing snacks, counter meals, and in some cases table service meals: you choose the option that is right for your budget. The key is, it is only available IF you are staying on Disney property. Now our family enjoys having a table service meal each night, so we always choose the Plus Disney Dining Plan, which gives us one snack credit, one counter meal (entree, drink, and dessert), and one table meal (again entree, drink, and dessert) per person, per day. We use the snacks mostly for breakfast and the others for lunch and dinner, and have found that it is usually more food per person than we can eat! We usually end up getting dessert “to go” since we are full from the meal. This plan saves us quite a bit of money, as the cost per day for our family of 3 is less than we would have paid just for dinner.
Of course, with all that food we are eating, we are fortunately doing a LOT of walking at all the parks to exercise it off! Saving money on food has been a great way to help us plan a magical, affordable Disney vacation each year!
Nancy Bobby has been visiting Disney World for over ten years. Her favorite resource for saving money on a Disney vacation has been the Ultimate Disney World Savings Guide. Learn how how to have your own affordable Disney vacation and get her free Disney World planning bonus at her blog www.theaffordablemouse.com
Tags: affordable Disney vacations, discount Disney family vacations, Disney Dining Plan, Disney vacation planning, saving money at Disney World, Vacations, Walt Disney World
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March 03 2010 06:21 am | Vacations