Affordable Disney Vacations Five Easy Ways To Reduce Your Food Budget
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 having some meals in your room. This is very easy to do if you are staying in a vacation home, villa, condo, or hotel suite, as you will have use of a kitchen. But even in a standard hotel room you can request a mini-frig if there is not already one, where you can store milk, juice, and sandwich items.
2. Bring your own snacks, juices, water etc. Not having to pay park prices on these things will save you a lot of money.
3. Consider sharing meals, especially if you have little ones who don't eat much. Disney portions are usually quite large and sharingwhether between 2 kids, or an adult and childwill not leave anyone hungry.
4. You can eat off-site and save money as well. If you are staying off-Disney property, ask at your hotel for local restaurant discount coupons or promotions. Or try looking for online coupons/promotions through local Florida/Orlando websites. You may even find it to be cost-effective to buy a local Entertainment Book for restaurant coupons.
5. Lastly, we absolutely love the Disney Dining Plan. For those not familiar with how this works, IF you are staying on Disney property, you have the option to choose from several levels of the Disney Dining Plan, and basically pre-pay for most, if not all of your meals. Since there are several choices, each providing a certain number of snacks, counter meals, or table service meals, there are options for just about any budget. As our family enjoys table service meals each night, we choose the Plus Disney Dining Plan, and receive one snack credit, one counter meal (entree, drink, and dessert), and one table meal (entree, drink, and dessert) per person, per day. We have found that the snacks generally work well most days for breakfast, and the others are used for lunch and dinner each day. Honestly, it is more food per person than we can usually eat, and often we will get our dessert at dinner "to go" since we are so full! And for this level at least, the cost per day for our family of 3 is usually less than we would have paid for just the dinner itself, so it is a huge cost-saver for us.
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!
