There has been a major price hike at Disney World for the past few weeks. It’s been creeping on, starting with the change to the ticket pricing system, and continuing with merchandise, price of soft drinks, food and restaurant meals.
As a whole, prices have gone up between 5% and up to a 20% rise, adding up to the largest price increase in years. As an example see DFB’s story from October regarding price raise of beverages, snacks and more.
If you have a Disney World vacation planned, or are planning one in the near future, you will be paying more for just about everything. This makes Disney World an even more expensive vacation destination than it already was.
With that in mind, I had to rethink my strategy this trip not to take the dining plan. I had a sit down and crunched the numbers, re-adjusting my budget, taking into consideration the new food pricing.
Just as a reminder, we are doing a split stay this trip. And to save us a load of money, I attached all our park tickets to the Art of Animation package, instead of splitting them between the two resorts. I attacked this issue in my post about our split stay. Long story short, if I do want to go with the dining plan I have to do one of two options:
Either split the tickets between the two resort stays, and book two separate packages with resort, tickets and dining;
Or, add the dining plan to our existing package at first resort stay – at AOA.
There is an option to add the dining plan to our room only package, under certain circumstances. For us it just wasn’t suitable.
Still, the new pricing really made a dent in our plan and budget.
I decided to return to the drawing board. I took all our dining plans for the first 7 nights (8 days), checked out the new pricing, and redid our approximate predicted dining expenses. Then, I went online and found the new Disney World Promotion with dining. With their promotion dining, during our first 7 night stay, would cost us just over $60 a day per person on the regular dining plan. Not bad at all. Working the numbers, it came to an approximate saving of $200 before the snacks. Wow. What a difference. From saving money not doing the dining plan to the exact opposite. Really quite unbelievable.
Saying that, the thing that made the real difference was the discounted offer from Disney. Without this discount the dining plan would still cost us more than paying ourselves for the dining. This is a $500 difference in price.
I immediately contacted my travel agent, and to keep a long story short, added the dining plan to our package. It actually fit right in with our ADR’s. Only thing, we most likely won’t be using up all of our quick service credits.- It’s just too much food. But even then, we will still end up saving money. We will probably exchange our extra quick service credits for snack credits. The plan is to use the left over snack credits for gifts (candy, rice crisps, cookies etc.).
In conclusion
It’s true. The dining packages aren’t always the cheapest way to go. Some would prefer to pay more just for some peace and quiet, not needing to deal with money and calculations while at Disney World. For this trip, at start, we elected to pay our own way. But then we were hit with the biggest price hike in years, and found the need to recalculate our figures. That brought on a major change to our plans this time, adding on the dining plan to our package, for the first 7 nights of our Disney World stay.