Tips for making the Dining Plan stretch to all 3 meals?

[dawnball]

To be honest, I always start a trip worrying about how we're going to stretch the dining credits to cover all three meals. Then by the end, I'm trying to use up as many credits as I can at meals and saying "can't we just skip the dessert?" We usually have a stack of side salads in the cooler/fridge, and a stash of leftover milks and juices, a little pile of gluten free brownies, more baby carrots than you can shake a stick at..

It's easy to push sharing over what people want to eat, and I think that's a slippery slope on vacation. We're much happier if we share when it's convenient, or we generally want the same things, and don't share when it isn't. On some trips the kids have felt compelled to get "something everyone else wants, so we can share" or "get the most dollar value, instead of getting what we want", because we get enthusiastic about being efficient with the dining plan. Spending two snack credits so that one can have mint chocolate chip and the other can have cookies and cream instead of both settling for chocolate or vanilla isn't a big deal.

 

[scbeachgirl]

We have done two trips with this plan and always end up with snacks to spend out on the last day. Sharing for us seemed to work best when based on hunger levels. With 6 adults, we would order 3 CS meals and divide up the food based on who wanted to eat what. If anyone was still hungry, we would use a snack credit so they could buy what they wanted or we would buy another meal. It only takes one or two meals to figure out how to make this work so that everyone is happy.
Another thing was to make late morning buffet reservations at MK. We would go and ride the rides for an hour and a half and then eat "brunch" at 10:45 am for our TS meal. Then eat CS for dinner.
We also have one day when we eat ice cream for breakfast, it is vacation after all. We use our snack credit for mickey bars at a park. Kids love the idea and the ice cream has enough calories to keep you going until lunch.

 

[Betty Rohrer]

on a MK day with crystal palace breakfast, i would get a larger snack for lunch and look at cosmic rays chicken and rib meal for dinner. large enough to split some to ad to kids if needed. also for dinner after day at AK and tusker house, go to downtown disney and eat at wolfgang puck's express,a cs, for dinner. both of these give big meals and are counter serve meals. do something similar to what was suggested with sunshine seasons. these are the ones we use to help with cs meals.

 

[brymalis]

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[brymalis]

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[csmommy]

WOW, Thanks so much to everyone for all your great suggestions and advice !!

It does make sense to split CS meals where possible so I'd better start preparing my children to do that. The trick will be getting them to agree on ordering the same thing!

We will be happy to have quick breakfasts in our rooms as we plan to be there for RD on our park days which means we will have to get up early enough without also needing to allow time to eat in the food court! I like the idea of a light breakfast with either using saved desserts, snack credits or getting Garden Grocer and then using the CS and TS for lunch/dinner. However, I've stuffed that plan up a bit by booking pre park-opening breakfasts at Tusker House on our AK day and Crystal Palace on our MK day. I'm happy to be doing those breakfasts but using the TS credit at breakfasts does make the rest of the day harder to stretch out the dining plan. Therefore I think we will have to start off by splitting our CS meals so that we have enough to cover us on those days where we use the TS for breakfasts.

We take in breakfast bars for RD & then schedule the latest buffet for breakfast. This takes us through the day & use (sometimes split) CS for dinner.

Otherwise it is lunch in room, CS for lunch & TS for dinner. Works every time for us & no one is ever hungry.

 

[SnipsNSnails]

We will have 6 adults and 1 child and an under 3. We plan on my mom and I and grandma and grandpa splitting a CS for lunch each day while my DH and dad will eat their own and the kids will split a child's meal. We will have 1 child's CS and 6 adult CS leftover as we don't plan on CS the day we arrive or the day we leave + another 12 from splitting meals. We plan on using the 18 CS meals to get 3 CS breakfasts for everyone to split on the 6 days we are there and we also have 1 child's CS we can use and snack credits if we need more. The last morning we'll be in a rush so we'll eat things bought the night before with extra snack credits or at the airport.

 

[Amy&Dan]

I think you will be fine. As others have suggested, you can so easily split cs meals, the portions are very large.

We use our snacks for breakfast quite often.

We are a family of four, two adults, a 16 year old son and a 14 year old daughter. My son is a huge eater, dd a very light eater! A typical day on the DDP for us is:

Get two counter serve breakfasts at our resort food court. At the values and mods, you can get what is called a Bounty Platter that is huge. We split that between the four of us, we get two drinks with each meal for a total of four drinks. So we can get four juices or milks. We might also use one snack credit to get a danish or an order of toast.

For lunch, we split two counter serve meals, again portions are large.

Then for dinner we each get our own table service meal.

Sometimes we do the late breakfast buffet, then end up doing four counter serve meals for an early dinner.

With the snacks thrown in for good measure, we come out fine and in fact soemtimes have a few leftover credits (not so much anymore due to ds' huge appetite!).

When we have done the DDP the only thing we have paid out of pocket for is cocktails and the occasional salad with our ts meal. Both of which we have skipped the last few times due to the money issue.