Ddp vs pay as you go

[Disney17]

We are staying in contemporary for a wk and thought about adding the dining plan which would be £1336 for the wk- would we use this amount of money for wk if we ate as we went if that make sense? Which would be about £190 a day for 2adults and dd 13 ds 10.

[loves2plan]

Really depends on where you want to eat and the amount of food you want. Also, at sit down ts restaurants (not buffets) you're children may prefer to order from the child's menu which is a lot cheaper. QS meals are often big enough to share, especially pizzas at places like Blaze and Wolfgang Puck Express.
This calculator is quite helpful: distripplanner
Other than that it's a case of spending a bit of time looking at menus and doing a guesstimate of what you might be likely to eat.

[Vikkicat]

I've worked out roughly what we will spend per day on meals and snacks (going into specifics, like where we want to eat each meal, what we will 'probably' order) and i cannot get DDP to be cost effective at all, or the QSDP for that matter, for the 13 nights we are on site we will be having 8 TS meals, and some off site while out shopping / KSC and for the 4 of us DDP is something like $3600 and we will be spending about $2500, both not including alcohol. for the 4 of us we do eat well, out most meals, but we do share 3 meals between 4 of us at lunch!

the only real way you will know is do a decent comparison and look at all of the menus
sorry - not the definitive post you might have been hoping for

[Mr Tom Morrow]

I have done the maths repeatedly and can never get the DDP to be worthwhile. We eat at a nice restaurant every night. Have an appetizer and entree but cannot abide desserts.
So much cheaper to do OOP than DDP which we as DVC cannot get free anyhow.

[Hevfev]

I was thinking of adding DDP to my package but we didn't spend that much on food last time we were there so not bothering.
If you get it for free it's obviously worth it, but if not for us it isn't worth it.

[sky13]

I added DDP to my upcoming trip.

I suspect it will work out to be either equivalent, or perhaps slightly more than paying out of pocket, but I'm looking forward to the convenience. It's also nice to be able to book ADRs without worrying about cost (as it's already been paid for!)

[Guest]

we have had free DDP for a few years, last Oct we stayed in our DVC and MVC units, so did not get free DDP

we asked the girls what meals they really wanted to do, Chef Mickey first night ( a family tradition ) and a few others ( worked out to be 8 onsite meals, 3 of them breakfasts ) and the rest were off-site, we really did prefer it that way

Now we have often done the sums, afterall, we have 1 week in DVC and 1 week in Marriott to use, have owned it a few years and never used it due to the free DDP offers, with what we eat, it works out that if we pay for DDP we get a free snack every day, it is actually that close, paying for DDP just saved us about $5 a day each, of course we often dont really want 4 X QS for lunch, but we know we have them to use and still order food, crazy really
a few times ( before you could swap a QS for Snacks, i used to have a Starbucks "QS meal " of a frappachino, a brownie and a banana just because i wanted a frappachino , we used t share the brownie and the banana would be put in the bag for later and then battered to hell and binned every day

[cartoonp]

Originally Posted by Mr Tom Morrow

I have done the maths repeatedly and can never get the DDP to be worthwhile. We eat at a nice restaurant every night. Have an appetizer and entree but cannot abide desserts.
So much cheaper to do OOP than DDP which we as DVC cannot get free anyhow.

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Same here we never done DDP and never will I know for a lot of people this is ideal but for us it's nort we eat off site a lot as we do not want to have every meal on Disney although we love staying there

[Disney17]

We decided not to go with it this time, with the dining plan both my kids still eat kid size meals but with the ddp they both classed as adults so would be paying for 4adults on dining plan when if we went out with the ddp we would only be ordering 2 adults and 2 children meals. And just fancied eating where we fancy rather then off the list. Also I found we ate pudding for sake of it cause they were included and we really didn't need them( I'm always on a diet lol)

[Minnie Mum]

We have added it for oct ) 2a/2c) for us it makes sense as we will do lots of character meal. I also like to know it's paid for- particularly with the uncertain dollar rate.