Back in August, I wrote a column that outlined the details of the various Dining Plans currently offered at Walt Disney World (you can read that column here). I also presented a bit of analysis on the Quick Service Dining Plan with a look at its pros and cons. I thought it might now be time to take a closer look at some of the other plans.
To refresh your memory, here’s a look at the current 2009 offerings, as well as their adult and child prices (prices include tax but are exclusive of gratuity):
- Quick Service Dining Plan: $29.99/$8.99
- Dining Plan: $39.99/$10.99
- Deluxe Dining Plan: $71.99/$20.99
- Premium Dining Plan: $159.00/$109.00
- Platinum Dining Plan: $209.00/$144.00
We’ve already investigated the Quick Service Dining Plan so let’s move up to the…
Dining Plan
The Disney Dining Plan has been around the longest of the bunch. It includes one quick service meal, one snack, and one table service meal per person, per night of your package stay for everyone in the party ages 3 and over. Again, let’s ask the question that most people ask: “Is it worth it?”
When the Disney Dining Plan was first announced, the table service meal included an appetizer, an entrée, a dessert and soft drink. At that time, the price also included tax and gratuity. When the 2008 Plan was introduced, Disney did away with the appetizer and announced that the price no longer included the gratuity—and they dropped the price by $1. Let me allow that to sink in for a moment.
In 2007, you paid $39 per day for the plan. In 2008, they took away the appetizer. Appetizers can range from about $5 to about $13. For our analysis, let’s estimate them at $8. Similarly, gratuities might vary considerably given the guest, the quality of the service, and maybe even the type of restaurant. Disney, like a number of other establishments, places the gratuity for good service at 18% so we’ll use that. The gratuity on a $40 meal would be then be $7.20. So they cut out your $8 appetizer and the $7.20 gratuity and… they dropped the price by a single measly dollar. I don’t know about you but, to me, that looks an awful lot like a $14 price increase. To put that in different terms, how about a 36% price increase in one year?
So, it seemed to be a good deal in 2007 and earlier—at least it was extremely popular. Is it still a good deal in 2008 and beyond?
As in my earlier analysis of the Quick Service Plan, I don’t see a real benefit in plotting a typical family trip using 2 adults, 2.3 children and a cocker spaniel. For analysis purposes, we’ll just look at a single day for a single adult and form our opinions from that.
In 2009, the cost of a single day of the Dining Plan will be $39.99. Let’s call that $40. For that, I’m getting a counter service meal, a snack and a table service meal. The cost of a counter service meal doesn’t vary significantly across property so, for this analysis, let’s try lunch at Cosmic Ray’s in the Magic Kingdom. We’ll have the Turkey Bacon Wrap ($7.59), a slice of Carrot Cake (3.59) and a Coke ($2.39). After tax, that comes to $14.45. For our snack, let’s get a bottle of water from a cart in the park ($2.00).
For dinner, we’re going to splurge a bit ,and I managed to nail one of the hard-to-get Advanced Dining Reservations at Le Cellier. There, we dine on the New York Strip Steak ($34.99). We’ll indulge a bit for dessert and have the Chocolate on Chocolate Whiskey Cake ($7.99) and wash it all down with a Diet Coke (2.39) (isn’t it great how we can consume 11 billion calories in a meal and still insist on that diet soft drink?) Our total for dinner, with tax, is $48.32. Our total for the day is $64.77. Almost $65 and Disney let us have that for a mere $40? What are they thinking?
Can we conclude that the Dining Plan is a great deal? From a financial standpoint, it would be hard to argue against it. If you had structured your dining precisely as the example I used, you’d have spent $25 less than you would have without the Dining Plan. I’ll grant you that the example I used may have been a bit extreme in choosing higher-priced entrees and desserts but, don’t you think that would be a natural inclination? If you’re perusing a menu, and you’re on the Dining Plan so you know there will be no difference to you in cost, wouldn’t you tend to navigate toward the higher-priced selections? I probably would opt for the Le Cellier Mushroom Filet Mignon with wild mushroom risotto, white truffle and herb butter sauce at $34.99 before I’d give in to the Mustard-basted All Natural Chicken with cream cheese mashed potatoes, roasted vegetables finished with mustard chicken broth at $20.99. I’d be trying to maximize my investment (and probably my waistline as well).
So we can agree that it’s looking like a pretty good deal. Let’s put our Conspiracy Theorists hat back on for a moment and see if we can figure out why Disney is giving us such a great deal. First, there’s the angle I mentioned in the earlier column. If you want to take advantage of the Plan, you’re going to have all your meals on property, giving you absolutely no reason to leave the confines of Disney to spend any money elsewhere.
Secondly, we can probably agree that, while the Dining Plan is a good deal, it’s not quite as good as it was a year or two ago. Should we wonder if there is a long term plan that Disney has to offer it as a loss leader? That is: initially offer it at a loss and slowly change it each year until they are making a profit while allowing most guests to now assume it’s a major part of their Disney experience. They did have that 36% price increase last year.
Apples to Apples or Apples to Oranges?
It’s probably a safe bet that all of Disney’s various dining plans represent a financial savings when you compare the apples to apples of menu prices versus the cost of the plan. If that’s your criteria for evaluating the various plans then, by all means, go for it and don’t look back. If you believe it’s a good deal for you and your family, don’t let anyone sway you.
If, however, using one of the various plans would cause a significant change in your dining habits, you need to dig a little deeper with your analysis. This is more of the apples to oranges comparison. In my case, a typical week at Disney World runs the gamut of dining experiences. Because, as Disney Vacation Club Members, we typically stay in a villa with kitchen or kitchenette facilities, breakfast is usually had in the room. Typically, it’s coffee and a muffin of some kind. Once or twice, we’ll venture out to a more traditional breakfast (eggs, pancakes, etc.) in a restaurant.
Lunches and dinners, over the course of a typical trip, will vary between counter and table service. We never have table service for every dinner of a trip nor do we always do counter service for lunch. As a matter of fact, we rarely consume 3 meals every day of a trip. If we’ve planned a particularly nice dinner, let’s say at the Yachtsman Steakhouse, we may skip lunch altogether to insure we’re good and hungry for a big steak. If we’ve had a larger than normal lunch, we may skip dinner and just have dessert or a snack somewhere.
I guess what I’m saying is that, in my case, I couldn’t justify any Dining Plan based simply on how much it would save me comparing the cost of the plan to menu prices. I would need to compare the cost of the Plan to what I would have eaten had I not been on the Plan—in other words, what I would spend on dining during a typical trip. The only way to really do that is to analyze a past trip and then ask the question, “What if I was on the Dining Plan?” I actually did this for our trip in January 2008.
This analysis will get just a bit more complicated because I did use the Disney Dining Experience (DDE) card on this trip. For those that don’t know, the DDE card may be purchased by Annual Passholders and Florida residents. It offers a flat 20% discount of food and drink (including alcoholic beverages) at most table service establishments on property—and some counter service ones as well. There are additional discounts that may be had with the DDE but they’re not germane to this discussion. (And just to keep this as current as possible, in an apparent attempt to avoid confusion with the Disney Dining Plan, the Disney Dining Experience has just been renamed to… wait for it… Tables in Wonderland!)
Our trip in January covered 6 nights, so had I purchased the Dining Plan, my wife and I would have shared 12 table service credits, 12 counter service credits and 12 snacks. During our trip, we would have used a total of 14 table service credits. They were a mix of lunch and (mostly) dinner and included extra credits used for dinners at the Flying Fish and Yachtsman Steakhouse, both of which require 2 table service credits under the Dining Plan. What that means is that I would have had to pay for a lunch (2 credits) out of pocket.
During the trip, we also had 9 snacks and 9 counter service meals. That means we would have had 3 left over, unused, in each category. I didn’t include our breakfasts in either category because they would have been out of pocket either way.
Further analyzing the costs involved show that the Dining Plan would have cost us a total of $455.88 (at DVC pricing). We spent a total of $481.90 for food and drinks, including tax. However, if I back out the breakfasts, alcohol and incidentals, items that would have been out of pocket in either case, that drops to $348.68. We actually spent $133 less by not using the Dining Plan.
I had used the DDE card whenever possible during this trip. The DDE card cost $60 and saved us $97.54 in applied discounts. It paid for itself in one trip and we hope to take two additional trips before it expires.
So what’s the bottom line? For us, buying and using the DDE card makes much more sense than the Dining Plans. For someone else, the Dining Plan will be an obvious choice. When we ask the question “Is the Dining Plan worth it?”, like many things at Disney, the answer is “It depends.”
That’s my opinion. What’s yours?
