Affordable Disney Vacations - Five Easy Ways to Reduce Your Food Budget
By Nancy Bobby. Filed in Vacations |
For our family, one of the highlights of our Disney World vacations is eating! With all of the great restaurant choices (most of which are good quality), and the fun of trying new foods, we have found that we truly love to eat at Disney World. However, it can become very expensive, so out of necessity, we have found several ways to save money on food, and yet still enjoy the many mouth-watering options the Walt Disney World offers. So let’s take a look at five easy ways to reduce your Disney food budget and make it possible to actually 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. If you bring your own water, juice, snacks etc, you can save quite a bit of money since you won’t have to pay park prices.
3. It can be a great idea to share meals, since Disney portions are typically pretty large. Whether you want to have 2 kids share, or an adult and child, this can be a great strategy for saving money…and not wasting food…and still have everyone eat more than enough food.
4. You may also save some money by eating off-site, especially if you can use discount coupons or promotions. If staying off-Disney property, ask at your hotel for any they offer, and you can also look at local Orlando websites. Or purchase a local Entertainment book to get Orlando area restaurant coupons.
5. Last but definitely not least, I have to say that we love using the Disney Dining Plan. This is basically a pre-paid “meal plan” that allows you to choose from one of several levels of options, each providing snacks, counter meals, and in some cases table service meals: you choose the option that is right for your budget. The key is, it is only available IF you are staying on Disney property. Now our family enjoys having a table service meal each night, so we always choose the Plus Disney Dining Plan, which gives us one snack credit, one counter meal (entree, drink, and dessert), and one table meal (again entree, drink, and dessert) per person, per day. We use the snacks mostly for breakfast and the others for lunch and dinner, and have found that it is usually more food per person than we can eat! We usually end up getting dessert “to go” since we are full from the meal. This plan saves us quite a bit of money, as the cost per day for our family of 3 is less than we would have paid just for dinner.
With all the wonderful food our family eats while at Disney World, it is a good thing that there is so much walking involved! We have definitely found that by saving money on food, it has truly helped us to plan a fantastic affordable Disney vacation on a regular basis.
Nancy Bobby has been visiting Disney World for over ten years. Her favorite resource for saving money on a Disney vacation has been the Ultimate Disney World Savings Guide. Learn how how to have your own affordable Disney vacation and get her free Disney World planning bonus at her website www.theaffordablemouse.com
Tags: affordable disney vacations, discount Disney family vacations, Disney Dining Plan, Disney vacation planning, saving money at Disney World, Vacations, Walt Disney World