23 Feb 10 Affordable Disney Vacations – Save Money on Food with These Five Tips

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 cooking and/or eating a few meals in your room. If you plan to stay in a vacation home, villa, condo, or even a hotel suite, you should have access to a kitchen. Even with a traditional hotel room, you will probably be able to have a small refrigerator: use this to store milk, juice, and sandwich fixings.

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 can eat off-site and save money as well. If you are staying off-Disney property, ask at your hotel for local restaurant discount coupons or promotions. Or try looking for online coupons/promotions through local Florida/Orlando websites. You may even find it to be cost-effective to buy a local Entertainment Book for restaurant coupons.

5. Lastly, we absolutely love the Disney Dining Plan. For those not familiar with how this works, IF you are staying on Disney property, you have the option to choose from several levels of the Disney Dining Plan, and basically pre-pay for most, if not all of your meals. Since there are several choices, each providing a certain number of snacks, counter meals, or table service meals, there are options for just about any budget. As our family enjoys table service meals each night, we choose the Plus Disney Dining Plan, and receive one snack credit, one counter meal (entree, drink, and dessert), and one table meal (entree, drink, and dessert) per person, per day. We have found that the snacks generally work well most days for breakfast, and the others are used for lunch and dinner each day. Honestly, it is more food per person than we can usually eat, and often we will get our dessert at dinner “to go” since we are so full! And for this level at least, the cost per day for our family of 3 is usually less than we would have paid for just the dinner itself, so it is a huge cost-saver for us.

Of course, with all that food we are eating, we are fortunately doing a LOT of walking at all the parks to exercise it off! Saving money on food has been a great way to help us plan a magical, affordable Disney vacation each year!

Nancy Bobby has been traveling to Disney World for over a decade. Her favorite money saving guide for a Disney vacation has been the Ultimate Disney World Savings Guide. Learn how how to have your own affordable Disney vacation and receive her free Disney vacation guide at her blog www.theaffordablemouse.com

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