Hi Olivia!
Welcome to the Disney Parks Moms Panel, and thank you so much for asking this fantastic Walt Disney World Resort vacation planning question to us hEAR!
Ooooh, I just love adding a
Disney Dining Plan when visiting Mickey's Florida house. I love paying for our
meals before the trip vs. after, and it really does give the whole holiday a bit of an all-inclusive feel. While the main way to secure a dining plan is through a Disney Resort Hotel Room + Disney Theme Park Ticket + Disney Dining Plan vacation package, there are definitely ways that those already holding tickets can play and stay and dine too. I'm not a Walt Disney World Resort Annual Passholder, but, my husband is in the military and we're able to get a discount on our theme park tickets through his base. The way that I'm able to arrange our Disney vacations is by booking a "Room Only" reservation online, linking our tickets to my
My Disney Experience Profile, and then by calling the Disney Resort Hotel Reservation team to add a Disney Dining Plan to my stay. (You can also book both your room reservation and dining plan in the same phone call.) I checked with some of my Moms Panelist friends who are Annual Passholders and they confirmed that this is what they do too. The
Disney Resort Hotel Reservation phone number is 0800-16-90-730.
The only place where having your own tickets or annual pass gets tricky is when a really amazing
Special Offer, Deal or Discount vacation package is released; most of those offers do require that you purchase your theme park tickets as part of the package and do not allow you to substitute with your annual pass.
I am happy to report that there is no minimum hotel night or park day requirement in order to secure a
Disney Dining Plan to a room-only stay; in fact, I added a plan for a single-night stay about a year ago! Just remember that when purchasing a plan, everyone in your reservation will fall under the same plan, and that plan will be valid for every night of that stay. Something that's popular is '
Split Stays' or 'Resort Hopping' where you book one Disney Resort Hotel for a certain number nights, and then check-in to another Disney Resort Hotel for another duration of your vacation. What's neat about this, aside from experiencing a different resort hotel, is that if you didn't want a Disney Dining Plan for the entire time you'll be in Orlando, you can indeed add a plan to one reservation but not the other. The only trick to remember is that the
meal and snack entitlements don't carry over from one reservation to the other, so you must use them within the days of the stay to which you add the Dining Plan.
I hope this helped to clEAR things up a bit, Olivia, and if you have any more Walt Disney World Resort vacation planning questions, We're All Ears!
~Kristen