Hi Maureen! Welcome back to the Disney Parks Moms Panel!
You will be visiting the Walt Disney World Resort soon and I know you must be thrilled to be planning all of your last-minute details! My favorite part of using a
Disney Dining Plan is that you have already paid for your meals and snacks in advance, so you only have to budget for gratuity and any extras that you wish to purchase. It is wonderful!
First, I suggest
visiting each restaurant's page on the Walt Disney World website to verify that the restaurant accepts the dining plan that you have. When you select the restaurant you are dining at from the list, look on the right side of the screen to see if a dining plan is accepted. If it says, "Some Dining Plans Accepted," click on that link to see which dining plan is accepted and how many meal entitlements the meal requires.
When you are in the restaurant, let the Cast Member assisting you know which dining plan you are on and ask what is available on the plan. They can give you all of the details for your meal. Once, my parents went with us on a vacation and had a date night for just the two of them. They didn't understand how the dining plan worked, so they ordered off the prix fixe menu at this particular location which required two entitlements per person, instead of the regular menu that only required one entitlement per person. Later that week, we were trying to pay for a meal and we were short a couple of meal entitlements and had to go through all of the meals to figure out what had happened! Since then, I always encourage Guests to ask how the dining plan works at each location to make sure they don't run into any surprises like that!
I hope you have a fun vacation and try lots of tasty foods, Maureen! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
Tabitha