Dining plan or not

The dining plan worked for us. With the sitdown restaurants you have to make reservations. So you need to work that into your day at the park. It want too hard and I actually enjoyed that part of it!

With that said I was disappointed with Disney and the fort. Everything is overrated, site was small, not that we were there all day. Parks were nice, but nothing that made me go ooh ahh!

I was more impressed with Cedar Point!

Dining plan is often free during Hurricane season...

To get it or not to get it is well debated. Generally it depends on the person, but in many cases it is not worth it, but in many cases it is. A few things that may help make up your mind:
1) Sit down restaurants are quite busy, having 6 months to get a reservation for the top pick restaurants can help a lot, especially if you must eat during prime time and during prime season.
2) Character dining is a unique opportunity for a little more "Disney" for little kids and the best way for them to meet the characters without a huge line or crowd. They often require reservations during prime season.
3) Some dining has quite generous portions and you only need one meal credit to feed two adults, the pasta bar at the cafeteria at Port Orleans Riverside is an example. Research is required to figure out how to beat the bank though.
4) It is easy, just swipe your band.
5) Its worked into your budget when you pay for your trip.
6) There are no age police for kids, the kids meal plan is much cheaper and kids may prefer the menu options, they will not ask if your kid is really 9 or not (unless maybe he looks 15).
7) Some sit down/ character meals can be quite expensive when paying cash, expect to pay $200-$300 for a family of 4 for dinner. Five nights of character meals at $200 each is $1000, that goes a long way toward breaking even
8) If you are the PB&J type, the meal plan will likely not be worth it, just pack a lunch and avoid all the long lines.

we go to DW/Fort Wilderness twice a year . The year we got the dining plan all of us gained weight. We save money and pounds only eating out once a day.

Don't know about Ft Wilderness. But they offer the dining plan for free for other Disney properties during certain times of the year. You can't beat that price. The free plan typically last about 4-6 weeks I think, and is offered 2 or 3 times a year. As long as you arrive within that window, you can include the free dining in your reservations for the duration of your stay. And you get the free dining even if your reservation runs past the window.

We have stayed at a Disney hotel twice with the kids and grandkids. Both times we had specific days we wanted to be there. My son, who researches this stuff to death, found out that by scheduling our arrival on the last day of the free dining window, we would get the free dining for all of the next 5 days of our stay. And that corresponded with our preferred time there any way so it worked well.

In our case, with 6 adults and 4 grandkids, the free dining was worth its weight in gold, literally. Typical dinners in a Disney restaurant run from something over $20 to over $35. With the dining plan, you just order what you want without considering costs.

Paying for the dining plan is not cheap. But may be worth it if you enjoy eating. In our case, staying at a Disney hotel we did not have a rent car and was pretty much limited to Disney properties for meals.

One caution. If you do go with the dining plan, read up on it carefully so that you don't use up your credits without understanding when and what credits you are using.

rtaylor0830 wrote:
Going to fort wilderness and wondering if we should get the dining plan or not. We have done it before but just getting opinions.

Sorry to sound a bit snarky, but if you've done it before then I'd expect you should already know the answer to this.

IMHO, while Disney is the not the cheapest place to eat, its certainly below what you might expect at other theme parks. For lunches, we usually bring our lunch into the park. We rarely eat dinner there due to the craziness and overall exhaustion after dragging 3 young children through the park. We go by a general rule of thumb: take the RV then take the meals..

We've done it twice but we're not doing it this year. It's been a debate topic between my wife and I for years. I think a lot things come in to play like types of restaurants, age of kids etc etc. We decided not to do it this year simply because our kids are small and don't eat that much.
Here is a helpful website for the dining plan.

We made one visit there and did not have the dining plan. We made another visit there about four years later and had the dining plan. We enjoyed having the dining plan, but I gained four pounds.