Disney's meal plans

If you are staying in a Disney hotel you can add a meal plan that pays in advance for part of what you will eat during the trip. It is worth understanding how they work before deciding whether one suits you, because not all the plans are the same and they are not valid in the same places.

There are, broadly, four levels: one covering breakfast only, two half-board ones —breakfast plus one meal— with different tiers of restaurant, and a full-board one (breakfast, lunch and dinner) that only exists in the full-board version. Which plans are available depends on the particular hotel you stay in: some hotels offer only the basic level, others give access to more restaurants, and the Disneyland Hotel has its own plan, exclusive to its guests, which is the only one covering every Disney restaurant in the resort.

The vouchers are not locked to your hotel: they are valid in more than twenty restaurants across the two parks, the Disney hotels and three particular restaurants in Disney Village (Annette's Diner, La Grange at Billy Bob's and The Steakhouse). In other words: breakfast is normally taken at the hotel, but the plan's lunch or dinner can be spent inside the park, without having to leave to find it.

What really has to be decided is whether it beats paying for each meal separately. It helps to look at which sort of restaurants your plan covers —there is a difference between "valid anywhere" and "valid only on a particular list"— and whether you are the kind to eat quickly at a counter or to sit down at a table, because a plan built around table-service restaurants does not pay off in the same way if the group prefers quick service.

One important clarification: the board decides which meals you have already paid for, but as things stand the particular hotel or plan you choose does not automatically change how meals are laid out in your Route. If you have breakfast included at the hotel, or a dinner already settled with the plan, tell us in your client area — that is how we take it into account when building your day, instead of giving you a restaurant stop you no longer need.

If you have no meal plan, that is fine too: we spread the day's meals wherever they fit best, on the basis that each one is paid for separately.