What do you think about the dining plans at Disney? Are they really worth it? We usually go for shorter weekend trips and have never really thought about using them. This year we'll be at Disney for 6 nights, and will have one sit down meal 6 times..one for breakfast at Chef Mickey's and the rest will be dinner (Le Cellier and Hoop Dee Doo are two we'd like to do).

I see from a post here that there is a quick service plan...which I think would normally be good for us...but since we are doing more sit down meals now I'm not sure what I should do.

(we are going May 30th-June 5th)

I would also like some imput on this subject...
We usually try to do one sit down meal a day and
we have been considering the dining plan for our next trip.
I read somewhere that it is not as good as it once was due to
gratuity not being included..

I have also never done the DDP, because I have never been able to make it work. We're not big eaters, but I hear people that just rave about it and I start to think maybe I'm missing something?

We have done the Dining every year since it was offered. Even with the gratuity not being included now its still a great deal if you want a table service each day. We are a family of 7, 2 adults and 5 kiddos but 3 of these are now considered adults. Most of our meals came out to approx. 250 some higher some lower. We enjoyed trying out all the places to eat and saved money while doing so.

That being said we are trying the Quick service Plan this time around mainly for the flexibility you loose when you have to be somewhere at a certain time everyday. We have already tried almost all the restaurants over the years. This May I wanted to take it easy and not worry about where to be each day.

If I had not already dined in so many of the restaurants I would do it again and agian. We go to Disney twice and year and we have decided to use the Quick Service on one trip and the Regular Dining on the other. The best of both worlds!

:)

We did the dining plan this last year when we went and I thought it was well worth it. I just went to the menus of the restaurants we wanted to eat at and roughly figured out what I thought we would eat and figured out if it was a good deal for us. More times than not it was a better deal to do the dining plan. We didn't save a ton but we thought it work good for us.

I did the dining plan twice. If you're doing mostly sit down or character meals, it's worth it. We tried higher end meals that we normally would not do paying out of pocket. With that said, you'd have weigh the cost against what each person could eat. The thing we found is that it really is A LOT of food for one day. We had a number of snacks left over on the last day which we used to buy yogurt and small boxes of cereal for the following mornings breakfast.
I don't know much about the new quick service plan but it seems like a good alternative if you like to be on the go and not tied to a reservation.