So we are 20 days and some change from leaving for Walt Disney World (WDW)!
How did I come to the conclusion that the meal plan was a good value? A lot of reading what others have said and spreadsheets.
First off, when I broke out my costs highest to lowest for our family of 4 you can see that food is #3:
- Lodging – $1,922 That’s $227 per night in a 34 foot camper with 2 bedrooms, kitchen and living room (not bad for end of June) (includes ground transportation)
- Air fare – Sadly we are traveling at the peak of ticket prices $1,650
- Food – The topic of this blog $1,433
- Park tickets – 3 days of single park and 3 days of water parks $1,361
- Fun money – $800
I started my estimations with the assumption we could make a lot of our own food since we were only looking at lodging with kitchens in them. I then estimated how much we HAD to spend on each meal. See the chart below:
| Per day meal estimates | ||
| Park meal for family | $ 80.00 | |
| daily snacks for family | $ 68.00 | |
| Lunch for family | $ 20.00 | |
| Breakfast for family | $ 15.00 | |
| In room dinner | $ 30.00 | |
Then I calculated how frequently we needed that meal, did the math and got a total of $1,181. Mind you we are not living it up here, I only allowed us to eat 5 meals in the parks. Basically one each day we are in a park.
The meal plan I choose allows 2 meals plus 1 snack each day we are on property (7 days). One of the meals can be sit down while the other is concession (fast food). The cost is $1,433. Only $252 more than our make 2 meals a day plan plus no cooking involved. Included in my $1,433 are the ingredients for our additional meals and extra snacks.
If you are interested, you can download my spreadsheet where I did the cost calculations.
