Dinning packages and/or Max Pass

I’m working through our upcoming trip and trying to decide what to upgrade on. My husband really hated waiting for the mainstreet electrical parade last year. So much so that he gets grouchy when I mention we will have to wait for a significant amount of time to see F! We will be in the park early February with three small kids and utilizing stroller swap. I’ve read many posts about max pass and dinning packages and I am just trying to prioritize.

1.) Is the on-the-go dinning package from the hungry bear a good option? Is the food decent? Is it worth paying for the reserved viewing area? How early do we need to get in line for the reserved seating? How often does the show get canceled, and if it gets canceled, do you get reserved tickets for the next show?

2.) I plan on getting the photopass for sure. Is it worth upgrading to max pass? If we only upgrade one day to max pass, I would assume we can only get photos from that day, correct? So, it will cost us $200 to upgrade to maxpass or $80 for photopass. Is the $120 worth it?

3.) WOC dinning packages. Would this be better than an F! package?

4.) Really unrelated, but has the stroller swap changed recently? I feel like I read something that was completely different than our experience in Feb 2017.

Thanks for all your input!!

Lolabear, I did read through a lengthy post on F! from Aug/sep. I believe you were in the park after your post here.Were the seat cushions available?

I cannot speak to the F!, but as for the max pass, I loved it. In fact we are going in Jan and we are getting passes and will be adding max pass to our annual passes. Sounds like you will be there for 4 Days. If you don’t want Max pass for your entire party for the four days, only one of you needs to have max pass the entire time to get all the photos. Actually if you only use it for photos it is a bargain at $10 per day. It gives you ride photos as well as pics from the Disney photographers. You could do one day of max pass for rides and then you keep it the entire trip for the pics and it would equal $80, same as the photo pass, but you would also get a day of electronic fast passes, which for me was heavenly! Loved walking into line for our first fast pass and then making another fast pass before ever getting on our first ride.

on thanksgiving night we didn’t have fastpasses or a dining package for woc and still got to see it. maybe not a prefered viewing spot but walked right up when the show was about to start. maybe we got lucky and there was only two of us, no strollers. Now maxpass on the other hand is something i would spend for … so worth it to me plus the photos. I almost did the hungry bear package and I read alot of reviews about it but ended up not doing it. Got fastpasses for F! and still had a pretty good view.

Thanks! My concern is how long we will have to wait with fast passes. My group doesn’t do too well waiting patiently :yum:

Oops, looks like I replied to the wrong person?! I can’t figure out how to use the chats well on my phone.

Carthy15
Thanks! I hadn’t thought about doing the MaxPass that way. Or maybe I did and I forgot… so many details to weed through!!

we dont wait for shows either! We try to get there as close to starting time and take a gamble lol. I guess its not our thing. When we had Fastpasses for F! we got there only about 10 minutes before the show. Im not really concerned if I have a good spot just want to see the jist of it. But i know a lot of people here are different and really love the dining packages.

From friends of mine who enjoyed F! with a dining package in early October, they did confirm Blue Bayou offers a seat cushion. River Belle does not. But these friends had butt cushions from seeing F! a couple years ago when the butt cushions were offered through Blue Bayou So they went to River Belle & brought their own butt cushions from a couple years ago.

Do you get to keep the butt cushions?

Yes! They are souvenir butt cushions. I don’t have a picture of my specific ones with me, but I found this on eBay showing what they looked like when we got ours (& my friends who took them back to re-use them):
image

The current one being offered with the package looks like so:
image

So cool! I just booked the f! Dinner package at BB and did not know that was part of it! We had to cancel our WDW trip recently, so I am splurging a bit at DL to make up for it. This is one of those splurges.

YAY so happy you could make up for it this way. IMHO this is the single best splurge there is at DLR, even better than an onsite hotel stay. Not that the hotel stay isn’t a grand experience, just I never felt so happy about the money I had spent at DLR as I did for this dining package.

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Yes it was painful to cancel. I had free dining and $75 per night in gift cards. I am glad to hear that you think it is money well spent. I have never done any of the dining packages or the dessert parties. This will be a new experience. We will be staying at the Disneyland Hotel. Our first time.

When in January are you going? We are arriving feb 1 and also staying at DIsneyland hotel.
I am thinking about doing the dinning to go at the hungry bear. Will this still be money well spent or should I go for the sit down dinner?

We are going Jan 7-10. I will report after if I think it is worth it or not.

Disneyland Hotel is the very best first place to stay. It’s the original hotel to the original Disney park & chalk full of special touches. Make sure to take the time to sit in the teacup couches in the lobby, the Autopia car near Goofy’s Kitchen/Steakhouse 55 & my personal favorite, a model of Frontierland on the first floor of the Frontierland tower. So excited for you!

I’ve never done the Hungry Bear, but I have heard that it is a fine option from those that have done it, especially if your main objective is to get a place for F! and not so much savoring the food experience. I’ve heard that the food is nothing really to rave about so if it were me personally, I’d go for the experience of the meal & ambiance at the Blue Bayou with the best seats to one of the best Disney shows.

Sorry, first time staying at DLH,have stayed numerous times at PP and once at CG. My husband is spoiled and refuses to stay off property.

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We just did the Blue Bayou meal plan for F! and it was totally worth it (it was our one splurge). However, in true disney fashion, the line to get in to the BB area for F! started about 2 1.5 hours before the show (all the lines start up by the haunted mansion). We had front and center seats and it was very well worth it to our family. The seat cushion is now more like the purple one and we found it to be super helpful since they let us in to the viewing area an hour before the show and we sat for that entire time. The Hungry Bear area is still a great viewing option…just bring your own cushion/blanket to sit on.

Back to the MaxPass vs PhotoPass question. If we are dining at goofy’s kitchen on a day we are not in the parks, how can we get those photos? How much is it to purchase the digital downloads from a character dinning, or can you even do that? I think I’d like to try MaxPass for all of us for at least one day and myself the rest of the trip for the photos. I just realized our character dinning is on a day we weren’t planning on being in the park for MaxPass