Does this seem like a good budget?

Heading home August 22nd thru August 29th and I’m trying to really figure out my daily food budget. We’ve had a few unexpected expenses the past few months that cut into our vacation funds, so I really am going to try to be a little more aware of our food expenses this trip, since it will be the most we spend.

Background:
ME, DH and DD8
Plans: one sit down a day, with one day of just QS at EPCOT F&W
Alcohol: DH doesn’t drink, and I will at the most have one beverage at sit downs, and maybe get some drinks for our room, so not going to be a huge factor in the daily budget.

Meals: our most pricey meal will be LTT. Also eating at B&C, Chef Arts, WCC, Rainforest Cafe (listen, DD8 loves it), Olivia’s, Skipper Canteen and Maybe SCI fi.
We plan on having some snacks in the room, and grabbing some bagels/PB/cream cheese. and some muffins and fruit.
DH and DD8 tend to be very “snacky” in the parks. I usually will get a salad or a kids meal for QS for lunch, and we usually will split a QS breakfast in the morning. We drink mostly water throughout the day and DH usually gets a root beer with dinner.
Its easy to look at the TS menus and figure out that but QS lunch and snacks are unpredictable!

So Is a budget of $275 per day feasible? $100 for each adult and $75 for the kid ( a little extra for fun drinks)

Again this will be strictly for food, we have gift cards for souvineers and if we stick to this we should have a some $ if we want to buy ILL or Genie +

Thanks!!

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We used to do $60 per person per day (2 adults + 3 boys: 15, 12,10). Given current prices, I’d probably bump that to $75, but we also stay away from the spendier table service restaurants, eat towards the middle of a given restaurants price points, and tend to share meals, especially if snacks are on the agenda :slight_smile: There’s lots of ways to bring that number way up without much effort!

Better to estimate high, so if $275 feels good to you? Should be fine.

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IME - I plan about $100 / person per day. So, $275 w. a child seems totally reasonable.However, I haven’t been back to WDW since 2019. I still think you’ll be fine though!

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When we went (excluding drinks) we spent about $60 on average per QS meal for our family of 5. 4 of us would order an adult meal and one child meal. So, I would think $275 would be a big high per day for your family of 3 but that being said, I think it’s better to over budget rather than under budget.

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I budget by what a DDP would cost me/day +5% increase. Logic being past visits with DDP we broke even, but that was using all credits. So without (less snacks than normal) I won’t be over.

Thanks all,
I think I spent around $100 a day when I went by myself a few months ago, but I also had a few more drinks than usual :thinking:

We did in-room breakfast, a snack at the park, QS lunch and sometimes a sit-down dinner/QS dinner. It’s really hard to get a QS lunch/dinner for a family of 4 under $60. Drinks are expensive add-ons for most meals. A pretzel, dole whip, ice cream iiced copy, slushy drink - all average about $8 a piece. Most of our table dining reservations were at least $100 for a family of 4, more if we added on an adult beverage and don’t forget the tip. Any of the set dining prices at Space, Storybook would all skew those numbers. If you want to be super accurate with your budgeting, pull the menus for a sample day at the parks.

Just back. Trip was just DH and me. We budgeted $100/day for each of us for food, and came in right around there. Each of our TS meals were over $100. At skipper canteen, no alcohol, at Jaleo one glass of wine. Normally I love having a nice TS meal or two while we’re there, but I was disappointed with both of those meals. They were fine, but not worth the cost. We split a lot of counter service meals and treats, which let us try more things and maybe spend a little less. Normally I have groceries delivered so we can have breakfast in the room, and snacks to bring to parks. That is a money saver. Didn’t do that this trip bc no kids with us!

Hope you have a great trip!

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Actually just looked at how much we spent and it was $125/person per day. Will def order groceries for our next trip. And prob only do one TS meal, as the few we had were not worth the price.

Hey liners,
We fly back home from our trip tomorrow afternoon and I tracked every day and I was way UNDER budget for food this trip- hooray !

I had budgeted for $275 per day not including extras (souvenirs, G+, Uber etc)
And I spent less than that with the extras included!

Now I have extra funds to put towards a future trip
(Or, if Murphy law has it, whatever breaks in my house next week :roll_eyes:)

Thanks for all the help!

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