Everyone was so excited when RO deals came out recently. I have a FD reservation from December 12-21. We are staying at POFQ, DH, myself, DD21 and DD13. I have run the numbers several times and the FD is always a better deal for us. Am I doing something wrong? Liners were so thrilled with RO, just want to make sure I’m not missing out on some savings.
With 4 Disney adults it can definitely be the better deal. Typically staying at value the room savings is greater than the FD savings, at mods it tends to be based more on the number of people, and deluxe the bigger RO discount is usually the better deal. If you’ve added it up and it came out to be the better discount then go for it, it doesn’t sound out of the ordinary.
A lot prefer RO also because they simply won’t eat as much as the FD promo allows them and if the RO discount plus the cost of food is less than the rack rate with FD they prefer to go with that. Dining is part of the experience of going for us, but with only two of us it is still cheaper to pay for meals and take the RO discount.
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Free dining is a better deal for us too, @MooreDisneyPlease. We stay at Pop with DH, myself and two teen DSs.
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Thanks @Outer1 for the reassurance. We usually go for RO because we book 3 mos from our trip. Most ADRs are picked over by that point, plus we’d rather tour than dine. This trip was booked 185 days in advance and it’s longer than our usual trips so we decided to do FD. I budgeted $150 per day for food (QS), added tickets and the RO discount for POFQ and it was almost $800 more than our FD reservation. Usung RO for a value resort came out about even with our current pkg. It actually surprised me.
Like others have said, need to run the numbers. With 2 adults and 1 child under 9, Room discount is almost alway significantly better…especially at Delux.
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POFQ has only been offering a 5% discount for the RO discount. I would keep the FD dinning. In 2012 we stayed there, dh will not stay anywhere else, RO would have only saved us 79 dollars. Shoulc have gone with FD.
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Room offers for us
Yeah it TOTALLY depends on the resort, how many people in the room, etc. We booked FD once in 2012 (even though I dont care for the dining plan) because it ended up saving us more even if we didn’t use all of the credits and all… The RO would have saved us like $50 per night but I knew we would get more than that much value out of the DDP each night so it worked out better.
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It really depends on your family, when you are going, where you are staying, etc. Free dining is not a one size fits all discount. For my family (me, DH, DS14 and DD10) we feel we save more with the RO discount when we go (end of the school year) and don’t like to be tied to the dining credits. We save up for our “dining plan” with Disney gift card purchased at Target and budget our meals that way. We did free dining once and it was just to much food. My kids were sick of desserts. My brother and his family used free dining for a trip in October and they loved it! They stayed at POP and upgraded their dining plan. They did lots of character meals for their trip (kids are younger than mine).
Does anyone know if QS will still allow substituting bottled water for dessert on DDP?