One of our clients, Jennifer Hackett, just recently returned from Disney World. She was kind enough to write up this post on utilizing the dining plan after having gastric bypass.
As you know, I put a lot of thought into the decision if we should purchase the meal plan since I had recent gastric bypass surgery. I had my surgery in November 2010 and we traveled to Disney in late May 2011 – 6 months after my procedure. At the time of travel, I was only able to eat about a half cup of food at a time.
For me individually, the dining plan was not an exception value. For my family as a whole, however, the dining plan worked out GREAT! The reason that it worked for us as a group is because we were not confined to each person only being able to use their meal credits – we were able to “pool” them and have more nice table service meals. My husband also enjoyed our dining experiences more since he did not have to worry about the price on the menu and ordered whatever he wanted that day.
In all non-all-you-can-eat restaurants, I ordered from the kids menu (which nobody had an issue with once I explained the situation to our server) and paid separately for my meal. Doing this allowed my husband to use my dining credits, which allowed more table service meals. Since our 5 year old son used his dining credits each meal, we did pay for two or three meals for him since we stretched our dining plan!
For the all-you-can-eat meals, since I was not able to order off the kid’s menu, I did use my dining credits toward my meal. While I was not able to “eat my money’s worth,” the convience was too good to pass up.
Again, while the dining plan was not a great value for me, with a little creativity, we made it work really well for our family!
Disney is great about handling all types of special dietary requirements.
That’s great! It’s great to hear that places such as Disney will accommodate specific diets and meal plans.