vacation – Page 13 – Wanderlist Vacations

Hotel Smackdown: Holiday Inn Express vs Country Inn & Suites

I enjoy travelling, but over the past two weeks we’ve done more driving than I care to do in such a short time having driven somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000mi in that time. Over the first week of that, we stayed in four different hotels, three of which I’m going to compare here.

Holiday Inn Express, Cambridge, OH

We stopped here for a single night on the way to our destination in Mansfield, OH, and in my opinion it was easily the best of the three hotels in this review. First, a few pictures of the room:

Good, clean room, complete with a fridge, microwave, and DirecTV, which is a nice change of pace from the standard hotel cable setups that have no interactive on-screen guide. Another big thing with this room (can’t say the same for the Country Inn rooms), there were plenty of outlets, including at least two on each nightstand. Lack of outlets in hotel rooms is why i carry two Belkin SurgePlus units with me, but neither were necessary in this room. For the type of hotel, the rooms have been done really well also, especially the beds. While none of the mattresses in the hotels I’m reviewing were bad, the pillows are what set the Holiday Inn Express apart from the other two, as it’s something few hotels get right in my experience. They included four pillows on the bed, as shown, with two being firm and two being soft. Nice labeling, too:

I had one of each, and was pretty happy with both. None appeared to be true down pillows either, something I’m allergic to that could have caused me to wake up with a nasty headache (I carry Flonase with me when travelling just in case). The other thing that set this hotel apart from the other two is the breakfast. Holiday Inn Express has really stepped up their game in this area, apparently. The usual choices were there, eggs, bacon, breads, etc, but the cinnamon rolls stood out. Wow those things were delicious. Additionally, the brand has what I can only describe as a 3D pancake printer:

The sign did not lie, 60 seconds after pressing the button it spit out two perfectly cooked pancakes on the right side of the unit. Wowza. Love it! No messing with batter or hoping that your waffle isn’t going to stick to the cooking plates, just magical pancakes that show up as if from nowhere.

The front desk staff was super friendly as well, even upon arrival sometime after 10pm. My only real complaint on the hotel would be the difficulty in finding it, which might not have been an issue during the day when we weren’t as tired. Both our GPS and our phones kept telling us where to go, but neither could really pinpoint the location, and the sign seemed a bit hidden to us, so my wife called the hotel and got clarification of where to turn. No biggie, though. Overall, a great hotel and a chain I wouldn’t hesitate to stay at again!

Country Inn & Suites, Mansfield, OH

We stayed here for four nights while visiting family. I recommended this while we were looking at hotels based on past experience with the chain, specifically multiple stays at the one in Bloomington, IL while on business in the past. I always liked that location, but was let down by the one in Mansfield. Again, let’s start with room pictures:

The hotel itself looked pretty similar to what I remember the one in IL looking like, although the room appeared slightly outdated. It was clean, however, and the mattress was fine, but I couldn’t stand the small square pillows. They seem to be popular these days, with the Hilton we stayed at a few days later in Arlington, VA having the same type. My other main disappointment was breakfast. I recall the one in IL having a decent sized layout, a good selection of warm items every day, and never having an issue with keeping things stocked. That was not the case here. The breakfast area was small, with few warm choices. They did have the standard do it yourself waffle maker, and a few cereal choices, but they only had three warm selections each day, and of the stuff I had (eggs and bacon one morning, that was it), they really weren’t that good. The bread station was an issue too, as it wasn’t stocked very well, to the point that on our last morning, there was only a single donut left (I never saw more than 3 in there any morning), two plain bagels, a few slices of wheat bread, and nothing else.

As I said, it was clean, and all of the staff members we encountered were very friendly, but I think next time we’ll check out the Holiday Inn Express in town.

Country Inn & Suites, Frederick, MD

After leaving Mansfield, we stopped here for one night on the way up to DC. We’d booked this at the same time as the one in Mansfield, again mostly based on how I remembered the one in Bloomington. This location was slightly better, and it looks like it’s undergone a small renovation the Mansfield location hasn’t seen yet. The room:

That last picture shows the welcome sign at the front desk for Club Carlson members, with my name second on the list. Not something that I look for or need in a hotel, but a nice touch. Again, a very friendly staff, so that piece was a wash for all three hotels. Also notice on the bed is a small plastic bag of goodies we were given on check-in with a couple bottles of water and bags of snack pretzels as another welcome for Club Carlson members. Again, nice touch.

The room was clean and comfortable, but they still have the square pillows that I don’t like. Other than that, no complaints on the room.

The breakfast area was bigger than the one in Mansfield, so I had my hopes up, but once I got down there in the morning, disappointment set in again. The same meager selection of warm items, plus a waffle maker, so I had myself another waffle. The bread selection was a little better than the previous location, at least. This was a better stay than the previous one, but still left me a bit disappointed vs the one I used to stay at in Bloomington.

Overall, you can probably guess where I’m going with this: The Holiday Inn Express was easily my favorite, and a chain I’ll look to in the future when traveling. You can’t go wrong with either brand in my opinion, but the pillows, breakfast buffet, and magical pancake dispenser easily push Holiday Inn Express over the top in my eyes.

Carnival Conversations – Tampa

After a quick two days at home following our time in Ohio and DC, we drove down to Florida yesterday to bring our daughter back for her second year of college at Eckerd. While move-in day isn’t until tomorrow, my wife noticed a few weeks ago that Carnival was doing one of their Carnival Conversations events on board the Paradise today, and really wanted to attend it. While these events are held on board a ship that’s getting ready to depart, just like the ship inspections we’ve done, this is nothing like the tours.

So what is it? Well, simply put, it’s a chance to hear from and ask questions of Carnival’s senior management. For today’s event, the main speaker was Christine Duffy, President of Carnival Cruise Lines. We’d never been to one of these events before, and since we were going to be in the area anyway, it seemed like a good opportunity to see what they were about, and to hear from the line’s leadership.

The itinerary for the event was pretty simple, but didn’t allow for any time to tour the ship, so there will be far fewer pictures in this post than the last :).

When we got to the Queen Mary Lounge, we grabbed a seat next to a couple other agents and chatted with them for a bit before Mike Julius, Managing Director of US Sales got up to kick things off. He started off by introducing us to Seth Grunes, the Tampa area Business Development Manager, who gave us a quick update on Carnival, including a brief overview of their newest ship, The Vista. Jen’s been paying attention to all of Carnival’s announcements about the ship, she she was already up to speed on it, but having a full time job to focus on, I didn’t know a heck of a lot about it. I enjoyed getting to see what’s coming, and I have to say that I completely understand her excitement about the ship and desire to sail it. Those Havana suites sound amazing!

Next up was Christine, who spent a few minutes giving us an update on the line, and other business info specific to their travel partners (us). Having come up through the agency ranks, she’s in a unique position to make positive changes to the way Carnival works with their partners. Here’s hoping it happens!

After that, a panel of Carnival execs, including Christine, gathered on stage listening to agent feedback and answering our questions. There’s not really much to say from this, as the discussion all centered around way Carnival can change to better allow agents to serve our customers when it comes to Carnival cruises. We’re both fans of the Carnival brand, having thoroughly enjoyed three straight Thanksgiving cruises on their ships, and the discussion today was validation of our trust in their product.

Following the panel discussion was lunch, so we all headed to the Destiny dining room. The menu was identical to what we had on our tour of the Fantasy back in May, so I won’t waste space repeating the same food pictures in that post. While I would have liked another Guy’s burger, the food was excellent, and we did get to enjoy one of my favorite things, the warm chocolate melting cake, which is a must-have if you’re on any Carnival ship.

Near the end of lunch they did a few giveaways, including a couple of free cruises, but we unfortunately didn’t win. Oh well, but congratulations to those who did win, we’re totally jealous!

Lunch ended right about the time we had to get off (the boat was getting ready to head out for an actual cruise, after all :)), so we headed back down the gangway, out the terminal, and back to our temporary home for the weekend.

Once again, I’d like to thank Carnival for their hospitality, including all the executives for making themselves available to us for a couple of hours, and to our dining room staff, who I’m sure could have used the break between sailings to rest a bit. One of the best crews at sea, for sure!

Hotel Review – Holiday Inn Laurel West

Once again, life gets in the way and causes me to write this up a lot later than I wanted to, but hey, at least it’s finally done 🙂

While on our last minute trip to D.C. two weekends ago, we spent a night at the Holiday Inn Laurel West. We had to book the night before, so there really wasn’t much time to do research, other than reading a few reviews on some of the travel sites. One other factor limiting our options was the presence of our dog, but fortunately this hotel was pet friendly. Unfortunately, that was one of a very small number of positives of the stay.

Driving up as late as we did on Saturday, and stopping in the city for dinner before going to the hotel, we were both pretty tired when we arrived. After checking in, we grabbed our suitcase and the dog and headed up. The lobby itself was fine, but as soon as we got past the main desk, we could see that the hotel was definitely under renovation, as a number of reviews we found online mentioned (apparently this hotel is being converted to a Doubletree). No biggie at that point, it wasn’t busy when we got there, so the fact that only one elevator was operational wasn’t an issue. Arriving at the room, we realized they’d given us the wrong room type. Instead of a single bed, we had two doubles. Too tired to deal with it, we pretty much just changed, chose our beds, flipped on the TV for a while to relax before going to sleep. It wasn’t until Sunday that we really got a look at the hotel itself. Before I get to that, I’ll mention my other main positive of the stay, the mattresses. Both were Tempurpedic, or had Tempur toppers on them, and we found them very comfortable. We have a knock-off version at home that we love, so it was nice to not have to switch between memory foam and spring, even just for the night.

Here are my initial shots of our room, which had not undergone any renovation yet. Sorry about the blurry desk/TV shot, I was tired:

The next morning, Bayley and her boyfriend were set to come meet us at the hotel just before 11am, so we had a chance to take the dog out for a walk and check out the hotel. The renovation is real, as we saw all of the old furnishings from some rooms stored on the back side of the hotel as shown below. I’d have liked to see an updated room, but we just had to deal with ours, which really looked dated compared to other Holiday Inns we’ve stayed at in the past. The inside of the hotel was more of the same. The hallways looked pretty run down, and as mentioned, only one elevator worked, so each time we went to use the elevator Sunday morning, we had to wait. One time we just gave up after watching two full elevators arrive, and took the stairs down. I never did get interior shots, other than the renovation sign, so here’s what I got outside:

I can’t say how the cafe in the lobby or the steakhouse attached to the hotel were, as we didn’t use either, since both of our meals in D.C. were at the previously reviewed Scion Restaurant in DuPont Circle, but apparently the steakhouse, which is currently an All American Steakhouse and Sports Theater, used to be an Outback based on the signage in the hotel. No biggie, as I said, we didn’t eat at either place. We did notice that the breakfast buffet here, like other Holiday Inns we’ve stayed at, isn’t free. Not a huge deal to us since neither of us are really breakfast eaters, but with all of the work going on, maybe make that free during renovations as a way to thank guests for choosing to stay.

I can’t really say anything else about the place, other than we likely wouldn’t stay again while it’s undergoing renovations. We’ve been pretty happy with other Holiday Inns we’ve stayed at in the past, so this one was a bit disappointing. Overall thoughts:

Pros:

Comfortable Tempurpedic mattresses (or topper), at least to us
Clean room
Staff was friendly
dog friendly hotel
Stable (but slightly slow) internet access

Cons:

Obviously dated, both inside and out, but undergoing renovations
Only one working elevator, makes it hard to get in/out of the hotel during busy times like check-out
Paper thin walls, which is a huge pet peeve of mine. Not long after we got there, some family that apparently had rooms on either side of the floor started running down the halls and talking loudly. Not quite sure why they felt why that was warranted at 11pm, but after a few minutes or so, it subsided.
Very few available outlets in the room (and none on the nightstand), and the ones that were available had loose plugs, making it hard to keep devices connected. Normally I carry two of my favorite little Belkin accessories with me to counter this, but being so short notice, I forgot to grab them.
No fridge or microwave.
The security/privacy lock on the door didn’t work. In fact the cutout in the metal plate (receiving side) wasn’t even close to lining up with the latch.

I think that about covers it. It served the purpose of a quick overnight stay, but if we’re able to make it back up for a longer trip near the end of summer, we’ll be looking elsewhere. Anomalies happen within any brand, and overall it doesn’t sour us against staying at other IHG properties in the future.

Random Disney Thoughts

I’m a bit late getting this done, but I wanted to get one last post in from our trip to talk about some of the things we hadn’t done on previous visits to Disney. The entire trip was a blast as usual, but a couple of the items below really helped make it even more memorable.

The 10-Day Pass

This is the first time we’ve done more than 5 consecutive days at Disney, and going in I was sure I was going to be sick of the parks half way through the trip, but can admit now that I was dead wrong. Normally we feel like we have to get everything done at whichever park we’re visiting the day we choose to be there, but having so many days on our hands, there was never any pressure to rush through the parks like we normally would. We went with a much more relaxed schedule where we’d head to a park whenever everyone work up, ride some rides, maybe head back to the hotel for a while, and later on either head back to that park, another one, or in a couple of cases to Downtown Disney for the rest of the evening. We had a general idea of which park(s) we wanted to visit every day based on the crowd calendar at EasyWDW.com, which we found to be pretty accurate. We did deviate from our plan a few times, but that was the nice thing about having so many days, as we felt like we had more flexibility in the schedule. If we had the time and extra money, it’s a pass we’d buy again.

We did make use of the ‘water parks fun & more’ option on our tickets, too, using them to gain entrance into DisneyQuest for a few hours the last Saturday we were there, before heading back to Hollywood Studios for one last park stint. For a Saturday, DisneyQuest seemed empty. I ended up sitting and relaxing most of the time we were there, as I wasn’t feeling that great (the heat was finally getting to me), but the kids had a blast.

Star Wars Weekends at Hollywood Studios

Star Wars Weekends are something they only do from mid-May through mid-June if I recall, and it was kinda cool. In addition to the existing Star Wars stuff they have at DHS (Star Tours, Jedi Academy, etc), they have a lot of characters on hand for autographs and pictures, and even some special celebrity appearances. We didn’t partake in the celebrity appearances, so I can’t really comment on what it entails, or how you get access to it. The characters were aplenty, though. Just about everywhere we went there were lines for various characters. Chewbacca, Luke, Lea, Boba Fett, Stormtroopers, and many, many more. It wasn’t just the kids who were in line either, there were plenty of adults, in some cases sporting Star Wars shirts, replica helmets they wanted signed, and a lot more. No judgement here, I have no leg to stand on, as I’m known to frequent autograph lines at races we attend :). Bayley got in on it too, taking pictures with a couple of characters. She was all too happy to wait 45min to get a shot with Chewbacca:

One of the coolest things about Star Wars Weekends were the fireworks. They have a special ‘Symphony in the Stars’ fireworks show at 9:45pm each night of Star Wars Weekends with the fireworks shooting off to music from the movies. It was one of the best fireworks shows I’ve ever seen, to be honest. I have a few clips of it, but they’re nowhere near as good as the multi-angle video of the show that the WDWMagic guys have on their site. If you’re a fan, I highly recommend sitting through the whole 6+ minutes. Better than the nightly fireworks at Magic Kingdom, in my opinion.

Magic Kingdom 24-hour event

On May 22nd, the Magic Kingdom was open from 6am Friday to 6am Saturday to kick off the summer, using a Frozen-based theme of ‘Coolest Summer Ever’. We’d initially planned to be heading home that day, but once my wife saw this was happening, we pushed our 7 days at Port Orleans back to accommodate. We really didn’t see much in the way of promotion anywhere for this, as Disney seemed to be more interested in publicizing the 24 hour event going on at the same time at Disneyland, since that park was kicking off its diamond celebration with the 24 hour event. That lack of promotion was quite evident when we arrived on Friday morning for the opening of the park, too. We got there around 5:40am to be there and see the rope drop, and had no problems finding a good spot to watch the festivities.

Once the rope dropped, we headed into the park. We initially headed for the Snow White mine train ride, but seeing that a long line had already formed there, we headed to Tomorrowland. The lack of crowd that early in the morning was evident here, as we were able to ride Buzz Lightyear a couple of times right away with no wait while the kids did Space Mountain twice, followed by a couple of rides in Adventureland, all before 7am. The park really didn’t start to fill up until 9ish, the normal opening time. The place really did fill up, too, with Friday being the busiest day we saw at any park during our trip. An employee we talked to the next day at Hollywood Studios said he heard Magic Kingdom hit a peak of 84,000 visitors at some point during the event. In a couple of the shots below you’ll see quite the crowd at different points in the day. Sorry a couple are blurry, I wasn’t going to stop in front of a large crowd and get run down 🙂

I’ll be honest, we didn’t stay the whole time. About 4pm Friday afternoon we headed back to the hotel to rest for a bit and freshen up. After that, we headed over to the Contemporary early in the evening for dinner before heading back in to the park. I expected we’d see people start to trickle out of the park after the evening fireworks show, but even with the normal mass-exodus that clogged up main street after that, the park was still pretty full all night.

Side note here – we got stuck in the main street crowd after the fireworks show (not the first time we’ve made that mistake), and saw some pretty sad behavior out of the supposed grown-ups. I get that people were tired and didn’t want to be stuck there, but intentionally slamming motorized scooters and strollers into people to try and make them move out of your way when they have no where to go is a pretty poor example to be setting. I even heard more than one spouse tell their significant other they were going to do it. Someone near us mentioned witnessing fights breaking out between parents, too. Truly pathetic.

Back on topic, once we were back in, we stayed until about 4am, riding various rides and watching the 1am electric light parade. For our last ride, we finally sucked it up and waited in line for the Snow White mine train. At 70 minutes it was the longest line we stood in all week, but we were glad we waited, as it was a really fun ride. All in all, the 24 hour celebration event was a blast, definitely something we’d do again! Here are a few random shots from our time at the park that day.

Disney Dining Plan Impressions

Coming in to this trip, we’d decided to splurge a little and add the dining package to our stay. Having never purchased it before, we went back and forth on which of the options to choose, but ultimately decided to go with the quick service plan on this trip, not wanting to spend more than necessary on an unknown. We did a little research on the dining plan ahead of time and had selected a few places to eat and snacks to get based on recommendations from other blogs on how to get the best value out of it, but if we’d had more time to devote to it likely could have done even better. My wife’s favorite resource was the Disney Tourist Blog, while I also utilized the Disney Food Blog quite a bit.

Reading various reviews and blogs on whether or not the dining plan is worth it will show some pretty mixed results. To get the full monetary value out of it, you do really need to plan ahead and figure out what restaurants and snacks represent the best value. Even if you get it free as part of one of their annual promotions, it still appears that you have to work to ensure it’s worth it when you factor in the non-discounted cost of the room and park tickets, at least according to this blog. Jen did a pretty good job tracking the cost of all of our meals and snacks over the week we had the plan, and thanks to a little creativity in where we ate we managed to come out ahead, but that only tells part of the story, and certainly doesn’t mean I’d do it again. Why? Let’s take a look.

For those unfamiliar with the counter service dining plan, you get two counter service meals and one snack per day per person. We had three meal plans, as we hadn’t added Bayley’s boyfriend Joe since we didn’t know until the last minute that he’d be joining us. This meant that overall, we had 42 meal credits and 21 snack credits to use as we saw fit over our stay on property. We each also got the refillable “unlimited” soda mugs as part of the plan. We did get unlimited mugs one time before when we stayed at Pop Century in 2009, but that was before they introduced the RFID-enabled mugs they use now. I get why they did it since far too many people refused to play by the rules when we were on the honor system and would bring the same mugs back on subsequent stays (this is why we can’t have nice things), but it made the experience a bit annoying a couple of times. It seems that once the system feels your cup is full, it induces a two minute delay before it lets you get more soda. It was smart enough to know that I hadn’t completely filled when I was doing a half-and-half fill with Cherry Coke and Coke Zero, but those times when I was super thirsty and wanted to drink some and refill right away, I was denied and had to wait. A minor inconvenience, but an inconvenience all the same. If you need it, there’s a great read on how the RFID-enabled cups work up here. They work at other Disney resorts, too, and appear to work for several days after your stay ends, as ours showed they were active until May 30th, a full 7 days after we checked out. We also found that paper cups given as part of meals at some of the hotel counter service restaurants had RFID chips in them that only allowed 3 refills that evening, too.

Anyway, back to the food. I think I mentioned in my last post that in the 5-6 weeks leading up to the trip that my wife and I had been on a pretty strict diet. It’s one that the coach at my boxing gym had put together for me to get me back in to shape after I’d regained some weight last year due to injury. I was down 25lbs when we got there, and over the course of the week on the dining plan, felt like I gained half of it back (but didn’t, thanks in large part to the amount of walking we did).

Oh, and I’d like to add that if anyone’s looking for a solid boxing gym in Charlotte, NC, be sure to give Dyme Boxing a try. I’ve been going 4 years now and have lost and kept off a lot of weight, and enjoy the workouts 🙂

Back on topic; with the dining plan, meals at counter service restaurants include an entree, dessert and drink. At most places I probably could have eaten a little healthier, but I’m pretty picky with my food, and many of the healthier options just didn’t appeal to me. My biggest example of why I didn’t like the dining plan centers around the desserts. Sure, I could have skipped them, but then I’m wasting money. That, and they looked awesome. For the most part, they tasted pretty good, too. Some examples of desserts we had, including a shot of the inside of Darth Cupcake (that’s delicious peanut butter in the frosting):

We expected cupcakes with dry cake and cheap frosting, but were pleasantly surprised by all of them. Moist delicious cake with some pretty good frosting. By day three, however, I was tired of anything cake-based and was doing my best to find other options, like the frozen lemonade at Yak and Yeti, which was perfect on a super humid day at Animal Kingdom. By the time day five hit I’d had my fill of park food, too. Maybe it would have been different if we’d had the next plan up, where we could have gotten one table service meal, but still, I wanted something that didn’t taste like mass produced food. Thankfully the counter service options aren’t limited to the parks. The plan works at a small handful of restaurants at Downtown Disney as well, so a few days in to our stay, the kids headed out for a date night (Joe took her to dinner at Sanaa, which we all love), and Jen and I took the water taxi over to Downtown Disney and ate at Wolfgang Puck Express on the dining plan. Honestly, this place was easily the best bang for your buck that we found with any of our counter service meals. For the two of us, the total that night was over $50 before tip (tips aren’t covered by the plan), and our entrees were much better quality food than what we’d eaten in the parks. I had the bacon-wrapped meatloaf on garlic mashed potatoes with creme brulee for dessert, and loved it. We all agreed that their vanilla bean cheesecake shown in the picture below was better than the creme brulee, though, and all got that on our two subsequent visits. Here are pics of my meals here. I had the meatloaf twice 🙂

Due to our character meals falling on day one of the meal plan and having small meals at other places we didn’t want to use the meal plan, we were able to use our credits to cover Joe’s counter service meals several times. We also ended the last day with 4 snack credits, and let the kids go pick out whatever they wanted before we left Hollywood Studios on the last night. Your credits expire at midnight on the day you check out, and you don’t get a refund on any that go unused. For snacks, we generally tried to ensure we used those credits on things over $4.50 in cost. My favorite was easily the school bread found at the bakery in Epcot’s Norway pavilion, although we had some pretty good sweets at the bakery in Germany, too. I don’t have a list of all the places we got snacks at, but I do have a list of the counter service locations we ate:

Wolfgang Puck Express at Downtown Disney (three visits)
Cosmic Ray’s at Magic Kingdom (two visits)
Contempo Cafe at Disney’s Contemporary Resort (two visits)
Toy Story Pizza Planet at Hollywood Studios (two visits)
Riverside Mill Food Court at Port Orleans Riverside
Yak and Yeti Local Food Cafes at Animal Kingdom
Sunshine Seasons at Epcot
ABC Commissary at Hollywood studios
Be Our Guest at Magic Kingdom

Be Our Guest was an interesting one. After checking the Disney Dining site multiple times each day to see if any space had opened up, we finally managed to get a reservation on one of our last park days. It’s an interesting (albeit slow) experience in the way you order, with kiosks available for your group to customize your meals. Once you order you go find a place to sit, and they bring your food to you on real plates, locating you by the RFID chip in your Magic Band (or the magic rose they give you if you don’t have a Magic Band). The food itself was some of the better in-park counter service food we had too, although the roast beef in my sandwich was slightly overcooked for my tastes. Regardless, it’s a neat experience that shouldn’t be missed.

Oh, one additional tip when eating at any counter service restaurant with a dining plan: if you want a large drink, just ask. They generally default to giving you a regular size one, but will give you a large at no additional cost if you ask for it in our experience.

We did get value out of the plan, having consumed $142 more in food and snacks than the dining plan cost, but I can honestly say I wouldn’t have eaten half the sweets I did if it didn’t come with the meal or purchased the unlimited soda mugs, and as such, we likely would have spent noticeably less on park food, although to be fair we might have made up for it elsewhere. For me, the only reasons I’d have for getting a dining plan would be convenience and lack of sticker shock. Even those counter service meals are pricy, and the cost of a single meal adds up quick for a family. Not having to fork over a bunch of actual money with each meal would probably keep stress levels down. It’s a lot easier to just swipe a Magic Band, and Disney knows it.

Final verdict: While I wouldn’t jump on the chance to get the dining plan again, I think I’d get outvoted. They both want to try the plan with one table service meal at some point. We’ll see…

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