How Much Money We Spent on Food During our Disney World Vacation

There are many factors that make up a budget for your Disney World vacation: hotel, park tickets, flights, merchandise. Another big one is the amount of funds you’re going to spend on food. On our most recent trip to Walt Disney World we opted to pay out of pocket for our food. Normally we choose to add a dining plan but for various reasons, that you can find listed here, we decided to not add one this particular trip. Which means we were spending dollars throughout our trip on snacks, meals and drinks. We did buy a few necessities so we could start our mornings in our room with some breakfast. All other meals were purchased.

Our family is a family of 5: myself, my husband, our daughter, our eldest son and our one year-old boy. At any of our buffet meals, our youngest was able to eat for free. Most of the other meals we had our two older kids split a children’s meal and order an extra kid’s dessert. We got an extra plate for our youngest, giving him a portion of all the meals on the table.

So here’s a run down on what we spent on snacks, quick-service meals, tables service meals and drinks.

* Keep in mind, we are DVC members. This gives us a discount at most sit down and quick-service restaurants, typically 10%.

Snacks

$130

Quick-Service Meals

$443

Table Service Meals

$857

Drinks

$39

Total $1469

$183 per day of vacation

Now to give you some perspective, we did not eat at extravagant restaurants, and we didn’t order any desserts for ourselves. As much as we had promised ourselves that we would order as if we were on the dining plan, choosing what we wanted instead of allowing price to influence our decisions, it was hard to do. For the amount of money we spent, we do not feel we got the value back in the amount of food we ate. Especially since I was giving portions of my meal to our youngest.

We vacationed at Disney World for 8 days. We ate at 7 table service restaurants, 8 quick-service restaurants and the rest of the meals were grabbed as snack style meals. Take a look at this previous post to see which restaurants we chose to dine at.

This should give you a good idea though on how much you can expect to pay for meals on your Disney World vacation.

For more tips on dining at Walt Disney World check out these previous posts:

The Most Expensive Restaurant at Disney’s Magic Kingdom

The 5 Disney World Restaurants I’d Never Eat at Again

My 5 Favourite Meals at Disney World

How to Use Mobile Ordering at Disney World

Ways to save on Dining at Disney World