What Is A Resonable Food Budget?

[steph73]

I'm trying to figure out how much our upcoming trip is going to cost, and need some advice on a food budget. There are 4 of us: me, DH, and our two sons ages 6 and 3. The kids can be picky eaters sometimes, so I will be carrying snacks for them. But when we do counter service & sit down dinners I'm sure we will order a meal for each of them.

We will be there for 10 days, and the first 7 days will be at the HGVC timeshare. We do plan on eating at the timeshare, at least breakfast everyday except for the one character breakfast we've booked. The last three days will be at the CBR, so we'll be eating out a bit more those days.

We've booked three character meals (Donald's Breakfastosaurus, Crystal Palace [lunch], and Chef Mickey's [dinner]), and may book one more PS for the Boma breakfast buffet at AKL. Other than that, we will probably mostly do counter service.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how much money we should allot towards food? I would love to know what others have spent on their vacations, and a price range low to high that we should expect to spend. I want to be realistic, I know that it's going to be expensive. But, at the same time money is a bit tight right now, and basically the less we spend on food will be more we can spend on souveniers.


Thanks!

 

[SandraC]

Hi, we're just back from CBR. We are me, dh, dd is 7 years old, ds was 15 months old (he ate for free and ate as much as dd!)

We liked CBR food court. We only ate there a couple of nights but the prices were good. I even ordered the children pasta with marinara and bread for $3.99 because I wasn't too hungry ~ it was HUGE! Definately an adult meal at kids prices!

You can go to Deb Wills Disney site for menu's and cost. I did that and added tax and tip to figure out our meal budget.

We ate at:

Cinderella's Royal Table char breakfast
Chef Mickey
Donald Breakfastosaurus
1900 Park Faire char breakfast at GF
Wonderland Tea at GF
Pinocchino's at MK (EXCELLENT $18.00 for dinner total)
Columbia Harbour House (great $18.00 for lunch total)
Crystal Palace char dinner
Pizza Planet at MGM
CBR food court
Epcot France snack & Morocco snack

We also bought groceries twice, once at Publix, once at Crossroads. Including a couple 6 packs of beer it came to $50.00 total groceries for baby food, milk, bread, jam, pb, fruit, cookies.

I went all out this trip for food and character meals. Next time I will budget less, it really saves.

I think we will only do three character meals next time
(1) Cindy's
(2) Crystal Palace
(3) Chef Mickey

It saves time and money if you only ate two meals at restaurants / counter, and one meal is a picnic.

We ate breakfast in the room a couple days, and lunch at the parks a couple days as a picnic, it was nice to relax and enjoy fruit and veggies. We often don't get the nutrients we should while on vacation ~ so eat your veggies!