You have found a great deal on tickets and are staying with friends to help keep your Disney vacation cost low, but everyone has to eat, right? Theme parks in general are not known for their inexpensive (or healthy) meals. It is easy to spend $50 on one meal for an average size family at Disney. You don’t have to spend that kind of money.
Every time we visit the park we take a backpack full of snacks. I have searched and cannot find any Disney policy stating you cannot bring food into the park. The security guards who search our bags have never said anything to us either, so I assume you can bring in your own food. What we like to do is eat a big breakfast before we leave for the park. Then around lunch time we break out the snacks. I usually pack things like granola bars, apples, grapes, pretzels, things that carry well and don’t need utensils. Then around 4 or 5 we splurge and get ice cream of popcorn from one of the stands. This holds us off until after the park closes. We either pick up burgers after we leave the park or cook a meal (if we have access to a kitchen) depending on the time.
During our last trip to Disney we spent 5 days at the parks and kept our park food bill under $200, for a family of 8. That adds up to less than $50 a day! We could have done it for even less but we dined twice at park restaurants. Tomorrow I’ll share some of our favorite Disney dining spots.
Snack are essential! Fruit that holds up to travel work well. We always like to bring beef jerkey and nuts, a splurge but worth it. We also splurge on something like gummie bears so the kids don’t get the gimmies when they see the goodies, a few can tide them over! I have even been known to keep a small jar with peanut butter when my one picky child was a preschooler as he would just always want a spoon full of peanut butter!
Thanks so much for this great series!! I am really getting pumped up for our trip to the house of mouse in Feb.
Love your Disney series and all the good tips! We are headed there in December with 4 kids and are looking for all the deals we can get!! Thanks and keep it coming!
We took our first trip to Disney this spring and we used their meal plan. We were really happy with the quality of food and felt the meal plan was well worth it. We also packed healthly snacks and water.
My parents did many of these things when going to Disney world. I remember my mom leaving a crockpot of food in our condo at night for us to come back to after a day in the parks and packing sandwiches and waterbottles to take with us. These tips are great.