The latest update to the My Disney Experience app added some great features and capabilities when it comes to dining on your Disney vacation. You can now make a dining reservation, manage your dining credits, and even place your food order through the app. But does this new update help with the most difficult part of the Disney dining experience – narrowing down the hundreds of possible dining options at Walt Disney World to the handful your family will be able to indulge in during your vacation? With everything from iconic snacks to luxury culinary experiences, the choices are endless. So how can you possibly decide? Everyone’s tastes and preferences are different, so there is no easy answer. Here are some quick tips to help narrow down the options.
Start With Logistics
Unless you have a specific dream dining experience in mind, you probably aren’t going to plan your entire trip around your dining reservations. There are so many other details that impact which parks you do on which days. Park hours, parade and firework schedules, extra magic hours, and special events are going to dictate your park days. So plan your park days and resort days and determine how many reservations you will want for each day and each location. This sounds like an obvious step, but you don’t want to be the person who has made a reservation at the Tusker House in Animal Kingdom only to realize you are going to be at Epcot that day. Now, for each day of your trip, you have narrowed the choices down from the hundreds of locations at all of Walt Disney World to the dozen choices at a single park or resort area.
In your logistics planning, you will also need to determine how many table service and quick service meals you will want each day. If you are on the Disney Dining Plan, you have a limited number of credits. If you decide to do two table service meals on your Magic Kingdom day, you may want to do all quick service meals on your Hollywood Studios day.
Now for each particular meal, you have narrowed your search to an area and a service type. The choices are getting more manageable.
Work the App
This is where the My Disney Experience App starts to help. The app will let you pull up all the dining options and start applying filters. You can filter your search by locations, pricing, experience type, dining plan, and even type of cuisine. Once you have narrowed down the options, the app will also give you restaurant descriptions, locations on a map, and full menus to help you decide.
Seeing is Believing
This is my favorite step. Hopefully by now you have a handful of dining options you are trying to decide between for a particular meal slot. Still can’t decide? Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a picture of food is even better.
There is no shortage of Disney food photos online. The DIS has a series of Food Photos blogs with food pics from all over Walt Disney World. Also, under the Disney World Dining tab, there is a wealth of articles, blog posts, and dining reviews with great food and restaurant pics. A good visual aid can make all the difference in the world in your Disney dining decision.
You can read a description of Tonga Toast a hundred times and still not grasp the magnitude of its awesomeness without a good picture.
So while the sheer number of options makes the Disney dining decision a bit overwhelming, there are plenty of tips and tools to help you make those difficult choices. If you are still having trouble making the final call, your Dreams Unlimited Travel agent would be more than happy to offer some suggestions!
