dining plan offer

[seanson]

if you booked your vacation to the world but didnt purchase a dining plan before a free dining plan offer comes about, are you valid for the offer? ty

[Ariel_Fan]

Yes, you are still able to take advantage of the offer. We've done that times before, but have been lucky enough not to have to track it and ours was added by the fine folks at Magical Journeys.

[SBETigg]

if you booked your vacation to the world but didnt purchase a dining plan before a free dining plan offer comes about, are you valid for the offer? ty

No, you're not necessarily going to be eligible. You have to book within the dates it is offered as free dining or you won't get it free. If you booked a package before the free dining was announced, you can possibly change your reservation to reflect the free dining. But, if you book after the dates that it is presented, you won't be eligible.

[CleveRocks]

if you booked your vacation to the world but didnt purchase a dining plan before a free dining plan offer comes about, are you valid for the offer? ty
Maybe, maybe not.

The short answer is that already having a pre-existing reservation gives you no priority over someone making a new reservation.

Free dining is a promotion designed to sell more hotel rooms at times when sales are generally lagging. Only the classes of rooms that aren't selling so well are put "on sale" with the free DDP offer. It differs from resort to resort, and within resort it differs between types of rooms.

In other words, let's take Caribbean Beach Resort. Let's say the preferred location rooms are already very well booked, but the standard rooms aren't. The standard rooms will be offered with free DDP but the preferred rooms won't be. But once the standard rooms fill up to a comfortable level, the free DDP won't be offered for the remaining standard rooms.

Disney sets a super-secret occupancy rate percentage for each type of room at each resort. Once the occupancy rate goes above that target rate, then free DDP is no longer offered for that type of room, even if some of those rooms are still available.

So, the short story is that you can't just "automatically" change your reservation from a regular package to free dining. If your level of room has already sold very well and Disney doesn't feel the need to offer something free to entice more people to buy, then your level of room won't be offered with the free DDP. If it IS available with your level of room, you'd need to act fast, because once enough rooms sell, Disney will take away the DDP offer from that level of room.

I've explained this better in the past, but I'm in a rush. I hope this makes sense, and if it doesn't please say so and I'll dig up one of my old posts that explains it very well.

[vamaggie]

If you are interested in taking advantage of any discounts/specials Disney offers (and who isn't!??!?!) I would highly suggest booking your trip with Magical Journeys (if you have already booked you can transfer your reservation to them to handle). They will automatically apply any discounts/promos that are available for your time frame. They seem to know about offers (even before they are posted anywhere else) and work really hard to try to get us all the best deals possible. They were able to apply the fall discounts to our Nov trip (2 rooms at Poly) and saved us over $1000!!! All this while we were at the beach! I did not have to do anything. Try Magical Journeys--they are the most awesome TAs around!!!