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.
