Are any parks' meal plans worth buying?

February 1, 2025, 8:54 PM

As a skeptic of theme park food these days, that's my question. Does anyone have a meal plan that's worth the money these days? If so, which park?

Replies (3)

February 2, 2025, 12:24 PM

Not a single one. Theme park food is too expensive for me to buy more than one meal a day without feeling guilty, let alone a whole dining plan, and amusement park food is rarely good enough for me to want more than one dry burger or chewy chicken tender platter. In fact, the only meals I buy in theme parks are restaurants with thematic or flavor significance, never when I'm hungry.

February 3, 2025, 9:15 AM

It really depends on how many times you plan on visiting the parks. Right now, it's really on Six Flags/Cedar Fair that are offering all-season dining plans that are truly worth their price. However, the now combined chain is managing its dining plans as 2 separate products. Now, if you could purchase an all-season dining plan for the combined chain similar to the price for the current plans, it would be one of the best products in the country.

My issue with all-season dining plans is that food can get stale in the parks and some parks are very limiting in what you can use your dining plan on. So, if you only go to your local park throughout the year, it can get really old really fast. However, if you do tour the country visiting other parks around the chain (like we do), it can be a valuable tool to reduce your cost for food when away from home, especially since food at Cedar Fair and Six Flags parks can be incredibly overpriced when purchased without the dining plan.

The other drawback of all-season dining is that both Cedar Fair and Six Flags require you to wait a certain amount of time between meals - for Cedar Fair, it's 4 hours (I'm not sure what it is at Six Flags now, but it used to be 3 hours the last time we had the pass). If you're at your local park on a slow day, you could easily experience all of your favorite attractions in a couple of hours, so even if you eat the second you walk in, it sometimes feels like you have to hang around waiting for the time to come where you can grab your second meal before you can leave.

February 5, 2025, 7:42 AM

When they first introduced dining plans we decided they weren't for us. Maybe they were designed with families in mind and just maybe the numbers worked for them.

We hardly spend any time stopping to eat anything more than a snack. Preferring to concentrate our time on all the attractions. That's not to say that we never ate in the Parks but it was never going to be an economically viable option.

We all have our favourite dining options. We always liked Flame Tree BBQ at MK for example. But the pressures of trying to get value out of a plan would be too much of a burden.


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