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Just FYI - I was talking to a friend who works as a campus recruiter for Disney. He attended some seminars at WDW last year where the lecturer was the head of counter service/outdoor foods for MK. Anyway, I was asking him about the dining plans, etc. and the discussions here. He said that DPs are NOT subsidized by the hotels (at least not the paid plans, that free dining thing was a marketing deal).
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I was wondering about this. People are assuming there is a hotel subsidity when there might will not be one. If there is no subsidity, then it is up the restaurants to participate or not - if they don't, people won't eat there if they are on the dining plan and if a large number of people are on the dining plan, then they have to offer it or risk going out of business. I'm sure Disney owned restaurants don't have a choice - Disney decides that for them - they may just have a choice of 1 or 2 credits.
The advantage to the restaurants is to get people to eat more table service meals (how many posts have you seen where the person said they normally only eat counter service and maybe one or two character meals), eat more appetizers and desserts and they win through unused credits.
Now Disney made rules for the program based on marketing decisions - i.e. packages only with room and tickets - they wanted people to stay onsite, purchase their tickets from Disney and now, eat on site.
So what does this mean for DVC? Well, if true, the room subsidity becomes an non-issue. So they can offer the plan at the same price. But I do think they will still tie it to the number of nights and for everyone in the room (to increase the likelyhood of unused credits) and to a ticket purchase. So AP holders will be out of luck at DVC just like they are at the regular hotels.
So why is it taking so long? First of all, given the evidence we have seen of lack of communication between different parts of Disney, I wouldn't be surprised that DVC found about about it the same time the rest of us did. So some months passed before DVC realized there was a significant issue here - after all, there was the Wishes dining plan previously that wasn't a big deal that DVC owners didn't get. Then they had to decide they wanted to do something, decide how to do it and negociate with the restaurants to be included (and this could potentially take a long time particularly if they were busy dealing with other issues - like how popular the plan actually was). Now we get to the technical issues, most likely months later. Changing an existing system is not as simple as just changing the code. You have to corridinate releases, do extensive testing to make sure you didn't break something as well as making sure your changes work in all the corner cases that people will think up, update your training documentation, train users, etc. Then there are the marketing issues - I can see it being very likely that the dining people agreed to inclusion, but only after the start of the year - after the already announced price increase. DVC may have decided that they want to announce it at the annual meetings, even if it could have been ready sooner.
I think I want the dining plan for the freedom of it, but I'm not positive that it is a cost savings for me. Because if I get it, I am assuming everyone has to purchase tickets - and an annual pass might be a good idea for me and my husband if we go back within a year. And for the rest, we would purchase the tickets from Ticketmania for a discount - we would lose some of that discount (I assume we still get the Disney advance purchase discount.