One of our favorite ways to get more from a day at the Walt Disney World Resort is to book a show dining package. This allows you to get reserved seating for one of the resort's theme park shows without having to make a Fastpass+ reservation for it, while also taking care of a dining reservation. It's a two-for-one deal that can make sense... if it's the right combination of show and restaurant for you and your family.
Disney World's latest offering is a Festival of the Lion King dining package at Tiffins, the two-time winner of our Theme Park Insider Award for the world's best theme park restaurant. Festival of the Lion King also is a former Theme Park Insider Award winner, so this should be a solid combo for many readers.
And Disney is offering a "three-fer" deal with this package, too, including an option for a safari tour along with the reserved show seating and the Tiffins meal.
The Festival of the Lion King dining package is $74-99 for adults and $29-49 for kids ages 3-9, with the higher price for packages that include the safari. Both packages include priority reserved seating at a showing of Festival of the Lion King in Disney's Animal Kingdom. The meals are a three-course lunch or dinner at Tiffins and include a choice of appetizer, entree, and dessert, as well as wine, beer, or non-alcoholic beverage.
The safari tour is through the park's African outback. "Escorted by a special guide, you’ll ride through rugged terrain to see some of the world’s most exotic animals in their unique habitats," the park's press release said.
Reservations open tomorrow (August 2) via +1-407-939-3463 and can be made for dining times starting August 13 through November 21, 2018.
Other show dining packages at Walt Disney World include a Rivers of Light dining package, also at Tiffins as well as at Tusker House Restaurant, a Fantasmic! dining package at The Hollywood Brown Derby, Hollywood & Vine, and Mama Melrose's Ristorante Italiano at Disney's Hollywood Studios, and Festival of Fantasy parade dining package at Tony's Town Square Restaurant in the Magic Kingdom.
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Useless upsells like this pop up usually before major openings when people are putting off their vacations until the next big attraction opens. We saw quite a few of them before Avatar then they went away, now a new set of these "couch digging" upsells will appear to make up some of the revenue they are losing from people putting off their Orlando vacations until next year after Star Wars opens.
This is what the games industrie calls pay to win.
Paying to get stuff is one thing, pay for something that is already there but is put on hold for the non Pay to Win guests is antisocial, rude and not fun on a vacation. Every single guest paying a huge amount of money to get into the park is treated like a second class customer until they pull their wallet again for "micro transactions". In the end you can't blame the Disney company for doing it but the people who keep going to WDW.
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I don't quite understand why you need to have reserved seating for FOTLK. The show rarely fills up anymore outside of the busiest of days, and if you're desperate to sit in the front rows, you only have to arrive @20-30 minutes before the performance time.
It sounds like the "Safari" is nothing more than a ride on Kilimanjaro Safari with other guests that purchased the dining package that day. There's nothing noted here that differentiates the upcharge experience from just a standard ride on the attraction. It's yet another example of Disney charging more for something simply because they can.
Looks like Disney is digging in the couch cushions again looking to shake out more loose change from guests. This particular dinner package doesn't appear necessary at all. Honestly, it would be much more valuable coupled with Finding Nemo, which typically has fewer showings and a much smaller, more visually limited theater than FOTLK. We did the Rivers of Light dining package on our last trip primarily because we didn't want to waste a FP on the nighttime show that would lock us out for the rest of the day and knew that ROL frequently reached capacity. That's not the case for FOTLK, and with multiple showings throughout the day, even if you wanted to use a FP+ reservation for it, you can attend a showing earlier in the day, so you can still make additional reservations after the show.