Universal Meal Deal?
 

Universal is selling an "all you can eat" type meal deal for their parks. Has anyone used this yet? We are going next month and it looks like a good deal.

I have used it. If you plan on eating a lot during the day then you can save money over purchasing the food individually, but it takes a lot of eating.

Some issues to think about:

• Most restaurants don't open until 11:00 or later. So you might be tempted to purchase breakfast and then not eat as much lunch/dinner.
  
• The restaurants that participate in the Meal Deal are limited.
  
• Most of the restaurants that do participate have a very limited menu. If I remember correctly, there was one, maybe two, restaurants in each park that had a slightly better menu option list than the others. For IOA, I think the restaurant in the Toon Lagoon area had the widest selection of food items.
  
• If you park hop, you won't be able to use the Meal Deal for food in the other park unless you pay even more for the Meal Deal. At its base price, it is only valid for certain restaurants in the park you purchased it at.
  
• Some items off the menu are not included (i.e. the better desserts, the larger pizzas, etc.) In fact, the desserts that are included aren't really that good at all.
  
• It does NOT include drinks. So you will have to purchase those separately. Universal does have a drink deal that you can purchase, but this raises the cost even more.

Basically, if I had some teenage boys who would normally never stop eating, and were planning on spending their time in one park per day, then it might be worth it. But for most people, you will probably save money by purchasing your food without the Meal Deal.

Thanks for the reply.

The 1 day/1 park deal is $20 and the 1 day/2 park deal is $25 and that includes a dinner at night in City Walk as well. It looked pretty good value but I wanted to see if anyone had already done it.

I've eaten many, many times at City Walk. You could easily spend more there on dinner alone than $25.00. Of the available restaurants at City Walk, I recommend Pastamore.

When I last purchased the Meal Deal, I didn't notice the City Walk dinner option. But I have seen advertised something like $20 for a Movie and dinner at certain restaurants in City Walk. In those offers, there was a very limited menu to order from (and those were normally the lower priced options). So I would suspect that the same would hold true for the OPs Meal Deal offer. I would suggest checking out exactly what can be ordered from each of the restaurants before purchasing.

I did check on the meals at City Walk. The meals on offer are between $9 to $16 a piece. It looks like the Spanish place was the best deal (value for money) when using the meal deal. You get the entree and tea,coffee,soft drink included.

At the parks you get a limited menu that includes a cookie or other small desert. There are salads and fruit plates included so we went ahead and bought them. I think that we will get good value out of it. I hate paying $4-6 for a plate of fruit as a snack in the parks.