SeaWorld's All-Day Dining Deal is an "all you care to eat" program in the vein of Universal's Meal Deal (which can be purchased for $21 for one park or $25 for both parks) or Disney's Dining Plan. Disney's Dining Plan (DDP) is the broadest of the three, with patrons allowed to go to almost any eatery and obtain an entrée, side item, and drink for their main meals (which are counted up, and can shifted around during the length-of-stay), and the DDP also factors in some snack items every now and then.

Universal's Meal Deal is more liberal in the usage: feel free to eat as much as you want, keep going through the line, request entrée after entrée, visit one restaurant after another, and stuff yourself silly all day long. The catch is that the Meal Deal is not accepted at every eatery, or even most eateries. It's restricted to just three restaurants in IOA and three more in Universal Studios, and all of the restaurants in question are in the fast-food business. As you might expect, this leads to the menus at those restaurants turning homogenous. You can find pizza, burgers, fried chicken, and basic pasta. There is an exception to the rule every so often – one place has Chinese food, for instance – but in general it's the same stuff all over. And worse, the food is not particularly fresh or exciting.

In recent years, in fact, the eateries in question have been very lightly frequented, and it seemed like 100% of the patrons there had the Meal Deal wristbands on. It looked for all the world like the non-wristband patrons glanced at the menu board, checked the prices, perhaps glanced at the mostly-unappetizing dishes, and decided to head off elsewhere. It doesn't take an advanced degree in economics to guess at the underlying factors at work here. If a select few restaurants are inundated with people looking for their "free" food, they have little incentive to provide outstanding taste or quality. The Universal Meal Deal makes sense only if you have a big appetite, do not mind a limited fast food menu, AND your tolerance for the humdrum is somewhat elevated.

At first glance, SeaWorld's Dining Deal looks a lot like Universal's. It costs $28/adult, and is accepted at a limited range of eateries, not the massive coverage you can find at Disney World. SeaWorld's plan allows for parkhopping also to Aquatica and, incongruously, to Busch Gardens all the way over in Tampa. SeaWorld does not appear to have a single-park Dining Deal. One of Aquatica's eateries has a single-location all day dining plan, though. Personally, I did not consider it worthwhile when I tried it in the park's first week. The menu was pretty limited, and the quality uneven. Worst of all, you'd have to start eating early, and possibly also stay late, to "break even" on the cost. Our problem was that we always parkhopped over to SeaWorld after a few hours, so it wouldn't make much sense to buy the wristband.

Voyagers has some mid-level theming

The new Dining Deal at SeaWorld appears to be an acknowledgement that the effort wasn't working when restricted to just the Banana Beach Cookout, and this is an ambitious attempt to roll out a comprehensive plan like Disney's and Universal's. For your $28, you get to visit the restaurants as often as you want, just like Universal's plan, but I detect some significant advantages over Universal's plan. First, the $28 includes drinks (soft drinks or Aquafina), and by golly that's a no-brainer for me. I can almost drink $28 worth of bottled water on a summer day, especially with the nominal cost around $3/bottle. It's like getting free food!

The nature of the food is the major advantage over Universal's plan. The list of restaurants at SeaWorld veers far afield of simple fast food, and you can get an impressively wide variety of vittles. I've previously tasted much of this, paying out of pocket, and I'm very encouraged by the list of restaurants participating. Here are the restaurants you can use the Dining Deal at (note that baby back ribs, when on the menu, are the only items not included in the plan):

In addition to the increased variety and the higher quality of the food, I'd argue that this list should be interpreted to mean that SeaWorld's plan is actually a hybrid of Universal's and Disney's. Many of the problems with Universal's plan can be traced to the fact that so few eateries accept the wristbands. SeaWorld's Dining Deal isn't accepted in every single restaurant, like Disney's, but it's much more than a token eatery or two. My hope is that this means the SeaWorld plan will avoid the descent into mediocrity that characterizes the Universal plan.

Here are the current menus at the SeaWorld restaurants which are part of the plan:

Is your mouth watering as much as mine? Of course, that line of thinking leads to almost certain gastronomic excess. The downside of a plan like Disney's is that people feel they must maximize their value and get their money's worth, so they make reservations at the eateries which in previous years had high quality but less of a crowd. Subsequent complaints about the lack of "common" foods (and fast food) has led to a blanding of the menus at Walt Disney World restaurants in the past few years, and the restaurants themselves are often quite full now as a result of the Dining Plan. The end effect has not been positive for the user.

The downside to a plan like Universal's, and now like SeaWorld's as well, is not driven by profit so much as it is by gluttony. Disney's plan is not exactly all you can eat; you can only get the one entrée for the meal, and you only get so many meals per week. With Universal's and SeaWorld's, you can keep going back, even five minutes later if you want. It's probably human nature, and even good business sense, for the local managers of those restaurants to cut costs and maybe cut corners, once the business is "guaranteed" via wristbands.

What's needed, at SeaWorld as well as Universal and Disney, is leadership. A leader needs to step in and declare, nay dictate in the strongest terms, that quality and variety must survive at all costs. When I say "at all costs," that includes at the opportunity cost of not actually maximizing potential savings. Just because you can save pennies by shaving costs or cutting corners does not mean it should be done, and a wise leader will avoid instilling policies that reward simple cost-cutting, without the larger picture.

Spice Mill

The SeaWorld Dining Deal does not include specialty drinks (Anheuser-Busch drinks) and it's not accepted at the signature dining experiences. But it's a good value. When I tried it on this past Sunday, I started out in Aquatica and parkhopped around noon, staying until 9 pm. My family of three paying members cost $63 to purchase the plan (it was $25/person last weekend, but has gone up in price since then), and we must have easily eaten enough food to cost $63. In fact, probably twice as much money. And this is the higher-quality type of counter-service and tray-slides, so it wasn't just $120 worth of pizza. We had salmon, chicken primavera, spareribs, jambalaya, and all sorts of "good" fast food.

As I went through the day, in fact, I was considering how to write this up, and had settled on expressing a desire for the plan to only limp along. Too little business, and they might fold it (which would make me sad, since it's a screaming bargain). Too much business, and everyone would join the plan, which would diminish things somewhat.

I worried about the latter because the lines at SeaWorld are already longer than at Universal. And they'd become longer still if everyone had access to free food. Which, now that I think about, SeaWorld might be banking on, to avoid losing too much money. As it is, they load up all the plates (not just those on the Plan) with seemingly half a pound of French fries per entrée. Were they trying to fill us up?

Apparently SeaWorld is selling 600-1,000 of the Dining Deals per day, which struck me as a low number but seems to make management happy. Happy enough to raise the price this week from $26 to $28, anyway. That puts it in range of the price of Disney's plan, which is not all you can eat and which features much more pedestrian fast food, compared to SeaWorld's. As locals, we really liked SeaWorld's Dining Deal. It encouraged us to try new places, and we liked an awful lot of what we sampled (we only had one poor meal during the entire day of sampling almost nonstop). We'll definitely shell out for this again.

A few hints so you can avoid some of my mistakes:

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© 2008 Kevin Yee