Be sure to read the fine print and understand the rules. Not only are you required to make reservations ahead of time for many of your meals, but it's very expensive and IMO defeats the purpose of staying in a timeshare with a kitchen. In addition to being cost prohibitive, there were a few things that I didn't like about the meal plan:
1) You had to purchase a meal plan for every person in your room, for every day, and every plan included breakfast.
Um, thanks, but I don't eat a big breakfast every day, and I certainly don't want to pre-pay for it. Even when breakfast is included in the price of my room, I might go down and grab a bowl of fruit or a muffin or I might not. And when I'm staying in a timeshare, I'd much rather toast a bagel in my room than go out for breakfast. I can certainly make breakfast for much cheaper than the ~$25pp the meal plans charge, even with tourist-trap grocery prices.
2) Everyone on your plan has to eat together. For my family with adult kids, that'd be a deal breaker right there because we are on completely different sleep schedules. While on vacation, we often eat breakfast hours before the kids get up. Stupid plan, IMO.
3) I don't like being limited to on-site restaurants. Part of the fun of vacation is to adventure out.
4) I don't like having my day dictated by restaurant reservations. One morning, you might want to sleep in instead of getting up for your 8am breakfast buffet. Another day, you might be exhausted and find out that a 7pm reservation is way too late. Who wants that kind of stress on your vacation?
5) The campus is ENORMOUS and the restaurants are spread out over many miles. I'd rather make home base where we find chairs together, in the least crowded part of the park, and have lunch in that section of the park, on my own schedule vs. having my restaurant choice dictate where we go within the park.
6) Some plans charge $50 PER PERSON for no-show. So let's day you're all exhausted and opt to skip dinner altogether, even though it's pre-paid. Well, you'll also have to shell out $50 PER PERSON if you forget to cancel that reservation.
7) If the plan included LUNCH every day, we might have considered it. Then we could have eaten breakfast mid-morning and lunch at 4pm and skipped dinner altogether. But this isn't the case.
FYI, we found that the water park is very lax in allowing you to bring your own food and drinks into the park. Most days we packed our own drinks (including beer and vodka) and a few times we packed a picnic lunch. No one ever bothered us. Just eating two or three picnic lunches can save a family a few hundred bucks.