I love the idea of lunch poolside or on the beach we will be doing this for sure. Saves time from going up to the villa to have lunch. The hard part about dinner every night for us is we are a party of 5 with no kids under the Disney ages. The youngest is 10.We were there in may. No dining plan except maybe an included breakfast with some packages. The best ‘dining plan’ is to stop in kapolei on the way to aulani and pick up food and alcohol. But we always get a one bedroom so we have a full kitchen. We get cereal and other breakfast food and then get cold cuts to make sandwiches at lunch which I bring to the pool. We usually go out to dinner most nights.
That is our plan and thoughts as well. If we cook in the villa dinner and lunches at the pool and beach that we made we can do character breakfast and dinner and luau one night.The last time we went we took the kids and rented a car. Which allowed us the freedom to go grocery shop and we saved a lot of money that way. One night we cooked on the grills which was nice. Our family of 4 also had poolside and beach lunch which was very convenient. By going to the store to save, we had more in our budget to do the character dinners a few times. We were there for 10 days.