Theme park visitors save money with grocery delivery
When Emily Smith visited Walt Disney World last week, she decided to bypass the pricey theme-park snacks and breakfasts by having groceries delivered to her hotel room.
The Austin mother of three ordered $200 worth of bottled water, chips, cookies, raisins, milk and produce from Garden Grocer. The Clermont-based delivery service dropped off her order at Disney's Art of Animation hotel, where staff brought it to her room and put the cold items in the fridge.
"It worked out amazingly well," said Smith, 35, who liked the convenience of having her own snacks and being able to eat breakfast in the hotel room. And "I definitely think it saved me money," she said. "I'm sure buying park snacks would be way more expensive than bringing our own snacks into the park."
As visitors try to defray costs of theme park vacations, grocery-delivery companies are cashing in.
Services such as Garden Grocer, WeGoShop and Orlando Grocery Express, which cater to tourists in Orlando, say sales have increased.
Time shares with full kitchens have helped fueled the trend, said Drew Martin, who with his wife Amy runs a local WeGoShop franchise that gets about 70 percent of its business from theme parks. Walt Disney World has added more time-share units at hotels such as Grand Floridian and the Polynesian Village Resort.
Theme-park food costs also are driving people to consider other options. Meals and snacks at attractions can add up, and prices are rising. Prices increased earlier this month for Disney Dining Plan, often used by visitors to save money on restaurants, with hikes of 3 percent for adults and 9 percent for kids.
"As the costs do get higher, people are looking for ways to save some money here and there," said Brian Coleman, founder of Garden Grocer in Clermont. "This is a pretty significant savings for people."
After 10 years in business, Garden Grocer employs 87 people. Coleman said the company's sales have increased annually, hitting $9 million last year. He expects to reach $10 million in 2016, despite shrinking his delivery area earlier this year to concentrate solely on Disney World.
Brian Sidwar said sales have doubled every year at his Orlando Grocery Express, which opened in 2012. Still, he said, many tourists don't know about the delivery option.
In areas with a heavy concentration of vacation homes, hotels and time-share units, "I see people all the time … walking up and down the highways with bags of groceries," Sidwar said. "I'm thinking to myself, 'You can't tell me these people wouldn't prefer to have placed their order ahead of time and just had it waiting at the resort when they checked in.'"
Each service has variations in its business model, but the basic premise is the same. Shoppers order online, and the groceries get delivered to their hotels, with delivery fees of anywhere from $2 to $40. Employees pick up the items at local stores, although as Garden Grocer has grown, it now has distributors of products such as soft drinks deliver in bulk to its warehouse.
Unlike Garden Grocer, WeGoShop and Orlando Grocery Express say they supply a variety of places including both Disney and Universal resorts, and WeGoShop says it supplies the independently operated Swan and Dolphin on Disney property too. Disney said it authorizes outside vendors, and that guests can either pick up the groceries themselves or have an employee deliver them. A spokesman for the Swan and Dolphin said it does not allow outside delivery and that it would ask any grocery delivery service to leave. Spokespeople for Universal and Loews, which has a joint partnership to run the hotels on Universal's property, did not answer questions about their policies.
At Garden Grocer and Orlando Grocery Express, shoppers select items and place them in an online cart, just as they would for typical Internet shopping. Items often cost more than in a typical supermarket.
WeGoShop, which has locations nationwide, has a different model. Users select which store they want their groceries from, then provide a shopping list. Martin said WeGoShop doesn't mark up the items and does not require a minimum order.
Gooding's, a supermarket across from Disney World, also delivers groceries.
Delivery services that require memberships have also become popular. About a year and a half ago, Disney-focused travel agent Stephen Juliano began using Amazon's Prime Pantry to order water bottles, breakfast foods and snacks when he visits the resort.
"I always recommend doing something like that for all my guests, even if it's a case of water. Water bottles in any theme park are always very, very expensive," Juliano said. Juliano said he also suggests Garden Grocer as an alternative for people who are not members of Amazon Prime, which costs $99 a year.
Grocery delivery service Shipt launched in Central Florida last year, delivering food from Publix throughout Central Florida. Like Amazon's Prime Pantry, Shipt charges a $99 annual membership fee. The company would not give details about how many orders it has had from the theme parks.
The growth of such online competition worries Coleman.
"We're trying to figure out how we can adapt to that," he said. "The real thing is trying to get better deals from our distributors so we can have a similar kind of pricing."
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