We are planning to go to Ladera Resort this coming December and wondered if anyone had used their meal plan (MAP) before. It's priced at $48 per person.

Hi Pam: <BR> <BR>We spent part of our honeymoon at Ladera last summer. We were on the breakfast plan but did eat dinner at Ladera a few of the nights we werew there. The food is great but expensive and I would think if you planned on eating all your meals at Ladera it would be worth the money to get the MAP plan.

Having eaten dinner at Ladera twice, if the meal plan is $48 a person, I'd definitely recommend it. We stayed at Jalousie, but enjoyed our dinner at Dasheene so much, we came back the next night! The food was fantastic. Jalousie prices are expensive (meal plan was something like $100 a day) so we didn't do it. But taking a taxi anywhere also adds up. If you figure lunch and breakfast would cost about $15 each, you'd be doing very well at $48 each a day. Have fun! That has got to be THE most romantic place in the world.

Breakfasts are free at Ladera (at least they were when we were there), and they are great. Lunch off the menu might have been around $15 U.S. per person (about the same as at Anse Chastanet or Jalousie Hilton). We spent around $25-30 per person on dinner at Ladera, but that was just with an entree and glass of wine apiece, not a full multi-course meal (I think if you each had an appetizer, entree, dessert and split a bottle of wine, the bill for dinner could easily have come to $48 per person -- wine in particular is expensive on St. Lucia -- and I don't know if the meal plan includes wine). We did not get the meal plan because we didn't want to feel like we had to eat all our meals at Ladera. We usually ate lunch on the beach at Anse Chastanet or Jalousie Hilton (only ate lunch at Ladera one day), and I think we ate 2 or 3 dinners at Ladera. The food is very good (and the view is the BEST), but it is also fun to try other places. I don't know if you can just get the meal plan for part of your stay but you might want to see if that's an option. It might be worth doing for a couple of days but I don't know that I'd want to do it for the entire stay. For us it would not have been cost-effective because we rarely want a full multi-course meal.