continental plan
- noun
- US
:
plan continental
- Our travel package comes with a continental plan, featuring breakfast but no additional meals.
Examples
-
The hotel offers a continental plan, which includes coffee and pastries each morning.
-
If you prefer more flexibility with your meals, you might want to book the continental plan.
-
We chose the continental plan for our stay.
-
Are you considering a continental plan for your vacation?
-
Our hotel rate includes a continental plan that provides breakfast items like fruit and muffins every morning.
-
When booking a room, we opted for the continental plan to enjoy breakfast without additional meal costs.
-
With the continental plan, guests can start their day with a light breakfast of pastries and coffee.
Synonyms
3
2.9
An arrangement where a hotel includes meals each day with the room price
A hotel offer that includes a room and some meals
How Inclusive
Surface Forms
Morphology
The components give a partial clue: 'plan' suggests an arrangement or rate and 'continental' evokes the familiar phrase 'continental breakfast', so a learner might infer it relates to an accommodation option tied to that breakfast. However, the precise sense (a hotel rate that includes only a continental breakfast and excludes other meals) is domain-specific and not fully predictable from the words alone, so prior exposure helps.
Etymology
The term continental plan comes from old hotel practice in Europe: continental described a light 'breakfast' of coffee and pastries, and plan meant the room price. So a continental plan today means a room rate that includes breakfast but not other meals.