How does disney dvc work

Under this scenario, you could feasibly have up to points available to use. Banked points must be used before the end of the following year, or they are lost. You can also purchase up to 24 one-time use points from Disney. It is also possible to rent or buy points from other DVC members to be transferred into your account. Here are the Details You Need to Know! You can. You can also do a one-time buy to cover a special or unusual trip.

Just buy extra points specifically for THAT vacation. We chose Copper Creek. The rules for making reservations are different. You can make reservations at your home resort up to 11 months in advance.

These time standards are no joke. We were able to reserve at our home resort right at the month mark but when we tried to book a room four months in advance, we had trouble finding anything and ending up having to split our stay between two different properties. With one exception, which is highlighted, all our stays have been in one-bedroom villas.

Copper Creek is our home resort. These are newly updated villas so everything is modern, although the decor is rustic railroad themed with lots of wood and iron accents. What we liked best about staying at Copper Creek is the amenities of the resort and feeling like we were in the middle of all the action. The resort is located right on Bay Lake and the Magic Kingdom is just a short ferry ride away.

You can also hop on the bus and take a short ride to the Contemporary and take the Monorail in to Epcot or Magic Kingdom. Jambo house is the main lodge where the beautiful lobby is. Animal Kingdom Lodge is a popular place to stay because of the on-site savanna with animal viewing. We stayed in a three-bedroom Deluxe Grand Villa inside Jambo house and it was the height of Disney luxury.

This is how I imagine celebrities and the ultra rich must experience Disney World. The Deluxe Grand Villas have three bedrooms, one master suite with a king-sized bed and two smaller bedrooms with two queen beds each. The couch in the living room also makes a bed. There were two separate balconies overlooking the savanna, a full kitchen, dining room and game room with a pool table.

Everything was exquisitely themed, from the wall art to the tiles in the shower. The experience of staying in a Deluxe Grand Villa was probably a one-of-a-kind thing for us. It is an all-DVC property, meaning that there are no standard hotel rooms here. All available accommodations are Disney Vacation Club Villas. The resort has a very beachy, Florida vibe. There are also three quiet pools on property.

What we liked best about staying at Old Key West was the amount of space we had. The only way into the bathroom is through the bedroom, which means kids sleeping on the pullout couch in the living room have to walk into your sleeping space to use the facilities — other one-bedroom villas have had a separate door to access the toilet.

Try the banana bread pudding sundae for dessert. The themeing is inspired by the Saratoga Springs in New York famous for horse racing. One of my favorite things about this resort is the artwork in the lobby of all the different horses that have been featured in Disney movies over the years. What we liked best about Saratoga Springs is the pools. My advice for anyone booking at Saratoga Springs is to check out where your villa is located on a map and see where you are in relation to pools and the bus stops.

Disney expedites the deed recording process and you can usually get a reservation as soon as you sign the paperwork, even before the deed is officially recorded with the state. If you want to pay the lowest amount possible, buying resale is usually the best bet.

You just have to understand that the process can be slow, sometimes frustratingly slow. With a resale, you first have to find a good contract. If you want a specific size at a smaller resort, it can take some time for one to come up. Once you find one and make an offer, the seller may decide to take a different offer, and then you have to wait for another one to come along. Once the offer is accepted, it has to be sent to Disney for them to decide whether to exercise their right of first refusal, followed by the titling and deed recording process.

Disney then needs to get you registered as a member in their system. If Disney does take the contract back via right of first refusal, it costs you nothing, but now you have to go back to the beginning and find a new contract to make an offer on. We can tell you from personal experience that the process can feel maddening. Another difference between buying direct and resale is the ease and cost of financing.

Disney has their own lending arm, so they can get you financing very quickly and easily, whereas financing a resale purchase can be a little trickier. There are third-party timeshare lenders, and some of the resale companies can help facilitate the process of taking out a loan with one of them.

To be honest, the costs of financing a DVC membership, no matter who you take the loan with, strike us as far too high.

If you do decide to finance the purchase, evaluate all possible options first before just taking the Disney financing. Keep in mind, though, that there are lots of point contracts available on the resale market, but very few that are really small or really large.

Important note: newly purchased resale points do not have all the same privileges as points purchased directly from Disney. In addition, members who only own points purchased resale after April 4, are also not eligible for most ancillary perks like Annual Pass discounts and dining and merchandise discounts.

People who own at least points purchased direct from Disney, or purchased via resale before April 4, , are still eligible for the various discounts. And finally, resale DVC points purchased after January 19, cannot be used to book at the newly built Riviera Resort unless they are Riviera Resort points , and points for the Riviera Resort that were purchased via resale will only be eligible for booking at the Riviera resort, not other DVC resorts.

Presumably these same restrictions will be applied to any new resorts built in the future. Bear in mind that the redemption options that were removed in for resale buyers are a very poor use of DVC points.

The special exchange options like Disney Cruises or the Concierge Collection require a very large number of points, and the value you are getting for your points is very low — so low that if you bought DVC points direct and only used them for exchanges like cruises, you might never break even on the purchase.

In pretty much every case, you can rent out your points for cash , use the cash to buy the cruise or other exchange, and have money left over. The most financially valuable use of DVC points is to stay at DVC resorts, and points purchased in the resale market will allow you to do that.

The discount for WDW annual passes is the big one. However, unless you plan to visit 3 or more times a year, an annual pass is likely to be more expensive than just buying regular tickets for each visit. The merchandise and food discounts are unlikely to amount to nearly as much money, unless you plan to eat at lot of very expensive restaurants or buy a massive number of souvenirs. Keep in mind that you get discounts as long as you own at least direct-purchased points.

If you have points purchased resale and purchased direct from Disney, you get the same discounts as if you had bought them all direct. That may actually make sense for some folks, especially if the Sorcerer annual passes are a good match for your travel patterns, but our advice is to run the numbers carefully.

Resale buyers still have the same core privileges for booking DVC resorts as those who buy from Disney: the ability to book rooms 11 months in advance at your home resort or 7 months in advance for other DVC resorts except for Riviera resale buyers, who can only book at Riviera. Those core privileges make up the primary value of DVC. We recommend dealing only with companies that focus on DVC sales, as opposed to companies that just generically list lots of timeshare contracts.

You should expect that every contract listed will show the use year, how many points are available in the current year and the next, and how much per point the person wants. Disney offers special incentives for new buyers on the DVC resorts that are currently available for direct sale.

These offers are subject to change at any time and may not be available when you make your purchase. Unfortunately, Disney's resorts are mostly at Orlando. Few rooms are available at any other location. The Grand Californian in Anaheim has a tiny allotment. Aulani has a bit more and still in development.

Hilton Head is another possible location if you really want to go there??? Fortunately, they can exchange for other resorts at RCI, but sticking with DVC gives them the best value because Disney is clearly the leader in terms of demand and satisfaction.

I do notice that despite expiring points, Disney's value is keeping up unlike other timeshare resorts. Owners can get some money out if they want out. The annual maintenance fees can cost as much as a 7-night stay at a WDW moderate resort.

That is the part that always stops me from being tempted to buying in. Although the sales team will tell you about how you can sell and rent your points and it is probably technically possible to make money, that is only going to happen if your willing to turn it into a part possibly full time job of managing it.

If you are going to do one of these clubs Disney or otherwise do it because you are committed to the idea of taking regular vacations and they are way of making it easier and cheaper over the long term. These plans do not appreciate in value, and in fact depreciate faster than a new car driven off the lot.

Do your research and learn how to buy in the secondary market basically Ebay. You will literally pay pennies on the dollar and save tens of thousands of dollars. The only ones who won't are the club owners.

And it's those maintenance costs that has driven me away. You pay up front then must pay extremely high fees each year. The fees were so expensive, it made it clear that there was not much of an advantage, if at all, in investing in DVC. The biggest problem with timeahares and vacation programs like DVC, is that buyers are putting huge sums of money down today for vacations they "may" take a decade from now. For those who are loyal and dedicated enough to recoup the initial cost of the program, it can be a huge benefit.

However, for those that travel more spontaneously and sporadically, it can be a financial drain. I have a number of friends who are DVC members, and they are extremely satisfied, but they are the type of people that go to WDW multiple times every year. I'm not sure if they would go as frequently if they weren't DVC members, but they and their kids eat and sleep everything Disney.

I do, however, also know a few others and have read dozens of horror stories from guests that have gone into serious debt because they did not conduct a proper cost benefit analysis prior to investing in DVC and other timeshares.

A DVC purchase should be looked at very carefully and decisions should be based on sound financial information from a professional. DVC is not for everyone, but can be a great service for certain guests that visit at least once a year. Anonymous I've an upcoming article that gets into the financials in more depth; I just wanted to use this article to describe how the system works. And Russtinator, I think that'll also open the part of the discussion you're talking about, which is the money.