Disney Vacation Club members — there’s a NEW CHANGE in DVC’s policy you’ll need to be aware of before you book your next Disney hotel stay!
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Becoming a Disney Vacation Club member can be a rewarding experience for future Disney World and Disneyland vacation stays (and it doesn’t hurt when the perks just keep coming)! But, even though these perks and discounts might be a huge part of the program that attracts members to sign up, it’s also seemed to spark a new problem that Disney is looking to crack down on SOON!
Disney’s version of a timeshare, or Disney Vacation Club, has become a popular option for Disney fans looking to book their next Disney trips over the last few decades. This program allows its members to buy into a points allotment that is then used to book their next Disney World or Disneyland hotel stays — and can be quite the money saver if you’re traveling a lot, tend to book the Deluxe hotel category, or have a larger family and need more space to vacation together.
©Disney
Members have been fairly flexible in using these points at all kinds of Disney destinations beyond hotel stays, including booking staterooms onboard Disney Cruise Line ships and taking up adventure with an Adventures By Disney vacation. As an alternative, several members have relied on the ability to rent or sell points out for booked hotel stays to non-members looking to try out the program. In turn, this allows the renter to pay the member cash value for a stay that they would otherwise have had to book directly with Disney (and probably at a higher price).
It’s also not out of the realm of possibilities that companies or individuals looking to become DVC members might have zeroed in on this system as a way to turn a profit over time after a set investment.
Copper Creek deluxe studio room
This practice has long been believed to be a contributing factor to one of the biggest frustrations as a Disney Vacation Club member. Over the more recent years, as the popularity of the program has increased and more members are being added, it’s becoming more and more common to hear members complain that the availability they once enjoyed getting to book their preferred hotel stay has decreased. When you buy into DVC as a member, your points are assigned a “home” resort on a purchase contract. This contract’s points can be used for hotel stay bookings as early as 11 months in advance of your trip since you own a deeded real estate interest at that hotel.
However, one of the perks of being an owner with full access to membership benefits from DVC is that you can choose to stay at a hotel that’s not your home resort as long as it’s available within the system and not already claimed by that particular hotel’s existing owners at 7 months in advance of your travel dates. Oftentimes, members are finding that choosing availability for their entire stay (even at their “home” resorts) has become rather difficult, leading to having to choose a split stay over multiple Disney hotels for one vacation or forfeiting their plans completely in favor of another time or year.
Island Tower
It seems these complaints have trickled up to Disney Vacation Club, and they’re looking to make changes that they hope will reflect positively for their members. Recently, DVC updated its membership terms and conditions for bookings and added some stark stipulations for future bookings. Now, when members go to book their next hotel stays using points, you will need to acknowledge that this booking will be used for personal use rather than commercial profit. One of the points in the updated document outlines explicitly, “You agree that any reservations made under your membership are solely for personal use and not for commercial purposes, as required by governing documents for each DVC Resort, including but not limited to the Declaration of Condominium and Membership Agreement. DVCM reserves the right to interpret personal use and determine if reservations are booked for personal or commercial purposes in its sole discretion.”
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The document goes on to read, “Personal use may include enjoying the benefits of a DVC Membership with family or allowing use of any reserved Vacation Home to friends and family on occasion. Additionally, personal use means that the member does not regularly or frequently rent/sell reservations booked using their membership.”
DVC Lounge in EPCOT
So what does all this mean? Well, we called Disney Vacation Club ourselves to make sure we didn’t misinterpret. What one supervisor told us is that this update intends to crack down on folks who typically use these memberships for profit over actually enjoying personal vacations with them. While the occasional rental is allowed under the outlined terms, they do strongly discourage trading booked stays under membership points for any compensation. He also mentioned that when you make a booking going forward, that “personal use” checkbox will have to be checked to complete the booking. Now that DVC aims to keep closer tabs on bookings made that are NOT in members’ names, too many occurrences could flag your membership for review with member services for further explanation.
Disney Vacation Club
So it seems this new update may not be such a bad thing for existing members. This appears to be the answer that DVC has come up with for now about booking availability concerns. When we pushed a little further to ask about situations where members book these stays to pay for other kinds of Disney vacations where the point exchange isn’t as favorable (such as renting your points out for hotel stays and in turn using that money from the renter to pay cash instead of using points for Disney Cruise Line sailings), we were told at this time there’s no conversation yet around revising the points charts for other Disney vacations.
DVC kiosk in Animal Kingdom
All in all though, it will be interesting to watch over and see if this new crackdown of policy will help DVC booking availability, if it will have any notable effect to it at all, and if we’ll see an increase in members with large point contracts selling back their memberships to Disney Vacation Club or other interested parties.
We’re always on the lookout to bring you the latest Disney news, changes, updates, and more! Be sure to check back in with us at DFB soon.
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Do you think DVC’s updated terms and conditions for members will help the booking availability? Tell us in the comments below!
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I hope this will solve the problems with bookings. We were to Aulani in Sept.2024 and had to change rooms three tomes in a week. We have talked about selling our share back to Disney. We bought in before there were any rooms to rent, we bought in the first phase, where you got some perks. We just spent 3 days at Wilderness Lodge(the only resort available with any number of days together). Because I need to use a wheelchair to get around we purchased a one day ticket for EPCOT. The ticket cost us almost 400.00 because we couldn’t even get a DVC member discount. We have been going to WDW since 1973 and now our kids don’t even want our membership because of costs and the problems with reservations. Hopefully they will remedy the problems or I think we will definitely consider selling back our points.
Yeah. Sure. Now let’s see if it’s really enforced.
Great news!! The rental situation has gotten completely out of hand.
Interesting. I hope this helps DVC members get the reservations they are looking for. I do wonder if this will impede future DVC sales though. People who are buying just to make a profit from renting SHOULD be discouraged from doing that, but I wonder how many well-intended buyers count on renting out their points as a safety net. I know people who count on renting DVC points for their vacations as well, and they don’t have plans to join DVC. For me, I’m too skittish to do anything but book directly through Disney, and for a variety of reasons (including that we take longer trips less often now and I don’t want to have to move rooms), we are not likely to go DVC. There seem to be a lot of trade offs for the savings and perks.
What does this mean for David’s Vacation Rentals or any of the other Disney DVC rental companies?
I only use my points for personal use,however it is amazing how Disney can change your original sales agreement at will even if it is a signed document that did not include such wording!
I’m glad I’ve always stuck with the Dvc Rental Store. I’ve always been nervous about renting through these dvc rental groups and are now starting to see why the crackdown. Some people with thousands of points or with many confirmed reservations but only accept venmo or zele as payment.
What about all the points that Disney buys so they can do the same thing – book rooms that they sell to non DVC members?
It seems We are all in agreement, the the DVC is not the old DVC we once all enjoyed. They have over sold it and are having difficulty in selling off the remainder of the Riviara., any way, I just wish they would return some of the perks many of us enjoyed that other guests. For instance, I would like to see the return the pool hopping feature that was included in your membership. Now maybe it could be scaled back to pool hop at only DVC Resorts, or how about offering a Seniors only DVC Park ticket that allows entry but no attractions so our senior members can enjoy a day with grand children. If we are an annual pass DVC member we should be able to stack our discounts at for food or merchandise and combine the benifit of each to,the guest. DVC used to,be a great deal, but now everything around us has increased in price dramatically and now I feel rope in to use my points. Like buying water at the airport of 8 bucks.
This “crackdown” logic is flawed. It may stop future DVC purchasers from buying into the DVC program because they can’t make a profit but the points out there already, are already out there to be used regardless of who’s using them, so I fail to see how it will alleviate the current issue. How about limiting the total number of points sold per resort? This feels like a reduction of DVC benefits so that Disney can make more money if they are the only ones “renting” points . It then becomes a monopoly and allows for price gouging. There are years a DVC member may need to rent their points to cover their dues and fees, especially if the member is unemployed. This makes me sad.
I bought DVC believing I could book at the 11 month window with little to no trouble. Man was I wrong!!! I’ve ran into more headaches than I thought I could imagine. If I had known then what I know now I would probably have started renting points. I no longer encourage people to buy into the DVC.