Disney Vacation Club: How Does That Work?

Disney Vacation Club: How Does That Work?

Jokes from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia aside, Disney Vacation Club likes to pitch itself less as a timeshare and more as a “future vacation plan.” Make no mistake, you’re buying into a timeshare scheme, it’s just up to you to decide if it’s worthwhile or not. For us, since we’d never be able to stay at the Grand Floridian otherwise, that makes up for the cost. But a lot of people aren’t clear on how this sort of thing works, so let me break it down for you:

To buy into the Disney Vacation Club you need three things: 

1. Money. 

2. The number of points you wish to buy. 

3. The “home resort” you want to buy into. 

1 and 2 are linked because the price entirely depends on the number of points you want. How many do you need? We’ll get into that later. 

Your “home resort” is going to be the resort where you can book a vacation 11 months out. This is important because there are only so many rooms and so many dates that you’ll want to go and this allows you to get in before anyone else. If you love your home resort, this will be great for you. If you don’t and you just bought points there because it was cheap, you might have a harder time because you can only book 7 months prior to your arrival at resorts that are NOT your home resort.

So as an example, let’s say your home resort is Bay Lake Tower (nice!) and in June 2015 you start to plan a trip for next year:

If you want to stay at Bay Lake Tower you can book a trip that takes place starting in May of 2016 because that is your home resort and it is 11 months out. If you want to stay elsewhere, say at the Polynesian because they have brand new rooms, you are limited to book a trip that starts in January of 2016. Make sense?

Now let’s talk about points. When you buy into the Disney Vacation Club you purchase a certain number of points. It is entirely up to you how many you buy, but there are a minimum number the resorts require (I think 25 usually) and you should definitely look up the Points Charts:

This is an example of the 2016 prices for the rooms at the Animal Kingdom Villa. Points are broken down by:

-Day: Sun-Thur costs less than Fri-Sat. 

-Season: Adventure is the lowest point cost and it goes up from there to Choice, Dream, Magic, and Premier season

-Room type: Deluxe Studio, One-bedroom villa, two-bedroom villa, three bedroom grand villa

-Room view: these vary but are usually thinks like Standard, Lake/Water, Theme Park or Savannah. 

Depending on the resort the number of people each of these room types sleeps varies, though not by much. To figure out how many points you need, take a look at either your home resort or a resort you want to stay at and the time of year you usually want to go and factor in how many people you have in your family (i.e. a family of 6 can’t stay in a Studio). What we did was look at “Adventure Season,” which is the cheapest points wise, we figured the view didn’t really matter much, but factored on “Lake/Water view” anyway just in case, and decided on the number of days we as a family liked to stay in Disney, which is usually around 10. We decided we could definitely do a Studio room and then…

And then we did some tricky math.

See, whatever number of points you buy is the number of points you have for the year. HOWEVER you do not have to spend your points every year, you can bank them and “carry over” to the next year. So since we planned on having kids (and we have one now!) we did the math to figure out how many points we would need to get a one or two bedroom if we only went to Disney once every two years–meaning we would have two years worth of points to spend on one visit! We ended up purchasing 170 points.

And it gets better for those of you who can wait THREE years to go to Disney: Not only can you bank points from a year you aren’t going, you can BORROW the points from a future year! So you will have three years worth of points to spend on ONE vacation! We don’t plan on doing this often, but we are doing that this year so that we can travel with another family and other family members for our daughter’s first visit this year. 

Being able to play with the points this way is how people also use Disney Vacation Club points for Adventures with Disney, Disney Cruises, and regular hotel stays both at Disney and all over the world. Keep in mind what we’re talking about above is ONLY for the DVC villas on Disney property. If you want to stay in a regular room at one of the resorts, that’s going to cost you points but it’s going to be MORE points than staying at the villas. Personally I can’t see the benefit in using points for things like Adventures with Disney or the Cruises because they cost a LOT of points. Maybe because we don’t have that many compared to other DVC members (I mean I think it’s a lot, but apparently people get 300+!), but when it comes down to weighing what is more expensive to pay out of pocket: a Disney Cruise or a 12 day Disney vacation for a family of 4 NOT staying in a value resort, I think I’d rather use points on the Disney vacation and pay for the cruise! But that’s just my opinion.