Tag: DVC

Our Disney Vacation Club adventure!

Maleficent Goofy Challenge 2017

Since my first trip in January 2008, we have stayed in Orlando and at Disney World proper many different ways.

We have stayed on property in value, moderate and deluxe resorts (even once getting a wicked upgrade to a 2 bedroom club level room at the Beach Club Resort – now that was fun!) and we have stayed off property in a townhouse for a 3 week stay when the kids were much younger.

There were pros and cons to each but this past summer we finally decided that Disney Vacation Club was the way to go.

Basically the major driving factor for that is that when we are at Disney World, one of our favorite things to do skip the Disney buses and walk to the parks.

That basically means a deluxe resort…a few very specific ones.

And the cheapest way to stay deluxe at Disney World appears to be Disney Vacation Club (DVC). You can rent DVC points to do that which is much cheaper than renting the room from Disney directly. But if you plan to go year after year then it can be cheaper to buy DVC points.

If you decide to buy then you have a couple choices – buy direct from Disney at a premium price or buy from the resale market. Buying direct from Disney does get you some extra perks over resale but there are some negatives as well beyond the extra price. Disney usually has limited availability of some of the older resorts which is unfortunate if you are looking for a specific resort to allow you to book at the 11 month window for that resort. Sometimes you can get on a wait list but that doesn’t necessarily work for us Canadians as there are some laws in place that make it difficult for DVC cast members to contact us for purposes of a timeshare sale. Which mostly means that, for Canadians, you have to buy when you are down at Disney World and if what you want isn’t available when you are there then you either end up not buying or buying a 2nd or 3rd choice.

So for us resale made sense.

But what resort?

Ideally we wanted to be able to walk to parks from our home resort. That meant the Contemporary Bay Lake Tower walking to Magic Kingdom or the Beach Club or Boardwalk Villas to be able to walk to Epcot and Hollywood Studios.

We were leaning toward either the Beach Club or Boardwalk as Epcot is our favorite resort and they are so close. Plus they are a quick walk to Hollywood Studios and with the two new areas getting built in that park we figured it would be good to be close.

We love the Beach Club Resort but the Villa rooms looked a bit dated (this was before they did a fantastic update to the rooms in 2016). We did a tour on our last trip of the Boardwalk rooms that were fantastic. The Boardwalk rooms also have more bed type options in the Deluxe Studio rooms with a bed, a couch/hide a bed and a Murphy type single bed meaning we could get each of the kids in their own bed. (Yay sleep!) (Note that they did this same style of set up for the updates at Beach Club Villas.)

Then we looked at price and landed on Boardwalk as well as the cheapest cost per point.

Then we looked at the number of points required to stay…which landed us at Boardwalk too.

We looked at the number points we would want and ended up buying 100 points from the resale market at a price we liked that also had some banked points we could use.

By the time we had decided we had already rented points for our January 2017 family trip so we had some decisions to make on what to do with some of the points.

I was already booked to do the Goofy Challenge at the beginning of January but didn’t have a room yet so after playing with wait lists I managed to get one night at the Beach Club Villas and then the remaining nights will be at Saratoga Springs.

Since we had extra points my wife, Heather, decided that she would see if there were rooms available during the Princess Half Marathon in February. There were, so she signed up for the Glass Slipper Challenge, convinced her mom to come along, and booked flights and the room. (We strangely had a lot of extra air miles this year so this all wasn’t nearly as expensive as it sounds).

While we were at Disney World for our family vacation we got super lucky and Disney actually had some points available for the Boardwalk Villas that we could purchase directly from them. We added 25 points (at a premium!) to bring our total up to 125 points. The points were added to our existing contract with the same use month, etc making it easy to manage the two sets of points. The bonus with these direct points is that we now get all the benefits reserved for direct purchasers including the discounted annual passes and access to the unique and exclusive DVC member lounge located in Epcot.

We are about a year into the purchase now and have booked our next family trip using the points we have and are extremely happy with the value for the money we are getting from how we did our purchases. January 2018 we will be down in Orlando for the Disney World Marathon weekend (Dopey Challenge!) staying at the Boardwalk Villas and then spending 4 nights at Animal Kingdom Kidani Village and ending our 2 weeks at Disney’s Beach Club Villas. We are going to get lots of different experiences this trip! And isn’t that what it should be about?

Let’s see where this DVC adventure leads us!

January 2017 – family trip – report 10

February 1st:

I got up early to sign up for Dopey Challenge for January 2018 as I had it in my head that the pre-registration for Annual Passholders started today. I was mistaken though, whoops!

We had decided that our next family trip to Disney World was going to be over the Walt Disney World Marathon weekend the next year and it apparently can be tough to get DVC rooms at Boardwalk Villas for that period. We wanted to start our stay on January 1st, and with Boardwalk Villas being our home resort that meant that this morning had our 11 month window opened up. Apparently some people do lots of tricks like walking forward reservations to try to save a spot and other things so getting just what we wanted was going to take timing.

I tried to do a DVC booking at about 8 am for Jan 1 to Jan 8 but the online booking was down until the 9 am EST and the DVC offices don’t open until 9 either.

It was going to be a mad scramble to get what we wanted! The availability tools seemed to indicate that it was available but we just couldn’t book it with the online booking down for maintenance.

I started hitting refresh every 10-20 seconds just before 9am and managed to get in and actually booked exactly what we wanted! A minute or so later there was no availability. That was tight!

We then did the final pack up and got out the door of the room shortly after 11. Dropped the bags with bell services to be picked up when we get on the Magical Express this afternoon and started our final tour.

We walked to Epcot, wandered through and took the monorail to Magic Kingdom (TTC) – we did one more check for K’s glasses at the lost and found with no luck and then took the monorail to the park. Got warm today so we enjoyed the heat – was not enjoying my cold / allergies though.

Pic of me not enjoying the allergies while on the monorail to TTC

We made sure to do TTA people mover and It’s a Small World. We had lunch at Cosmic Rays and after some more wandering we headed out to the busses. We waited and waited and no Boardwalk bus came so we got on the second Yacht and Beach Club bus we saw come through. Hopped off at the Yacht to do a walk through there before heading out to the Boardwalk area to walk to the hotel.

We let K and T play a bit in the play area and we checked out the DVC Community Hall before  getting our luggage and settling in to wait for the Magical Express bus.

It came a bit early – or they let us on a slightly earlier bus. Mixed blessing – don’t like waiting but don’t want to leave too early either.

Magical Express used to drop at both A and B side depending on what carrier you were with but it appears that this has changed. We were dropped off on the B side and we had to walk to the A side to drop our bags with our carrier.

After a bit of a wait to do that we headed straight through security which was a bit slow and then took the small monorail to our gate.

We had independent snacking along the way and got on the plane. I got in to the window seat to try to sleep because of the cold meds I was on but managed to break my Kindle in the process. Yay!

The flight was good though and after we landed it was a quick and easy run through Canadian customs but we ended up having to wait a bit at the back of the line since the kids needed to go to the bathroom just as we were getting in line.

Short wait for our luggage and headed out of the secured area to pop open our bags and find warm jackets. Then out into the deep cold to get to the truck.

Quick ride home and kids straight to bed around 1:30 am.

We managed to get them up and had them at school on time in the morning!

Next was breakfast and then we went to pick up the pups from the kennel and bring them home.

It was a good trip!

January 2017 – family trip – report 4

January 26th:

Hotel move day! We set an alarm as there was an early bead collecting conservation activity Heather and the kids wanted to do before we left. They went to do that and I stayed in the room and finished up packing.

After they go back they only had 3 more activities left to go to complete the full collection but at least those ones were late morning / afternoon activities and we could come back and do those easier – so we made plans to do that later in the week.

We then took our bags over to bell services to have the luggage transferred over to the Boardwalk Villas.

After that we did another wander around the resort and let the kids buy small African drums as a souvenir of the stay at the resort.

We decided we didn’t want to pay for a cab over to Boardwalk Villas so we hopped a bus to Hollywood Studios instead. We got off the bus at the park and took the walk way to the Boardwalk area and checked into the hotel. Our room was not ready yet but they were able to get everything else set up and they said we would get a text when the room was ready. Note for Canadians – it doesn’t look like the texting to a Canadian cell number works for the room check in.

We then walked the Boardwalk area to International Gateway at Epcot, went through security and rented a locker so we could put down the African drums for a while!

First stop in Epcot was the Canada pavilion where they were giving out Disney buttons with “Canada 150” on them in celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017.

Next we had to test out one of the perks of full DVC membership by going into the DVC Members Lounge in Epcot. It is located in the glass pyramid above the Imagination with Figment ride. The space has a great vibe and the free snacks and drinks were a nice bonus. We sat and absorbed the atmosphere for a while.

We decided that we would head over to Test Track and use up one of the special fast pass tickets we had been given the other day at the DVC Center. Before we got on the ride though it had to shut for a maintenance issue. The kids were pretty upset unfortunately.

So we went into MouseGears to do some shopping and to stick close to the ride in case it came up quickly. We ended up getting T a nice sweater that he still wears constantly now that we are at home.

Heather also bought all the Dooney and Burke.

Well, not really but she did get some crazy deals and somehow managed to convince me to let her use the e-gift card I had from runDisney due to the Walt Disney World Half Marathon being cancelled earlier in the month.

Heather was looking at the purses and one of the cast members mentioned that the Food and Wine bags were 30%, plus 20% off for annual passholders, plus my e-gift card equals two purses apparently.

We also got a couple fuzzy blankets (as per tradition) and had it all shipped to the hotel.

We then did Spaceship Earth and walked back out to the Boardwalk area to grab a pizza from the pizza window there. We picked up our stuff from the locker at International Gateway on our way.

Surprisingly we still hadn’t gotten the text to tell us our room was ready (which is how we found out that texts to Canadian numbers don’t work) so we wandered back to the hotel and found that our room was ready.

The room was great with a true boardwalk view on the 4th floor – straight view to the lighthouse and the Beach Club Resort. It was also just a short walk down stairs to the pool area and a different set of stairs to end up on the Boardwalk itself. The Boardwalk exit that was closest to our room was an exit only but it sure made it fast to get to the Boardwalk instead of waiting for the elevators.

Beach Club and Yacht Club lighthouse from Boardwalk Villas
Disney’s Boardwalk area from Boardwalk Villas room

We then decided to go swimming in the clown pool for a bit – probably 45 minutes there and several trips down the water slide for the kids and a few for Heather and I.

Then back up to the room and called to get our luggage brought up.

Our daughter K did a change over to her Elsa dress and we did a fast walk to Epcot to get into our Frozen Ever After fastpass just about 10 minutes before they expired.

After that we were able to get on Test Track to make up for the disappointment from earlier in the day.

Then a quick snack before heading onto Ellen’s Energy Adventure and then a wander over to do the Nemo ride.

After Nemo we watched the fish and the divers in the aquarium for a while before heading into Coral Reef for our supper reservation. The food was great although T seemed to get a bit of a tough steak.

We spent time on supper and ended up missing Illuminations unfortunately.

We then decided to end the day, so we walked out to the Boardwalk and picked up some items for breakfast the next morning and to keep in the fridge from the store.

Put the kids to bed, did a quick unpack and organize and then went to bed ourselves.

February 2016 – Disney World Vacation – Post 5 – Feb 14th and 15th

Unfortunately this post is pretty light on photos as we didn’t take a lot of pictures for a few days. We did get a few photopass photos that are included below.

Feb 14th

Got up and did a short run this morning – I took a path that completely avoid the main building because the crowds in that area were insane!

Once I got back the room and cleaned up we all headed out for breakfast and headed over to the lobby to catch the shuttle to do the DVC tour. The tour occurs over at Saratoga Springs where they have a full area where you can view the different room styles all decorated in the styles of the newest DVC resorts.

The tour was pretty cool and the facility was great.

One very awesome thing was that our tour guide Mark  is part of Off Kilter – the band that used to play at the Canada pavilion in Epcot. Sounds like they still play festivals and have a new album coming out. It was a great experience meeting Mark and it was a very good tour.

We are pretty sold on DVC but the Canadian dollar needs to recover before something like that could even be seriously thought about.

Another cool thing about the DVC tour was that we got 3 special fast passes for each of us that could be used at any time during the next few days at any parks and they didn’t need to be reserved. Pretty awesome! Because we also did a morning tour they also gave us a $50 gift card too. Nice!

The kids enjoyed the kids club area including the arts and crafts while we did the tour – our son enjoyed video games while our daughter made a bunch of stuff.

After the tour we were treated with ice cream at the tour center and then given a shuttle ride to where ever we wanted to be dropped off. We decided on Animal Kingdom figuring we maybe could use some of the special fast passes there.

So we got to Animal Kingdom and it was insanely busy. To the point that we were holding onto the kids to make sure we didn’t lose them.

We first tried Kilimanjaro Safari but the fast past line was huge and we didn’t want to wait – unfortunately this made this the only trip we have never made in on the safari ride. That is a bit disappointing.

We then went to Everest and the fast pass line was over 20 minutes for our son and I to make it through. So he and I had burned one of our special fast passes each so far.

We then had a normal fast pass time for Primeval Whirl and our daughter was finally tall enough to ride – she had a blast!

It was still pretty early but the crowds were just too much – so went back to the hotel to get ready for supper reservation at Narcoosie at the Grand Floridian resort.

Narcoosie was great – we all got a bit dressed up for Valentines Day – we had a window view of the boats on the Seven Seas Lagoon and of the monorails and the entrance to Magic Kingdom. While we were there it got dark and we were able to see everything get all lit up. A fantastic setting really.

We then did a tour around the gorgeous Grand Floridian resort before grabbing the monorail over to Magic Kingdom. We didn’t have park hopper tickets and we were all pretty tired so we decided to not bother to upgrade our tickets and instead head back to the hotel by bus.

That was a pretty full day.

 

Feb 15th

I woke up around 6-7 because my back was hurting – got up and took some advil and lay back down. Surprisingly fell back to sleep.

I then got up and started to run just before 10 – already pretty warm outside – seemed like it was going to be a warm day. I ran 3.6 miles – went the opposite direction than I had been going – that helped with the crowds near the main building.

Then after getting back to the room and shower and having a shower we went for lunch / breakfast at the hotel and figured we would go in the pool after. But after a wander we found it too cool due to surprisingly cool breeze so we looked at the updates to the main pool area and let the kids play on the play structure for a while before heading back to the room.

We grabbed sweaters and left the room and took the boat to Disney Springs – after some quick shopping (our daughter needed socks) and a snack (Wetzel’s Pretzles – jalapeno cheese dunk was phenomenal).

We then took a boat to Old Key West and did a quick wander around to check things out. Then took a bus from there to Hollywood Studios.

At Hollywood Studios we all did Rockin Roller Coaster – Heather was not feeling well after that even after having taken some of her meds for motion sickness – of course she got the front seat too to make it more interesting. It was also our daughter’s first time on the ride – she didn’t much like it either. I enjoyed it.

Rockin Rollercoaster - Hollywood Studios

Outside Rockin Rollercoaster - Hollywood Studios

Then did the Voyage of the Little Mermaid show.

Next thing we had was the Frozen Sing a Long – it was actually very good – quite funny. Kids loved it.

Was raining a little bit after that but not too bad.

We all then did Star Tours before leaving the park.

We had supper reservations at Beaches and Cream at the Beach Club Resort – it is about a 20 minute walk and we just made it (3 minutes late). It was pretty awesome having the Symphony in the Stars fireworks going off as we wandered over.

Another great meal at Beaches and Cream – the Classic Root Beer float with the hard root beer was very tasty!

Walked around Beach Club and Beach Club Villas and then the Yacht Club.

Walked over to Board Walk and checked out the model villa – very nice.

After a bit more walking we grabbed a cab to Riverside ($10.80)

Put on the Duffy show for the kids and then we were off to bed. My calculations had us walking over 6 miles today – the kids did great!