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!