Making and managing waitlists online

Somewhat of an overdue rant. I'll need to sit down at some point and write to Member Satisfaction about this as well.

It's been some number of years since DVC gave us the ability to create our own waitlist requests using the online booking system. The form you fill out to tell MS how to deal with your points should the waitlist match is still terrible.

First, there's nowhere to indicate your preferred order of contracts to use points from. When we make a reservation, the section where you prioritize your contracts is excellent. For waitlists, the closest thing they offer is the choice of whether you authorize borrowing, and which home resort to borrow from. Way too vague.

Second, half the time MS completely ignores or misunderstands the instructions to replace an existing reservation. This creates all kinds of headaches related to banked or holding points not being allocated to the reservation you wanted them to be allocated.

Finally, the online booking system is so flaky... it's often impossible to deactivate your waitlist request or submit your change to/from 31day to/from 7day deadline.

Tonight for me has been:
Almost as frustrating as when you get kicked out of your supposedly held for 20 minutes room after you select your contract priority.

(Talking to myself here, but here's an update.)

So to add insult to injury, I called MS to deactivate my waitlist this morning. Immediately afterwards, I went online and created a brand new waitlist request.

I'd been keeping an eye on the Resort Availability Tool all day, just in case the night I wanted popped up at any other resort, and lo and behold what do I see? The exact night at BLT that I had waitlisted became available.

I pulled up the Waitlist Manager to see if my request that I'd just created a few hours ago was now in confirmed status. Welp, it was NOT. So I moved as fast as I could and booked the room manually.

This puts some serious doubt on the viability of DVC's waitlist system if rooms are popping up and not triggering waitlist requests! What gives?

MS has not shared with us exactly how the WL process works. Based on anecdotal evidence, the prevailing theory is that the WL runs as a batch process one or more times per day. It checks existing WLs and scoops up any inventory that is available to fill a WL in its entirety. That means that for some time after a reservation is cancelled, those nights are sitting there for the plucking even though there is an existing WL that needs those exact nights. You should check online regularly because if you don't, someone else could grab the nights you are waiting for before they are set aside to fill your WL.

There have been some good discussions here on how to build a better WL process and it turns out, it's not as easy as it sounds. I remember an excellent post by tjkraz outlining the issues. If I can find it, I'll post the link.

Given how it works, I view the WL option as a fallback plan, i.e. if you don't manage to get the nights you need by stalking the online system, maybe the WL will just happen to snag them for you. Don't rely on it if it really, really matters to you whether or not your WL comes through.

Ahh, thanks for explaining. I've missed out on a lot of info since I stopped frequenting DISboards.

I have a programming/sys admin background, so it's completely understandable that it's hard to code an automated waitlist process well. Just a shame that they aren't more upfront with us about the fact that the waitlist is not truly automated and rooms do slip through the cracks. I guess they don't want to admit to such shoddy IT, heh.

I think most members probably have no idea that the waitlist is not reliable. I imagine many would be upset to discover the truth after all these years of believing that having a waitlist means you're covered. :\

EDIT: Out of curiosity I went and read the fine print terms and conditions when creating a new waitlist. No one reads those, so I was hoping to find that DVC was upfront about rooms potentially slipping through. Nope. Nothing in there.

It is not hard to write a greedy algorithm to fill waitlists. That is, that whenever a waitlist is entered, a trigger is places for those days the specified resort. Then, whenever a day comes free, the trigger fires and reserves the room marking that day on the waitlist as filled. You order the waitlists in order of oldest first...

This would mean that the waitlist that's been there the longest would get filled first. This, in turn, would cause members to put in a LOT more waitlists as early as possible..

I, for one, would not be opposed to such a system... As long as it's known and reliable, I think most people would want it this way.

Prior to online booking becoming available, the current process probably worked well most of the time. It would have been rare that someone would happen to call MS to request nights that just happened to become available earlier that day due to a cancellation. At some point after MS closed for the day the WL process could be run to scoop up any nights that would fill, or partially fill, a WL. (It used to be possible to ask for a WL to be filled a day at a time.) Now that we have online booking, there are potentially a lot of members trolling for availability making it much more likely that cancelled nights will be grabbed before the WL is run.

As to how (or whether) DVC should upgrade the software, DVC should be most concerned with maximizing occupancy to avoid having too many points in circulation and not enough rooms to absorb them. Given that, does it make sense to set aside nights that only partially fill a WL when there is no way to know if the rest of the nights will ever become available? That could potentially take a lot of room nights out of inventory. How long should they wait for the rest of the nights to become available before releasing the held nights back into the pool? It seems like that approach could hurt more members than it helps because while rooms are held back, other members might have booked what was available, increasing occupancy.

And if the person at the top of the list is waiting for a week but someone further down the list needs only 2 nights of that week, what do you do when those two nights become available? Do you immediately give them to the person further down the list or hold them for some period of time to see if the other 5 nights needed by the person at the top of the list become available? At what point do you give up and start filling WLs further down the list?

And since DVC members would probably foot the bill for the software, is it worth the cost to redesign it or should they just abolish the WL entirely now that we have online booking?

I do think that the information about the current WL process should be updated to reflect how it works now that online booking is available. It should state that setting up a WL is a convenience feature that has a low probability of succeeding and that your best bet is to use the Availability Tool or online booking to check for availability.

I'm a big proponent of cost /benefit analyses and totally agree with what LisaS posted. I am not in favor of re-writing waitlist code in an attempt to make it more "fair" to individuals.

While some may consider the existing system to be "unfair, IMO, it works works well enough for the membership "as a whole". It's in the membership's best interest to have the rooms full. Spending additional dues to ensure cancellations are distributed in some other way will not result in higher occupancy numbers.

I'd much, much rather spend any increase in my dues on other things.

I have wait listed a most desired time. Nov 6-8. I was misinformed by MS that although I had no other wait list I could not separate it to two. So now I have to hope both nights become available in order to get the wait list filled,correct?

Nanajo1 said:

I have wait listed a most desired time. Nov 6-8. I was misinformed by MS that although I had no other wait list I could not separate it to two. So now I have to hope both nights become available in order to get the wait list filled,correct?

Click to expand...

Yes, both nights must become available for your waitlist to work. MS generally will not set up separate waitlists for consecutive nights. But you can do it that way yourself online.

You are only allowed two active waitlists at a time, though, so if you decide to set up two for your nights, you'd have to cancel the waitlist you already have. Not sure if waitlists set up by MS can be seen / cancelled online or not, so you may have to call to cancel that one.

Good luck. Hope you get those nights.

P.S. You may be able to find those nights online by checking the RAT several times a day. If you find one, book it and call MS to change your waitlist.

Thanks. I've become a stalker. I do have a back up plan but if the wait list comes thru it would be great.

I was talking to DH about what I learned about the waitlist being not automated. He mentioned an analogy that I think might apply.

He was saying he wondered if DVC did this on purpose. After all, it's kind of like Fastpass.

There's people who plan in advance and use up one of their two waitlist slots towards trying to get that elusive room. They're kind of in the Fastpass return queue.

Then there's someone who pops by randomly wondering if that room happens to be available to book. They're kind of in the Standby queue.

Just because the Fastpass queue isn't empty yet doesn't mean the Standby queue never gets to go.

After thinking about it this way, it actually seems completely Disney's style to not automate the waitlist. I heart my DH.

As for DVC's policy a few years back to not allow day-by-day waitlisting, I never disagreed with that decision even though I did use day-by-day myself in the past. It truly wasn't fair though.

The main problem I have now is just their lack of disclosure about the way the waitlist works. Oh and the flakiness of the website heh.