i wish the resort availability tool would tell you

[bwvBound]

Yes, but all that information does is help mitigate the home-resort advantage. Disney hasn't historically given any insight into availabliity beyond your own home resort. Again, I'll say that the fact that the RAT showed non-home resort availability is a bug or lazy programming. Any request or attempt to gain an advantage that traditionally is limited to owning a particular resort would be ignored or used to make the RAT less useful.

OH, I don't mean that the 'availability' tool should show beyond the home resort advantage. It doesn't need to! (My other product doesn't use 'home resorts' -- so there is no 'advantage' to either leverage or abuse.) Personally, I still think that having a general idea of 'how many units are available' w/in DVC would be useful for owners w/in the proper booking windows.

 

[ziravan]

Where it would be helpful is in swapping out reservations. What are my chances of dropping a reservation I know will be gone in a minute for this other reservation?

If there is only one room left, that's a different decision and different "odds" than if there are several. At that point, I just want to know what the odds are of making a successful transition. Knowing how many rooms are available would be extremely useful in that regard.

Example. Feb 25th open Poly booking. How many people held their breaths that the move would be successful and they wouldn't end up both without a new reservation and lost the old reservation? Apparently, this shouldn't have been a great concern, and an inventory count would have shown this.

Honestly, I don't see a downside to this for Disney? I do, however, see an upside. It's a simple software change and the result would be happier customers.

 

[nabi]

Get the mystery programmer who first came up with the resort availability tool (before Disney asked it to be removed) to do it...that poster showed Disney, and us,that it can be done!

 

[Sandisw]

Where it would be helpful is in swapping out reservations. What are my chances of dropping a reservation I know will be gone in a minute for this other reservation?

If there is only one room left, that's a different decision and different "odds" than if there are several. At that point, I just want to know what the odds are of making a successful transition. Knowing how many rooms are available would be extremely useful in that regard.

Example. Feb 25th open Poly booking. How many people held their breaths that the move would be successful and they wouldn't end up both without a new reservation and lost the old reservation? Apparently, this shouldn't have been a great concern, and an inventory count would have shown this.

Honestly, I don't see a downside to this for Disney? I do, however, see an upside. It's a simple software change and the result would be happier customers.

But let's say that you look, and you see that there are several rooms available, and decide that it might be worth the try. You cancel and go to re-book and all of a sudden, they are gone. You can't get your reservation back. What would you do? Most likely contact MS to say that it said there was plenty of availability and when I went to make the switch, they were gone. Now maybe they are gone because people booked, or maybe they are gone because it wasn't an up to date accounting of the rooms.

I think it'd be more harmful because while many of us would realize it is just an estimate, others would want to hold DVC accountable to the numbers when something happened. The fact that we can have a general idea in terms of how popular a room type is at a certain resort at different time periods now is a nice thing to have. However, the more specific you make the information, the more you open yourself up to members counting on that information for decisions and too many problems can arise.