I've been stalking the pages for awhile now and the one piece of advice I keep seeing is to "buy where you like staying." I get the advice, but this appears to only matter if you know when you're going with lots of advance planning. My wife and I have 1 large window (summer) to go, but aren't always sure where we are going on vacation until March/April. If we are planning on using DVC points 3-5 months out, how important is home resort, because you're not guaranteed to stay there except at 11 months, right? Certainly there will be some times when we'll know earlier, but more often than not we wait to make vacation plans. When we have kids, it'll still be the same time frame and we may want to use a Disney trip from 11 months out as an incentive for school/behavior but I just don't see the importance of a home resort if we are the type to not always plan out the when until 5/6 months out. Can someone help me out with this/
My husband and I have very similar planning habits. We book are DVC's around our airfare. For us, this works out to about 5-6 months before our trip. So, for us the 11 month booking window rarely comes into play. There was only one occasion that I booked at 11 months out and that was when we wanted to stay at a club level at AKV.
i'd most likely recommend buying SSR (best onsite combination of low resale prices, low annual dues and length of contract) and expect to stay at SSR on a regular basis... if you expect to regularly book BLT, BCV or value villas at AKV on such short notice, you will find DVC very disappointing.
You can usually find something on shorter notice but there is a good chance that it won't be at the more popular resorts. Your choices for room size may also be limited. As long as you know this and if ownership saves you money and you love the resorts/rooms that you can get, your golden. Bill
Also, if you don't mind moving around, like a day in resort 1 in a studio, two days in resort 2 in a one bedroom, one day in resort 3 with a one bedroom, and two days in resort 4 with a studio short notice might work. But we like to unpack and settle in for our trip. But if you want a full week in a specific sized villa in a specific location, you need to book at least seven months out.
