While it is true that Disney can reallocate points with certain parameters, those parameters include:
- The total points for a year cannot increase (holiday/date fluctuations taken into account)
- Your total % ownership of a unit cannot be changed
Important language in the POS: “
that the total number of Home Resort Vacation Points existing within a given Unit (i.e., the amount of Home Resort Vacation Points representing 100% of the Ownership Interests in a given Unit) at any time may not be increased or decreased because of any such reallocation."
One of the biggest reasons for the 2020 rollback was because the lockoff premium materially changed the points of a vacation home unit and affected the ownership interests.
While the water is a little murky for resorts that have no dedicated 1BRs, they usually have dedicated studios, so it’s possible to calculate ownership and see if they are violating this rule.
DVC did violate this rule after the Treehouse Villas were added to SSR and they rebalanced their
point chart, increasing THVs and decreasing 2BRs. I owned contracts whose units were both and I calculated out the difference and my ownership % changed (if you search there’s a post on here some time ago about it), but not enough owners cared - honestly enough other owners benefited - so there was not the outcry to fix it like there was the 2020 charts. The 2020 charts materially affected everyone, there was a huge outcry, and Disney rolled them back.
So Disney can reallocate across seasons and dates and such within a given vacation home, but they cannot really allocate across vacation home units, per the POS (the exception being the trust CFW is in). And even if they could, there would likely be enough of an outcry that for PR reasons Disney is unlikely to try it. Thankfully there are some people who analyze changes in the
points charts and post them to help owners see when DVC is violating the POS.
Now, as a “I prefer 1BRs” owner myself, I do wish 1BRs were cheaper. I started doing the “Disney math” and booking 2BRs when traveling with my sons, but when it’s just the two of us, that 1BR jump is painful. The “paint saver” devil-on-my-shoulder always argues I should just book a studio because do I really need all that space? The angel on the other shoulder says yes, yes we do. It’s why we bought into DVC.
That said, we do often do studios for our first night or two, for an extra savings, especially if we’re arriving on Thursday/Friday and staying for a long time, so that we pay the weekend premium on the studio and then switch. We often fly in on the evening, so its often my bed time when we get to the resort, so I usually see that first day as a “waste” of a 1BR cost and book a studio and then switch the next day. It also gives me a reason to try out studios at other resorts, since we can just have Disney move our luggage the next morning for us.
