Aggressive anti-rental email response from MS

[Nursemanit]

When I bought RR I knew there were over 6 million points in that resort. I knew that the points I did not buy would be competing with me for popular rooms. It does not matter to me if other point owners are renting or staying - I still have to compete with them for a room.

It is not my business what other people do with their points and it is not up to me to decide if it is a "justified" use of points - For all I care they could make reservations and not show up if they want.

 

[CarolMN]

I am not able to see how buying, stripping and reselling a contract is hurting the membership, nor do I see why DVD would care.

Renting does not hurt the membership as a whole, either. We forget the DVC does not care WHICH member booked the room. It only cares that the room has been booked.

Posters here are arguing about "fair" - how to allocate scarce resources. We will never agree on that.

 

[jennypenny]

Is there any way to find out how many DVC points are used outside of WDW in a given year? I would think without a brokered rental market, members with excess points would pursue alternative uses for their points. I assume that probably happens less often now if a member can easily list the points with a broker, which also means that more points are used in WDW resorts than through exchanges. To that end, if Disney made exchanges more (financially) attractive, they might entice people to burn the points instead of renting.

I'm not trying to annoy anyone. We have no idea what the real numbers are so have no idea what the impact of renting is. But Disney can probably tell who the rental whales are and which brokers consistently buy and sell contracts, so they could start by addressing those. Or they could develop their own system that competes with the brokers. Or both.

I would really love to know the numbers ...

 

[Matty B13]

Renting does not hurt the membership as a whole, either. We forget the DVC does not care WHICH member booked the room. It only cares that the room has been booked.

Posters here are arguing about "fair" - how to allocate scarce resources. We will never agree on that.

I'm not sure if this is the case though, there are several FB posts out there about people not being able to get the room they wanted just after buying Direct. If this becomes the narrative on social media then DVC will start to have an uphill battle trying to sell points, and things are starting to slow down now. Most people on Disboards are power users but the "average" DVC owner is not even close and doesn't want the headaches of walking a reservation much less booking at 8am at the 11 month mark. I'm sure a lot of new buyings who are runners are also buying DVC to stay on race weekends only to find out that all the rooms are booked for that weekend and they either have to pay for a reservation through a broker our pay Disney cash for a room.

 

[Sandisw]

I'm not sure if this is the case though, there are several FB posts out there about people not being able to get the room they wanted just after buying Direct. If this becomes the narrative on social media then DVC will start to have an uphill battle trying to sell points, and things are starting to slow down now. Most people on Disboards are power users but the "average" DVC owner is not even close and doesn't want the headaches of walking a reservation much less booking at 8am at the 11 month mark. I'm sure a lot of new buyings who are runners are also buying DVC to stay on race weekends only to find out that all the rooms are booked for that weekend and they either have to pay for a reservation through a broker our pay Disney cash for a room.

I keep an eye on things in terms of availability a lot and there has never been a time at 11 months that anyone was locked out of their home resort.


Maybe it’s not the cheapest view or room, but something is there to be booked. That’s the nature though of a first come, first serve system.

Race weekend may just be one of those times when getting a specific room 11 months is needed.

Stopping renting isn’t going to change that. Things have changed with booking but that goes with more points in the system at places that are not WDW.

While there are certainly aspects of the system, expecially with the ease of renting now via the internet, may be frustrating, I just don’t see any way to make a rule thst is going to prevent anyone from buying, stripping, and selling a contract.

 

[tjkraz]

I am not able to see how buying, stripping and reselling a contract is hurting the membership, nor do I see why DVD would care.

Renting does not hurt the membership as a whole, either. We forget the DVC does not care WHICH member booked the room. It only cares that the room has been booked.

Posters here are arguing about "fair" - how to allocate scarce resources. We will never agree on that.

I agree that any notion of "fairness" is rather specious. No matter how many changes DVC makes to the program, we will never reach a point where everyone is satisfied.

Specific to this thread, I think the idea is that if any hard-to-obtain accommodations are going to spec renters, it's a bad thing. Hypothetically if there are 10 BCV studios available for December 2nd and 50 people hoping to book right at 11 months, any of those 10 rooms falling into the hands of a renter is bad. Of course, most of these arguments focus on those truly hard-to-get accommodations. Even if we remove renters from the equation, there are still a couple dozen people who won't get their desired room. But in the abstract, I think most members would agree they'd rather see all 10 rooms going to run-of-the-mill DVC families with plans to stay there rather than 8 rooms to those families and 2 sitting on a website as spec rentals.

10+ years ago, the DIS seemed to be the de facto place to go to rent points. And the board had a rules against renting most confirmed reservations. I always assumed this was to discourage spec rentals, and I thought it was a rather noble clause which helped to discourage the practice.

Does DVC care about this activity? So far, there isn't much evidence that they do. They did bother to write these "personal use only" clauses into the POS and have communicated anti-rental messages a variety of times. I'm not sure that we've ever seen any explicit action though.

Every owner has a legal right to use their points. But some of the practices are damaging to the program as a whole. For example, there are villas being booked as spec rentals and held until exactly 31 days out. If not rented, the reservation is cancelled just before the holding rules come into play and the points are banked or rolled to a new set of dates. Even points that fall subject to the Holding rules can be rolled to new dates if availability is aggressively monitored inside of that 60 day window. Rooms cancelled on a few weeks' notice have far less chance of being rebooked with points. It's lost capacity. Do that a couple thousand times per year and it adds up.

Cracking down on certain practices would unquestionably help availability. Though probably not to the degree that some want to believe.

I have no quarrel with someone who says "I've got 200 points to rent (or 500 points, or 2000 points) at $$$" and offers to check resorts & dates. I don't care how many points they own or what method they use for renting (DIS, broker, Facebook, etc.) But when people proactively tie-up availability with no customer lined up, yeah, I think it hurts everyone. Especially when failed spec reservations lead to short term cancellations and rooms that ultimately sit empty.

 

[DonMacGregor]

This whole idea of fairness and “first come, first served” has got me thinking. For the next MM, I’m going to have a couple of our admins go into two or three of our offices and log onto every single electronic device they can find (we never went back to mandatory in-office attendance after Covid, but several admins staff each location still for snail mail, document processing, etc.) and get on the virtual queue. That should be good for 50 or so devices, easily, plus the 5 or 6 I can do from my home office. Sure, it’s still a random assignment, but I’ll take my odds on nearly 60 devices over some retiree with a single laptop and a flip phone!

I’m gonna be in tall cotton!

 

[take36]

This whole idea of fairness and “first come, first served” has got me thinking. For the next MM, I’m going to have a couple of our admins go into two or three of our offices and log onto every single electronic device they can find (we never went back to mandatory in-office attendance after Covid, but several admins staff each location still for snail mail, document processing, etc.) and get on the virtual queue. That should be good for 50 or so devices, easily, plus the 5 or 6 I can do from my home office. Sure, it’s still a random assignment, but I’ll take my odds on nearly 60 devices over some retiree with a single laptop and a flip phone!

I’m gonna be in tall cotton!

I don’t like my chances, I still call in sometimes!

 

[Dobermanns]

I keep an eye on things in terms of availability a lot and there has never been a time at 11 months that anyone was locked out of their home resort.


Maybe it’s not the cheapest view or room, but something is there to be booked. That’s the nature though of a first come, first serve system.

Race weekend may just be one of those times when getting a specific room 11 months is needed.

Stopping renting isn’t going to change that. Things have changed with booking but that goes with more points in the system at places that are not WDW.

While there are certainly aspects of the system, expecially with the ease of renting now via the internet, may be frustrating, I just don’t see any way to make a rule thst is going to prevent anyone from buying, stripping, and selling a contract.

For the upcoming DL half marathon weekend in Jan, every single unit available for booking at VDH was booked in the morning of 5/16. That same morning, multiple rentals for those dates were posted on FB at $30-$33 a point, while several owners who were runners were shut out. Granted this was opening day of booking and call-in only, so it was random luck of the draw.

Thankfully, in the last several days, reports have come in that wait lists were filled as more rooms were apparently declared.

 

[GoingSince1990]

Again, I’m really not seeing any problem. I just checked availability for Dec 21 - Dec 26, so a Christmas trip which is the busiest time of year at WDW. And check-in is within 7 months so all resorts are bookable. Looking at all room types across all resorts, there is an absolute ton of availability. Which surprised me a bit based upon the stories of commercial renters supposedly grabbing all of the peak times with spec reservations to sell at a profit.

 

[crvetter]

Is there any way to find out how many DVC points are used outside of WDW in a given year? I would think without a brokered rental market, members with excess points would pursue alternative uses for their points. I assume that probably happens less often now if a member can easily list the points with a broker, which also means that more points are used in WDW resorts than through exchanges. To that end, if Disney made exchanges more (financially) attractive, they might entice people to burn the points instead of renting.

I'm not trying to annoy anyone. We have no idea what the real numbers are so have no idea what the impact of renting is. But Disney can probably tell who the rental whales are and which brokers consistently buy and sell contracts, so they could start by addressing those. Or they could develop their own system that competes with the brokers. Or both.

I would really love to know the numbers ...

If someone uses their points outside of a DVC resort it means they traded their points to Disney so then Disney uses those points to reserve a room so the availability is still as stressed if rented. If they trade to II then Disney is obligated to put in a room of equal value so the system is still as stressed if rented. If they don’t use their points it goes to breakage which Disney can reserve and rent as cash within 60 days so the system is stressed still as if rented. Now the one thing to note about breakage it says within 60 days but the funny thing is the PÓS states that Disney can forecast breakage and reserve the rooms as early as 11 months and the memberships dues are only offset by a fraction of that income because their is a cap to what Disney has to pay to the association.

So points never burn and disappear out of the system. Someone benefits in the end and it is almost always Disney (and occasionally II if someone trade into that which I’m guessing doesn’t happen to much and Disney tends to deposit SSR only to II)

 

[tjkraz]

Again, I’m really not seeing any problem. I just checked availability for Dec 21 - Dec 26, so a Christmas trip which is the busiest time of year at WDW. And check-in is within 7 months so all resorts are bookable. Looking at all room types across all resorts, there is an absolute ton of availability. Which surprised me a bit based upon the stories of commercial renters supposedly grabbing all of the peak times with spec reservations to sell at a profit.

It's more about targeting certain resorts, dates and room types which are cheap, rare and in-demand. The typical rental may go for about $20-22 per point. But if you can snag something like Standard View BoardWalk Studio during fall Food & Wine or AKV Value studio during marathon weekend, it could be priced at the equivalent of $30-35 per point and still be very competitive with Disney hotel prices.

Few people are making spec rental reservations for something mundane like SSR Preferred One Bedroom in August. The first dominoes to fall are the rooms which will maximize revenue. Christmas is popular at WDW, but the high crowds and expensive point charts are a turn off to many members. I'm quite sure there are some spec rentals for that Christmas period, just not enough to exhaust availability.

If you've never looked, pull up several of the rental sites and look at confirmed reservations. One rental site currently has over 1550 confirmed DVC reservations available representing more than 5400 room nights. Another broker has almost 500 reservations. That's just the next 11 months, and doesn't take into account the hundreds (thousands?) of reservations which have already been rented for the same period. And there are several other sites, Facebook, eBay, DIS, etc.

 

[Sandisw]

For the upcoming DL half marathon weekend in Jan, every single unit available for booking at VDH was booked in the morning of 5/16. That same morning, multiple rentals for those dates were posted on FB at $30-$33 a point, while several owners who were runners were shut out. Granted this was opening day of booking and call-in only, so it was random luck of the draw.

Thankfully, in the last several days, reports have come in that wait lists were filled as more rooms were apparently declared.

VDH right now have very few rooms available so I’d say this is a unique situation and not likely to be long term.

Good to hear that more rooms have open fed up.

 

[mikeuno]

Brokers will find ways to maximize profits!

 

[take36]

Brokers will find ways to maximize profits!

Commercialization/capitalism of niche activities almost always leads to min/max strategies that hurts the original use case. There is money to be made so lets take advantage! When there is a crackdown, the large scale users can afford to find more loopholes, while the original use case is further marginalized. Wyndham timeshares were so complicated yet can be so lucrative if you know the system led to massive issues with renters and ultimately led to a crackdown.

I am glad Disney and others continue to build new DVCs and new hotels/timeshares in the areas to give us more choices and options. So many luxury and value options off sites to utilize when I'm blocked out and more DVC towers coming online for me to try. I worry about the non grandfather resale only members as the min/max approaches maximum efficiency and they are unable to utilize points in a somewhat flexible manner.

 

[dioxide45]

I'd define commercial rentals as any rental where a third party gets a fee.

This does and doesn't make sense. What is a third party fee? Is it just a commission? What if someone pays to list their points for rent on Redweek or Ebay, a fee would need to be paid to them. Eliminating rentals when there is a third party fee almost forces people to have to list in the classified ads of their local newspaper, but wait, there is a fee to be paid there too.

The fact that people are arguing over the definition of commercial on this thread is evidence that it is a vague term. Disney did that on purpose.

All timeshare companies have done the same, and for a reason. Without a formal definition in the contract, they can define it however they wish and if an owner wants to define it differently, they need to go through the expense of litigation.

 

[we"reofftoneverland]

This does and doesn't make sense. What is a third party fee? Is it just a commission? What if someone pays to list their points for rent on Redweek or Ebay, a fee would need to be paid to them. Eliminating rentals when there is a third party fee almost forces people to have to list in the classified ads of their local newspaper, but wait, there is a fee to be paid there too.

All timeshare companies have done the same, and for a reason. Without a formal definition in the contract, they can define it however they wish and if an owner wants to define it differently, they need to go through the expense of litigation.

Agree

 

[New Mouse]

I am not able to see how buying, stripping and reselling a contract is hurting the membership, nor do I see why DVD would care.

Renting does not hurt the membership as a whole, either. We forget the DVC does not care WHICH member booked the room. It only cares that the room has been booked.

Posters here are arguing about "fair" - how to allocate scarce resources. We will never agree on that.

Renting artificially inflates the demand for peak times and really not much else. It sometimes effects last minute availability for those who cant sell.their reservations and ditch them. The peak timed would still sell out but you would arguably have slightly more time to book them.

 

[sethschroeder]

Oh I know what's there, we are allowed to rent up until a non defined commercial purpose. That's why I wonder how strict they can actually get.

They would never know though. That seemingly is the point lost in this thread. There is nothing they could do within the confines of the contract to ever stop you from renting personally every once and a while.

 

[sethschroeder]

I could argue (possibly not successfully in court) that Disney is OBLIGATED to enforce the non-commercial clause for the benefit of the members.

If you can't argue it I will send you multiple of my DVC contracts with Disney that will make it so you can. It states its not allowed. I pay MFs for management of the resorts and reservation system. Part of their management is enforcing the rules.

Its the same with balancing point charts. NO they can't add points but they are required to balance the point charts appropriately. Which is what I outlined to the management that leads the team who balances point charts and luckily they have started doing something.