Has anyone stayed at a resort during refurbishment? I’m trying to decide if we’re going to keep at Kidani or go to Jambo, or even try another resort at 7 months. We’re just about at 11 months for Thanksgiving next year so I need to decide soon.
We haven’t stayed at a Kidani Grand Villa so that’s one reason we were wanting to do Kidani over Jambo next year. The plan was a GV for us and my SIL, and then savanna studio rooms for my MIL, BIL, and niece and nephew to sleep in while the GV remains our gathering place.
We usually alternate between the Wilderness Lodge and Animal Kingdom Lodge, but CCV will also be under refurbishment, so the two resorts I have enough points for 11 month priority both are on the refurb schedule for Thanksgiving next year.
At the same time rooms will be subject to refurb at Kidani,
DVC mentioned that it will also be doing work on the lobby and community hall. That lobby/community hall work may be more of the issue than the doing the rooms. The question for the rooms is whether DVC will follow the same process it did with its first full refurb in 2016, which was to do half a floor at a time, and when done do the other half, and then move to another floor. That type of refurb, as long as an outside refurb is not going on at the same time (and it will not be for Kidani because that was done in 2022 and 2023) creates no real issues for staying at Kidani, unless you get a room directly above or directly below rooms being worked on at the time, in which case, you may have a possible noise issue during the day.
The fact that it is still fairly easy to get rooms after Sep 2025 indicates that the planned Kidani refurb may be that type. The real problem problem would be, if instead, DVC adopted the BWV refurb that took place from Sep 2023 to June 2024. Before that refurb, all prior refurbs of the rooms were done on a half-floor basis at a time -- complete one half floor, then move to the other half of the floor, and when done move to another floor. For that latest refurb, DVC decided to do something a "little" different. It took half the building out service (all floors) that included all the boardwalk view rooms for about four months, and then later took the other half out for about four months that included most of the standard view rooms (the likely total times were initially asserted to be much shorter when the refurb was announced but DVC was wrong assuming the entire refurb could be done quicker when taking out half the building at a time). There was work seemingly going on all during the day, inside and out, for half the building. A prime effect was the impact on reservations. For reservations during that time, standard and boardwalk view studios/2BRs (when usable) were both disappearing almost all the time at 11-months out, mostly right at 8 a.m. eastern, and, for more than about half that entire time, the pool/gareden view studios/2BRs were doing the same. Even the 1BRs were not lasting very long. That refurb is also having a longer term effect.For 2025, rooms have often been more difficult to reserve than traditionally at BWV, a result of the fact that many members could not get their usual reservations during the refurb, and thus there is now more more demand, including by those members who could not get their usual reservations, and have been trying to use up banked points.
