DVC *SHOULD* come up with some sort of offer for members, APs or otherwise.
Tim, we're normally on the same page, but I disagree with you here. DVC
could do that. But I am not sure DVC
should do that--at least, not in the business-case sense of "should".
Over its history, Disney has been reasonably good at maintaining "gate integrity"--setting up a pricing structure that in most cases ensures a minimum per-day spend for more or less everyone who walks in the park*. And, that's because the theme parks are the engine that drives
everything else in the domestic resorts. I can recall exactly one time they've discounted single-day tickets--the "give a day get a day" promotion coming out of the Great Recession. [In hindsight, I'm guessing that promotion was viewed as a too-successful failure--it closed almost nine months early.] Most of their other "deals" are likely thought of internally as upsells in disguise.
One example of such an upsell is the pricing structure on multi-day tickets. You get a small discount on the fourth day, and the "real" discounts don't start showing up until day 5. Guess how many parks there are? The fourth-day discount is essentially a way to say "You've seen the three you really wanted; might as well see the fourth." The fifth day and beyond is "We may as well go back to Disney for another day instead of paying 2-3x to go to Sea World or Universal."
The same is true for the AP structure. For out of state visitors, the break-even point is somewhere between two and three "visits" per year, where each visit is at least several days in length. How many times do we see people say something like: "I bought it for the two trips we had planned, and then figured the third trip was 'free' so I booked an extra one." Except of course that third trip isn't free, only the admission is.
The same is arguably true for DVC. The minimum is 150 points, and that sounds like a lot if you are staying at Saratoga or Old Key West. But, at Riviera it's just barely more than a week's stay in a Standard view studio, on average. So, an entry-level DVC purchase is maybe two trips per year--and again that's just under the "regular" AP price, and a bit more than the other AP DVCers were able to get. That AP structure probably encourages slightly more trips that are a bit shorter than otherwise, and that probably fuels more spending elsewhere. If you make two 5-night trips, you might do two Signature meals each. You might only do three Signature meals in one ten-night trip. Two After Hours events rather than one. And so on.
The other part of this story is that existing DVC Members just are not
that important from the POV of the theme parks. There are somewhere between
250K and 300K DVC families. Assume they spent all their DVC time at WDW. Further assume they have three people on average, and average seven park days per year. (That's probably off in one direction or the other, but it's probably also within a factor of 2.) That's a total of 275K * 3 * 7, or about 5.7M park-days. 2019 saw attendance of roughly 59M. So, the DVC crowd is maybe 10% of total park admission, give or take.
That's not zero. But in the "tail that wags the dog" analogy, DVC Members are not the dog. And, right now the dog has other problems, namely: several different times of year when they are
unwilling to sell day tickets to anyone because they are too busy. I was at WDW for two weeks in mid-March last year, and most of those days had no day-of park pass availability anywhere. Disney was
refusing to take money from people who wanted to give it to them. That's a far cry from the state of affairs pre-pandemic, when
maybe that happened at Magic Kingdom four or five days a year, total, and all during the Christmas/New Years rush.
So, the Parks would really not rather engage in upselling more admissions at a discount. In the words of Ted Lasso being offered tea: "
No thank you." DVC is an afterthought in that decision, and simply swept up in the broader currents of the theme parks. When that situation subsides--and I suspect it will before too much longer--APs will be back. And, out-of-state blue-card members will probably have access to a price point that regular out of state guests do not have. The lack of admission discounts is not some intentional slight towards DVC Members---it's strictly business.
But there is another problem. The point of Membership Extras is
not to reward DVC Members who have already bought in. They exist for only two reasons. The first is to serve as upsells to people who have demonstrated they have cash they are willing to spend on Disney. (The merchandise and dining discounts probably play this role.) These are likely to be "paid for" by the unit offering the discount, because it is in that unit's best interests. They aren't doing a favor for DVC; they are helping themselves.
The second is to
sell more points. And, those are "paid for" by the sales arm of DVC. The person responsible for P&L for the DVC segment needs those investments to bear fruit. I would bet big that admission discounts of any kind fall into this category. And therein lies the problem. Over time, point sales are roughly constant. But the Membership base is constantly growing. That means that, over time, perks that "every Member" gets cost a larger fraction of the total sales volume. And I suspect that's why DVD has turned to Moonlight Magic and similar promotions--because they are not available to every existing Member, and they do not get more expensive as there are more eligible Members.
Will this ultimately spell the death of DVC Member admission discounts? Probably not--and that's also becaues the theme parks are the engine that drives everything else. Dangling an admission discount is probably a very potent sales tool. But it does mean the admission discounts will probably get less generous over time. And, we've already seen that, in that DVC Members were no longer getting a discount on the top-tier AP during the last round or two of sales.
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And yes, everyone knows That Guy who had 200 visits during a year on one mid-tier AP. That Guy is the exception. This is a game of averages, not absolutes.
