Different Use Years??? Ok or Hassle???

[lovethesun12]

I personally would not do 2 contracts in this situation but if I did, it would be paramount to get them as a single UY and linked together under one master. Now if you were up at or over 150 each then it might be less important. If you planned Easter one year and Thanksgiving another then I might hold a different opinion. Personally I'd just do a single BLT contract in the 220-250 range, one should be able to get into AKV most years at 7 months out though not value. I presume you're looking at studios and know it'll consistently be Premier Season. Your numbers are a little low for 7 nights in a studio, are you also looking at 6 nights on average? IMO if you're looking mostly at BLT standard and AKV value you'll need a good 20% cushion or more over what you think you'll need.

Thanks for the response! We would stay 6-7 nights in a standard studio. We stayed this year at AKV for 169 pts for 7 nights. We could do 6 nights instead for the years we were a little low (or possibly get a value although I definitely wouldn’t bank on that obviously). Ideally looking for a 100-120pt contract.

I was looking at 1 contract, but we haven’t 100% decided yet. We did like AKV, but I used it more as a hypothetical for the example; planning to try a stay at some of the other resorts first that might not be as easy to book like BCV and PVB and decide which we prefer.

Basically still a ton of work to do before we do an offer (or even decide we will offer)

 

[cedricandsophie]

We have four use years at 7 resorts. And four diff member numbers. All the direct purchase points are combined under one year, June and then three other contracts we bought resale for april, August And December. All show up on our online account. And I get emails with banking reminders. It’s never been s big deal or problem for me. All your reservations show up online. There is a pull down box that shows each membership number.

 

[Henwen88]

I actually like having 2 use years, but they are 6 months apart on purpose: take summer/fall trips with June UY and winter/spring trips with Dec UY - built in cancellation insurance. I'd always be nervous with my end of May trips booked with June contracts. Not sure why you'd want them to be only one month apart... too much hassle for not much benefit. The great thing about the resale market is if you can be patient, then eventually the perfect contract will come up. Just gotta be patient

Also remember that travel habits/patterns change over time. Don't stress too much over the use year because in 5 or 10 years you'll probably be traveling differently than you do today.

 

[kboo]

Not trying to hijack your thread, but I have a similar question and thought it would be better asked here than a new thread (perhaps beneficial for us all looking to buy new contracts?

We were planning on purchasing two contracts for the best deal we can find (lets assume AKV and BLT) so not concerned about use year thus far). We would alternate each contract annually during Easter, so for example, Easter 2020 would be AKV then Easter 2021 would be BLT. We would plan on two 100pt contracts (each stay is about 169-210 pts) and borrow pts or cut our stay short if we needed to.

We would always book 11 months out, and always bank the points for the contract we are not using that year into the next year by setting reminders in our phone/email at the earliest time possible. We would always keep the points separate, using only for that resort every other year.

Is there something difficult about doing this I'm missing that someone could shed some light on? I keep seeing posts about how different use years give people trouble but not sure if that would apply here or if I'm missing something.

We have 2 different home resorts and UY and use them as you describe (separately, for different trips). So far it is working mostly as planned. One thing to consider is that you want to always be in borrowing mode - even if it's just be a few points, because once you have banked points, you *have* to use those banked points by the following UY (the UY they're banked into), which can be a problem if it's a small # of points and you already have your other trips planned.

Consider yourself as two separate owners. Twice the dates to keep track of, separate dues billings, mail, accounting's, and a greater chance of something going wrong.

Bill

As long as you're planning to use the contracts separately, I don't think this is too much of a problem. ALTHOUGH -- I agree that there's a little more to keep track of, and you will probably need to plan your trips even farther out. For example, I am thinking about how to use points in my 2019 UY, which effectively means I have to have a ballpark idea of trips I'm going to take into 2020. For example, if we went on a Disney cruise in 2020, we might spend less time at WDW that year, which in turn would require us to really make sure we use all of our 2019 points in 2019.

#firstworldproblems

I actually like having 2 use years, but they are 6 months apart on purpose: take summer/fall trips with June UY and winter/spring trips with Dec UY - built in cancellation insurance. I'd always be nervous with my end of May trips booked with June contracts. Not sure why you'd want them to be only one month apart... too much hassle for not much benefit. The great thing about the resale market is if you can be patient, then eventually the perfect contract will come up. Just gotta be patient

Also remember that travel habits/patterns change over time. Don't stress too much over the use year because in 5 or 10 years you'll probably be traveling differently than you do today.

This is exactly what we have, with February and August UY. The only issue is that since we bought August UY later, we are points poor with our Feb contracts, and so right now we are taking trips in the last 4 months of each UY. (e.g. we are using our Feb contract for a trip in November this year, because we didn't yet have points from our August contract when we needed to book our November trip, and then our next trip is in April 2019, but we are using Aug 2018 points for that, since we don't have enough points in our other contract until Feb 2020.) So I'm looking at our 2020 trip(s) to get us back on track for using our points in the 1st 8 months of each UY. That IS a little bit of a headache, because any trips between Feb and August are in different UY depending on the home resort (e.g. right now we are in Feb 18 UY and Aug 2017 UY)

By the time we get on track, our travel patterns will probably have changed again.