Hi All,
I have booked cash
DVC rooms in the past and was looking at potentially booking something for end of June/early July 2020. I've been perusing the Disney World website for a while and noticed that cash DVC rooms for that period have opened up somewhat gradually for most of the resorts but oddly enough, there is no availability showing at SSR. I find this odd considering the size of the resort so I was wondering if someone knows/could explain for me how they go about releasing cash rooms to the public (i.e. non-DVC members). For example, is there a specific time frame when this generally happens (i.e. some time after the 11-month booking window I would assume)? I'm just curious to know how it typically works.
(I'm not sure if this is posted in the right place so please feel free to move the thread at your discretion. Thanks!!)
This will not address SSR, the PP did that. I'll address the other part of your question, the timeframe for making DVC rooms available for the public to book.
We stayed at CCV in December 2017 and will be staying at CCV again later this fall. For about 2 years leading up to our first CCV stay, and in the 2 years since, I stalked/watched the WDW website to get a sense of how the DVC resorts are made available to the public for cash reservations direct form Disney. My focus was on making a reservation at the earliest possible point to ensure we got the hotel and room type we wanted.
It is easy to go to the website and put in some dates in the 9-11 month out range and get a sense of availability; if you watch over a period of time you'll begin to see some common patterns emerge.
Some things I learned:
There is variability between the resorts, sometimes with some patterns, but not a long-lasting pattern where I noticed that X resort ALWAYS releases first and Y is ALWAYS last, though certainly some tend to lag behind most of the others in doing their initial release.
The first large batch of rooms to become available are presumably the rooms that Disney owns and is allowed to make available to the public. So they come from the few % of the DVC points that are Disney's. At any given resort they are released in the range of 9 to 11 months before the travel date -- never further out than 11 months. Most of the time it seems they release them around the 10.5 to 10 month point, but there really is some variability in there. If you want a specific resort, I would start looking at the 11 month plus a couple days and check each day.
With this first batch: Not every resort becomes available at the same time. Not all availability at a given resort becomes available all at once. There can be a "trickle" effect over a period of a few days or even weeks, both between and within resorts. Yep, makes no sense except to say that it appears to be a slow "load" as opposed to an "all at once" load into the system. Thus, start checking at the earliest possible availability and then check each day until you find what you want.
Sometimes availability will pop in and out. I am not sure if this is due to IT issues on Disney's end or due to an extremely small number of rooms being available and they get snapped up but then someone changes their mind. Either way, if you see the room you want, you are better to grab it or risk it becoming not available. This is particularly true of highly limited rooms, like AKL-Jambo Value or Club level studios or villas [yes, I have seen both of those categories in multiple room configurations available for the public as cash reservations].
Once this first batch is loaded in not much happens except availability goes down for some time as people make reservations. Then at a few points several and a few months out it seems that there are some additional batches loaded -- or at least resorts that had gone down to little or no availability suddenly have some again. I don't know if this is as a result of Disney adding more inventory to be available [e.g. due to DVC members exchanging points], or due to guests canceling reservations or both. The main point though is that if you missed the first batch and there is little or no availability at your chosen resort, it is possible but not guaranteed that as you get closer to your stay availability may come up again, though it may not be for the room type you want [e.g. instead of studios there are 1 bedrooms available]. Sometimes some resorts just never really get availability back once they sell out for a date set.
Finally, the specific dates can make a big difference, and sometimes it is a single day within a range that is the problem child. We experienced this for our upcoming stay. We already have a reservation, but were playing around with options when the fall discounts came out [no discount available at CCV for our dates unless we want to move up to a 2 bedroom at much higher cost...]... One day in the middle of our stay is a problem as there is zero availability at many resorts for that day, but all the days around it are just fine. So if you have flexibility for your dates you may need to do some experimenting with the calendar.
SW
