I provide here my initial views on the new Terms and Conditions for On-Line Booking for Disney Vacation Club Resorts (hereinafter referred to as the “June 2025 rules”).
The Transfer Rule
Outside of what the June 2025 rules say in relation to rentals, most of the terms are just reiterations of rules most members know about and do not reject, except that there is one major mistake (or at least I assume it is a mistake) that does not involve the rental issue. The Vacation Points Banking Guideline section declares that already banked points cannot be transferred. In December 2024,
DVC issued new rules applicable to transfers, which were approved by the government agency that controls condominiums and timeshares, which expressly declare that already banked points can now be transferred. That is a rule that today remains in the Home Resort Rules and Regulations, and there is nothing to indicate that DVC has sent the new June 2025 rules to the government agency for approval or sought reversal of any December 2024 changes to the transfer rules.
New Rental Rules
The General Terms and Conditions in the June 2025 rules appear to adopt rental rules similar to those DVD first adopted for the Cabins of Fort Wilderness in its declarations and DVC Membership Agreement. A member (apparently by using the on-line reservation system) agrees: (a) that any reservations are solely for “personal use and not for commercial purposes,” and that meaning is the one required by the governing documents of all DVC resorts; (b) personal use “may” include reserving vacation homes for friends or family on occasion, and (c) “personal use” means that a member does not regularly or frequently rent/sell reservations booked using the membership.
Whatever the drafters of the June 2025 rules believed should be the rules, it is incorrect to declare that these new rules are the same “personal use” rules contained in any of the POS’s for DVC Resorts that came into existence before Riviera and it is even doubtful for Riviera. As I have pointed out before,
see e.g.,
www.disboards.com/threads/aggressive-anti-rental-email-response-from-ms.3919744/page-16 post #316, and
www.disboards.com/threads/new-definition-of-rental-activity.3939178/page-24#post-65340745, post #474., the Declarations (usually in section 12.1) and other governing documents define the term “personal use” as the actual use of the rooms as “vacation accommodations.” The “use of the accommodations” are then limited to the “personal use of the Owners, their lessees, guests, exchangers and invitees,” and thus the term “personal use” is deemed to expressly include members renting rooms to “lessees” as vacation accommodations. What is then prohibited is the actual “use” of the vacation homes for a “commercial purpose or any purposes other than personal use described herein.” Since personal use is expressly described herein to include rentals by members of rooms as vacation accommodations, the term commercial purpose in that sentence is not even referring to rentals but instead just to the actual use of the rooms, e.g., they cannot be used to conduct business operations, a use that can be engaged in only in designated “Commercial Units” as set out in the Declarations. The Declarations then provide the only rental prohibition that exists pre-Riviera by stating that a “commercial purpose” includes a “pattern of rental activity” that the “association can reasonably conclude constitutes a commercial enterprise or practice.” That section was prepared by lawyers. In the law, there are statutes and cases that refer to “commercial enterprises,” a term generally understood in the law to mean a person or organization that is actually in the business of doing something to achieve profit.
DVC itself in the mid-2,000s showed that its understanding of the personal use provisions was that many rentals were allowed by a member as long as the member was not perceived as actually being in the business of doing rentals, including by adopting a rule that declared that if a member did more than 20 reservations in a year, a presumption, which the member could defeat, would arise that the commercial enterprise rule was being violated.
Another issue is that the June 2025 rules state that “DVCM reserves the right to interpret personal use and determine if reservations are booked for personal or commercial purposes in its discretion.” The rule that actually exists for pre-CCV resorts is that the association or its Board is the determiner on the issue of whether a member has violated the commercial purpose rule using the reasonableness standard, and there is nothing in the DVC Membership Agreements applicable to DVCM that gives it the authority to make such determinations, including one that requires no level of reasonableness. The CCV Declarations and Membership Agreement are the first to ever allow DVCM to decide the issue, and the reasonableness standard existed until the creation of CFW. In fact, the DVC Membership Agreements for BLT, VGF, and Poly themselves expressly repeat that it is the association’s Board that is to make any determinations concerning violation of the commercial purpose rules, i.e., DVCM itself is precluded from making such determinations in the very document that controls what it has the power to do.
What Is Really Going on
My initial reaction was that the June 2025 rules were attempting to do something devious. The document phrases things as something a member agrees to by using the online reservation system (which did not exist before 2012) after seeing the June 2025 rules. The potential was that DVC may in the future contend that a member’s use of the online reservation system after learning of the June 2025 rules results in the acceptance by the member of the new rental rules and thus a waiver of any rental rules actually contained in the Declarations and other documents for a DVC Resort. However, it appears that may not be DVC’s intent since the document does state that if there is a conflict between the June 2025 rules and any rules contained in the POS’s of a particular resort, the terms in those POS’s will control. Moreover, if DVC's new rules are deemed in any way to lessen the number of times a member can rent under the the terms of the original declarations for a DVC resort, they can be thrown out by a court as a violation Fl. Stat §718.110 (13) which provides that rental rights provided in the original declarations for a condominium resort cannot later be changed to lessen in any way the number of times an owner can rent except via an amendment to be voted upon by the owners, and any owner that votes against the amendment will not be bound to follow the changer made.
Nevertheless, there is still some outside possibility that DVC may later contend that the June 2025 rules relating to rentals control because they state your agreement that the June 2025 rental rules are themselves what is “required by the governing documents for each DVC Resort,” i.e., a member agrees that what is stated in the June 2025 rules about rentals really has the same meaning as the rules stated in the DVC resorts’ POS’s.
An ultimate issue is what DVC intends to actually do with the June 2025 rules. Its intent may be two-fold: (a) the new rules will simply make many who are doing multiple rentals do less; and (b) DVC will attempt to stop a number of those who are actually doing a lot of rentals to make profit, including those members that are joined with others in a business-type relationship to mainly do rental. If that is what occurs few can complain. If instead DVC intends to be far more restrictive on rentals, a lawsuit may arise, and would be one that DVC could lose if it takes any position that the June 2025 rules control.
I have seen reports that those currently seeking to make reservations are being asked to confirm if it is for “personal use,” or requesting the member to state whether it is a “rental.” If all DVC is doing is asking whether a reservation is for “personal use,” then the problem is that members of most the DVC resorts can honestly answer no even if it is a rental because the actual meaning of "personal use" in the pre-Riviera DVC declarations includes member-rentals to persons who will use the rooms as vacation accommodations.
If instead, the system is asking whether the reservation is a “rental,” then the answer to that is I wonder why DVC did not start asking that question some years ago when reservations were made, so as to provide DVC needed information on rentals. What many are unaware of, including because DVC has not asked the question when one is making a reservation, is that the Home Resort Rules and Regulations, §5(3)(b), have, for a number of years, required members to inform MS whether a reservation made for someone other than the member is a rental.
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