The long answer is that it will change a lot, and multiple times over your membership.
We've been owners for 18 years, and our stay patterns have varied greatly over each say 1/3 of our ownership. During the first 5-6 years, while DD was in elementary school, we could take her out, and being that we were 8ish hours by car away, we got APs and went all of the time. We would go for long weekends, summer weeks, spring break, and always labor day for
MNSSHP, etc, the zenith of this being in 2012 when they offered members the $399 Premium Annual Pass (think Incredipass+Water Parks+Mini-golf+Oak Trail Golf).
The middle 1/3, mainly when DD was in middle/high school, visits were perhaps fewer, but longer, and beholden to the school calendar. We also probably took more friends during this period than others. Also, as others have mentioned, you start to gravitate towards larger villa sizes. Also at that time, newer properties started opening, most prominently, Aulani. We went the first year it opened and have been back 5 times since. We have now decided that Aulani is a once every at least 3 year visit.
Then the pandemic hit, parks closed and points started to back up. Also, Disney stopped selling APs at the time, which really changed at least our visit pattern. Prior to that, we always had APs, which made you want to maximize your visits. Well, with no AP, we branched out. We visited Aulani 3 straight years 2021-2023 and loved every visit (sans the COVID testing we had to do at the airport once we arrived back in 2021, but that was a different time...
). We also hit Vero for two weeks during the shutdown and Hilton Head the next year and really enjoyed them as well.
Fast forward to the last couple of years and DD is now out of college, so there are many more couples trips for DW and I. We have really come to love the Cabins at Fort Wilderness, and our last 3 stays have been there. We can just go down and enjoy the Fort ecosystem with the golf carts, scavenger hunts, great community, etc., and we feel that we don't even need to visit the parks. Plus, you can bring your dog, which we've really enjoyed. That said, we do usually make one day for Epcot for Guardians
We've also increased things like trips to Europe, etc, branching outside the Disney bubble, so that makes less time for park trips.
I am sure that our visits will change over the next 18 years as well. Our first part of our ownership was add-on-itis as we wanted more points to do more and more. However, now that our visiting patterns have changed, for the first time, we have actually thought about downsizing a contract or two, especially since we don't really use the 11 month window that much.
The short answer however is that everyone is different and your experience could well be very different than ours. We are only a sample of size 1, so I wouldn't take our experience as gospel (what did
@Brian Noble say about turning anecdotes into data???
)
, I wanted to switch gears.
