Importance of UY month

[Plan Man]

We are considering buying more than one contract and want to know how important it is to have the same month for each contract?

 

[disneynutz]

Each UY has it's own dates to keep track or and each would be a separate membership, more to keep track of.

Buy the UY that covers your 8 most used vacation months.

Bill

 

[BlazerFan]

I have multiple contracts, all with the same use year (June). That has served us well for all the times we usually travel. Then runDisney moved the Tinker Bell race to May, WORST month for a June use year. We are in the process of a resale add on with an October use year that we will use for our May trip only. I'm hoping it won't be too hard to deal with.

 

[DVC Doctor]

I personally think it is way easier to have the same use year for multiple contracts and if you have different use years, you will have different membership numbers and it can sometimes be challenging to keep track of points and dates as they will have different log in accounts for the member website.

 

[DVC Mike]

When purchasing additional points via the resale market, you can easily purchase a contract with a different Use Year. If you’re buying an add-on direct from Disney, you will most likely be given no choice but to get the same Use Year you already have – unless you buy the minimum points that a first time purchaser is required to buy-in, in which case you can ask for a different use year.

If you buy the same use year (and the deeds have the exact same names on them), all your contracts can be setup to be treated as one for purpose of reserving, banking and borrowing. If you have separate use years, the two contracts remain separate for all purposes and when you reserve using both you reserve some nights using one contract and other nights using the other and link the two. Or, you can transfer points from one contract to another, but there are limitations.

Having multiple contracts with different Use Years can offer added flexibility in some cases, but certain limitations in other cases, and is just harder to manage. Having the same Use Year on all of your contracts is much easier to manage, as there is less to keep track of and less chance for mistakes.

The main advantage of multiple UY’s is if you go different times of the year you can potentially chose which account to use for a given trip giving a certain amount of protection from cancelation and banking issues. But having multiple contracts with different Use Years does create more accounting, is more complicated and difficult (but not impossible) to make a single reservation from both contracts.

So, some people ask why you should make life harder than it needs to be and recommend sticking with just one UY.

If you were adding on to the same resort, many people recommend you keep the same use year. If you are buying a new home resort, then a different use year isn't too hard to manage.

 

[drusba]

Two use years means two membership numbers and for all intents and purposes you should think of it as if you were two different people with separate memberships. The banking dates differ, you get two different annual maintennace bills, and if you have automatic withdrawal from checking account for dues, you get two separate withdrawals per month.

You cannot combine points from the two different use years to reserve any given night. Instead if you want to use them both for a single trip, you either need to first transfer points from one use year to the other, or, alternatively, make two separate, but sequential reservations for the same resort and room size, and then have MS link them so you do not have to change rooms at the turnover date. If you transfer points, you get a new issue in that transferred points do not show up in your online account and you cannot use transferred points to do a reservation at 8 a.m. online but instead must call MS at 9, and thus you lose the one hour on;line reservation advantage at the 11 and 7 month windows. If you make two separate, but sequential reservations, you also have issues you would otherwise not have with a single use year. Each of the separate reservations has its own 11 and 7 month window, and if dealing with a high demand room and season, such as VGF studios in the last quarter of the year, you could get the issue of being able to make the first reservation but then when the time comes to make the second one, you could be blocked out even at 11 months out because those studios can disappear before the 11 month window opens. Also, the 180 day out "plus-length-of-stay" rule for restaurant reservations applies separately to the two reservations.

An advantage to two separate use years if they are months apart, is that you can possibly avoid having the risk of not being able to bank points if you cancel a trip too late into the use year --if you want to take a trip in the last quarter of one use year, you can use the other use year to make the reservation and thus still be able to bank points if you cancel as the trip approaches.

 

[DenLo]

I think you end up with more dangling points with multiple contracts with different UYs. Dangling points are ones that are not enough to reserve a single night. It just much easier to combine points from different contracts with the same UY at the 7 month mark. We sometimes have points from three or four contracts being used in a single reservation and we don't have to transfer the points around to combine them at the 7 month mark.

 

[Granny]

We have two contracts, two UYs. A simple Excel spreadsheet keeps everything easy to figure out. I would say that for the most part it is not a big deal. We have two UYs because we got a great deal on a BWV resale contract and didn't want to let UY get in the way of great savings.