It could seem easy at first glance, as hotels have on-line reservations all the time. But there all you have to do is give a credit card number.
DVC reservations are actually fairly complex. Consider the following:
- The system would first have to check if your dues have been paid and are up to date.
- Next, if you have a loan, it would need to check to see if you are up to date on your payments.
- It would have to determine what Use Year is required for your reservation dates. EG a reservation for August 2007 would be in the 2007 Use year for someone with a February Use year month, but would be in the 2006 Use year for someone with an October Use year month.
- It would need to check the status of all your points within that use year. There are five different categories of points: Regular, Banked, Borrowed, Holding, Reservation. It would have to present you with a listing of which of those points could actually be used and cannot be used. And if you've had points transferred in from another member, that can really complicate it as transferred points are suppose to retain their original use year and home resort. This is a major problem if those transferred points don't match a home resort and use year month that you also have. (this has been the 'point morphing' problem that DVC had to work on for a long time)
- If you are trying to make a reservation more than 7-months ahead, it would need to check that the points you want to use are all Home Resort points.
- You may own at different resorts and want to make a reservation at 6-months. Say you own OKW, SSR, and AKV but want to make a reservation at BCV. It would have to present you with all your choices and you would have to tell it how many points you wanted to use from which contracts. Maybe you want to use 50 of your OKW points, 10 of your SSR points, and 5 of your AKV points to make a 65 point BCV reservation.
- OK, everything is correct up to this point. Now it has to check availability. You have to give it a resort, villa type, and in some cases a view. With all the combinations at AKV, that alone would be quite some computer program. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't AKV that is causing the current delay for introducing on-line booking.
- Finally it would have to present you with a list of requests you could select from, or even have to have some place you could type in your requests.
- Remember, all this has to be done in real time, dynamically. That means it would have to put a temporary 'hold' on your reservation and wait for you to click the 'OK' button, else someone else could try to be reserving the same room, and it may be the last one available.
- And if the room wasn't available, you might want to waitlist. Adding that to the equation complicates things even more. Especially since there are different option for wait-lists: EG, notification of availability, automatically booking, waitlist expiration time.
There are other things that have to be accounted for in creating an on-line reservation system such as collecting the names of everyone who will be using the resort, generating a confirmation number and automatically generating the reservation letter that is sent out.
And day-by-day booking? I'd say forget it. For that you'd have to call MS. Programming day-by-day would really complicate things.
Many of us believe a good first step would simply be to have DVC develop an on-line program that simply allowed checking availability. This alone would cut down on numerous phone calls to MS.
Many of you know I've been working a long time on a point tracking program. It addresses ALL of the above issues. So believe me, it's no easy task.
In reality, a 
your tracking program! How's the new release coming? 
