Refurb and room availability

[Michaelene De Boer]

While DVC resorts go under refurbishment are they required to keep the same amount availability? For example, if they don't have enough one bedrooms and they will put people up on the regular resort side.

 

[erionm]

While DVC resorts go under refurbishment are they required to keep the same amount availability? For example, if they don't have enough one bedrooms and they will put people up on the regular resort side.

No.

 

[VGCgroupie]

No. Short term sacrifice for long term gains

 

[Tatebeck]

They pull rooms from the booking tool ahead of the 11 month window when they anticipate they are going to do refurbs.

 

[drusba]

While DVC resorts go under refurbishment are they required to keep the same amount availability? For example, if they don't have enough one bedrooms and they will put people up on the regular resort side.

Legally for a timeshare resort, the maximum number of yearly points it can sell for all the rooms cannot exceed what it would take to fill the rooms for a year. However, there is no rule that requires that there actually always be enough rooms open during a year to meet that formula and no rule that requires DVC to provide any other locations to the owners to get rooms when DVC rooms at a resort are taken out of service for maintenance or repair.

Typically for a scheduled refurb of all rooms (about every 7 years at each resort), rooms will be taken out of service for times to be subject to reservations before 11-months out, usually a group of rooms at a time, and a typical resort refurb can take many months and sometimes even longer than a year. Moreover, what sometimes happens during a refurb, some rooms will be done earlier than anticipated and members can suddenly find openings even within 7-months out that are usually not open once the 7-month window has passed.

The methodology for a refurb has often been in the past to do part of the rooms on one floor at a time, then the rest of the rooms on the same floor, and then when a floor is done, move to the next floor for refurb. The result of that process is that there is a shortage of rooms for many months but still many open for any particular period of time, but it can be somewhat more difficult than usual to actually get a reservation at times, particularly for studios.

Sometimes DVC chooses a different method to do a refurb, including one like the completely absurd, anti-member method chosen for BWV with its last refurb in 2023-2024. It decided it would do half the building at a time, and designated, for out of service just before 11-months out, all boardwalk view rooms, and about half the pool/garden view rooms, on all floors for late Sep 2023 to Jan 1, 2024, and and all the remaining rooms -- the other half of the pool/garden view rooms and all the standard view (now called resort view) rooms -- for Jan 1 to March 1, 2024. For all past refurbs at BWV, only half the rooms on one floor were taken out at a time, with the result that the refurb usually took a little less than a year to complete.

The result of that new schedule was that the refurb did not actually complete in the times specified, and ultimately, there were rooms out of service for the refurb until sometime in July 2024. Moreover, lack of availability during the refurb was a major issue -- during most of that entire time, the boardwalk view and standard view studios left open (and thus also 2BRs since all 2BRs are lock-offs that can be reserved as studios and 1BRs) typically filled within moments after 8 a.m. at 11-months, and for about half the time pool/garden view studios did the same. Moreover, even after July 2024 rooms continued to have more availability problems than usual for many months as a result of many members having banked points to use because they could not get their usual reservation for time in the latter part of 2023 or during the first several months of 2024.