Doesn’t Wyndham have owners priority seasons at certain high demand resorts/seasons & isn’t Bonnet Creek one of those high demand resorts? I believe the way they police it is to limit the number of free guest certificates an owner is allowed & you cannot buy any at all, although I think if the owner is staying at the resort concurrently w/ the guests in other rooms it’s ok
but I’m not sure, maybe a Wyndham owner knows?
Based on the above quoted language in
DVC’s documents, I think DVC could institute a special seasons preference list giving special reservation priority to reservations made in the owner’s name w/ no ability to remove the owner’s name thereafter w/out a cancel/rebook during certain seasons. They could even allow concurrent reservations in non owners names as long as the owner has a reservation for the same time to accommodate extended family/group holidays.
From what I’ve read Wyndham can be pretty aggressive in ferreting out, canceling, & freezing accounts of those they deem to have stepped over the line. I’ve seen little evidence that DVC has done so, their enforcement seems lackadaisical, no one has reported receiving a cease & desist letter, for example, nor have I read of any rentals being cancelled or accounts locked. So far the words of DVC’s contracts are worth no more than the paper they’re written on because DVC is not shutting down even blatant commercial point renting/spec reservation enterprises. Until Disney sees an uptick in hotel occupancy overall I doubt we will see a crackdown on commercial rentals because having DVC rooms booked ups their occupancy numbers which looks good on their financials & right now that’s probably a higher priority than enforcing DVC’s contractual provisions.
I don’t know much about other timeshares as I don’t own them and have never read their contracts. Wyndham may be strict in enforcement because their definition of what is a violation is because they set strict rules.
I don’t see DVC wanting that because from what I understand some of what they require in fees for guests, changes, etc are not owner friendly.
For DVC, the special seasons preference list is already defined in the POS and it has a pretty detailed explanation. One thing is that if DVC were to implement one, it would be applied to specific high demand times for booking. It could be for one or all the resorts.
Once a time period is selected for this, the home resort advantage goes down to 1 month,,,it is no longer 4…to get on the list. Say it was at AKV for the first week in December for AKv value. Owners get on the list 13 months in advance, non owners of AKV get to br added at 12 months, and DVC can use a lottery to choose who gets the room. I see nothing to suggest this can be used all the time, or that an owner can’t confirm the reservation in the name of others.
In that sense, while it might impact someone who has ways to secure a room faster, it also means that someone who doesn’t own at a resort can get the room ahead of an at that resort….so, certain rooms would see competition increase not decrease,
Not sure owners want to do that, Now my Nit picky hat on. I know people think that spec renting and running rental website to offer reservations is a blantant violation but there is nothing that DVC has ever stated that makes that necessarily true.
Yes, the rental broker is a business, but the DVC contract applies to the membership and an owners vacation interest, it does not apply to what a business owner, who may not even own DVC, is doing. That is why DVC can’t shut down a rental broker from assisting owners in renting their reservations.
Now, there is updated language that DVC could say, if they choose too, that you can’t rent your own reservations through your own website…meaning those that own a rental site, can’t use it themselves.
As I said, there is nothing in our contract that differentiate between renting a confirmed one or not and I don’t think you will ever see DVC try to say that there is…they don’t need to…they can simply set rules that define a membership as not one for personal use as a set number of reservations or defining a pattern that they see happening as one that is not acceptable.
The hard part with this discussion right now is that everyone is using the word commercial and applying it to situations in general but not always tying back to whether those things are happening in the context of the contract.
The enforcement that people feel is not happening may simply be because DVC is using a very broad definition …which is their right…to define what makes a membership a commercial enterprise and it’s not matching the one some believe it should be.
Let’s pretend that DVC said we can rent 50 reservations a year on our membership, it doesn’t matter how you found a renter…broker, website, DiS, or word of mouth, and confirmed reservstions or reservations on demand are both allowed.
What if they add that they have to apply the rules per membership and if you own more than one, each one can have 50? So, if an owner was listed on 20 memberships, they’d have the ability to rent 1000 reservations a year. And, the icing on the cake is that they say a business, even running their own website, will have the same rules as an average owner. Could you still say that there is blatant violations going on.
No, because if those were DVCs rules, and remember, they get to make them without needing approval of owners, then that’s all that matters.
Obviously, many of us would agree that rules of that nature would pretty much make hard for anyone to ever be found as a commercial enterprise and even I would be surprised to see them ever do that,
So, we come back to the issue thst owners..I have…should be reaching out to DVC to asking them for thr written policy currently in place as well as what the remedy is when it’s found that a membership is no longer a personal use one.
If DVC came back and says, “Running your own website to rent your own reservations…is a criteria that we use To define commercial enterprise”, then owners have a reason to call on DVC for not enforcing their own rules.
