I do also wonder about the impact of cash rooms once inside the 7 month window. I know Disney does reserve a certain number of
DVC villas at each resort for cash sales - not sure how many. I would presume it's a very low number, but also the question is whether they open up additional cash booking rooms after the 11 month and 7 month windows - ie: if at 7 months they still have rooms remaining not taken on points, do they convert those over to cash bookings, meaning someone trying to book on points at 6 mo, or 5 mo, may see less availability due to the lost inventory switched to cash?
Cash inventory comes from the following sources:
- Undeclared inventory
- Points that Disney owns (unsold, foreclosure, buyback, ROFR, etc.)
- Disney-internal exchanges (DCL, ABD, Disney collection)
- Breakage
The reason for #3: When a
DVC Member uses their points to book e.g. a
Disney Cruise, the points that the Member relinquishes are used to book some DVC inventory, that inventory is rented out, and the proceeds are credited to the unit ultimately providing the vacation (in this case, the Cruise Line).
#4 comes from points that Members own, but expire unused. You might wonder how that could ever happen, but it does. Disney is allowed to rent that inventory. The first $X is given back to the Association from where the points came as income against the expenses, which lowers Dues. The value X is some percentage of operating expenses---I would have to look up the specifics. Disney gets to keep the rest. Every time I've ever looked, Breakage income to each Assocation was the maximum required, so who knows how much Disney keeps.
Disney is allowed to take any rooms that are unbooked inside (I think) 60 days and rent it out. Disney is
also allowed to make reasonable estimates about how much inventory
will end up as breakage based on historical booking patterns and pull it out early to rent it. I have no idea how that inventory is chosen. But as long as
that doesn’t mean people have to pretend the experience at 7 months hasn’t changed
I don't think anyone is pretending anything. We are telling you our direct experiences, and many of those experiences are recent. I know I am not making this up, and I have only owned since early '24, so it is not like I am telling you about what it was like in 2008.
It appears that the reason your expeirence is not ours---as many people have said over and over and over---is that most of us are talking about
7 months at 8AM exactly, you are looking some time later than that, and the last two and a half to three months' worth of 7-month availability is during Fall Frenzy ending in the first two weeks of December. The former is the highest-demand season overall by a large margin, and the latter are close to the highest demand weeks of the entire year. So these last 10-12 weeks are when those few minutes (or, sometimes seconds) between 8AM-at-7-months and "later than that" matter the most.
And this really is hgihly seasonal. I just checked a random week in August, and there are 1BRs available for that
entire week right now at eight different WDW resorts, with a run of six nights out of those seven at a ninth. That's only about three months from now.
that doesn’t mean [...] that frustration automatically comes from ignorance
It's understandable that you are frustrated that you can't see what you thought you'd see. But, speaking only for myself, I don't think anyone should be that surprised to find sub-7-month availability is tight. The mantra on the Buying/Selling board is
buy where you want to stay, and it is repeated over and over and over again.
@drusba has been talking about Fall Frenzy for what must be close to 20 years at this point.
What's more, I am not sure how one reads e.g. the Field Guide charts and concludes that non-home bookings for longer stays are easy to get. Take, for example, the BWV 1BR P/G view. This is
by far the easiest room categry at BWV to book, and even there, less than half of the year has a run of 6 or more nights available at the 7-month/just-before-8AM mark, let alone what might still be there hours later. The fine print on the table is clear: "any number less than seven---indicating limited availability---signals caution"
