Any solution that forbids walking would not result in assuring that members get the rooms they want at 11 months out. The issue that exists is that you have what has become a very high demand season with more and more members chasing the bargain point cost rooms which are limited in number.
One solution that I believe few would want is to disallow changes to any reservations except by completely cancelling the reservation you have and making another. You could revert to the old system, where you could reserve 11 months out from date of departure from WDW, under which members would start reserving one night 11 months out, e.g., Jan 2 to reserve night of Dec 1 with a Dec 2 departure date, and then the next day reserve the night of Dec 2, the following day Dec 3, etc, and after you are done getting all the nights you actually want, call MS and merge the reservations. You could do something like mentioned above, prohibit changing dates until 10 months out, which favors those with more points. (You could not under my understanding of the official POS documents create a reservation system that would, as suggested above, charge any fee for making or changing a
DVC resort reservation; that is allowed for non-DVC reservations but would not be for DVC resort reservations.) But if you make any of those changes you still have essentially the same problem that needs correction. When you go online at 11 months out to get a time like Dec 1 for any lower cost rooms, you have a real risk of not getting them unless your computer communicates faster at 8 a.m. with Disney's computer than many of the others trying the same thing. In other words, you will still have the skewed demand problem that currently exists for many times during the last quarter of the year at WDW.
There is a solution and it is the one DVC is supposed to use when there is excessive seasonal demand, but it is one that no member who likes to get time in Oct, most of Nov, or first two weeks of Dec wants Disney to do. That solution is a point reallocation. Points for any night can be raised or lowered by up to 20% in any given year and you need to offset any increase with an equal decrease elsewhere. Though I have not thought through the process, and whether the change would logistically really need two rather than a single year to make, the solution to the current problem is to raise high demand choice and adventure times in the last quarter of the year by about 15% to 18%, while lowering the points needed by an equal total amount of points for what are now fairly low demand times in much of Feb, March, April, July after July 4 time, and possibly first half of August. What the change would effectively do is possibly put some more times in Dream season and have many more times in either a new season or a restructured Choice season that has points that are higher than the current Choice season and somewhat lower than current Dream season. Many might be happy with such a change, but a very large group would undoubtedly be extremely disappointed with that solution.
