Swap-a-palooza - the fun way to book non-home resorts.
The beauty of
DVC is that there are a number of different resorts that you could potentially book at, but with the 11 & 7 month home priority thing, it can often be difficult booking a different resort. But what if somebody else would like to stay at your resort, and you at theirs. There is no way to make that happen today, (unless you do an off-the-books swap a bit like a rental).
This is where swap-a-palooza comes in - it would act as the magic broker to enable exchanges to happen between complete strangers, and have the points re-adjusted if there is an imbalance. Swap-a-palooza would be a feature of the booking site where you can put in "wishes" for exchanges.
For example, you book at your home resort, GF but would like to stay somewhere else say Poly. What if family #2 who have a reservation for your dates at the Poly, but wanted to stay a WL and family #3 who have a booking at WL but want to stay at GF. Currently if those were setup as waitlists they would never clear as there is a deadlock situation.
Swap-a-palooza would change that. It would be an automatic match making system - You select an existing reservation of yours, and possibly a subset of days - and what resorts/room types you would like to trade it for. Swap-a-palooza would run the algorithms to see if there is a match, even if it involves a cycle of a number of reservations to make the exchanges happen. You would pay the points value for the resort you end up in, and need to allocate the points for any additional ones needed when you enter your requests into the system. You would be refunded the difference if you select a cheaper resort/room.
Swap requests are not final until a match is found - you could cancel your request, but once a match is found the swap would be automatic (there is no confirmation or backing out if its not exactly what you want). Unlike wait lists where there are only 2 per membership, you can have an unlimited set of requests for your dates with swap-a-palooza, but you have to have a reservation for the dates that you are trying to exchange.
Swap-a-palooza requests could be made at any time between booking and 1 week from checkin. Swaps would only occur at 7Mo to 1 week before checkin. Cancellations within 30 days have the normal withholding restrictions. This is to prevent some hacks in making 11 mo bookings purely to enable an exchange, that is then cancelled.
If you cancel a reservation that was swapped, then the bad-swapper penalty will apply - you are not able to make additional swap requests for 12mo from the date of the reservation that was cancelled. Unfulfilled swap requests would be cancelled. Any matched swaps would be honored as they are already confirmed.
In an interesting twist, it might be permitted for resale customers to swap into/out of resorts they cannot currently book. So a Riviera resale owner could swap with a BWV resale owner, into resorts which they normally wouldn't be able to book, but as its a swap, it technically doesn't affect the overall system.
There may need to be protections against gaming the system - that's why there is a bad swapper penalty that can apply to cancellations.