Originally posted by beequeen
When I bought an add-on, my guide told me that only if you add-on through Disney will your membership no. and use year be the same. He seemd to think this was an advantage of buying through disney.
This is correct in that points with two or more contracts that are 'true' add-on's can be combined for banking purposes but two contracts with different contract numbers cannot. Note that Disney add-on's have the same contract number as the original contract except with a suffix such as -001, -002, etc. A resale contract would have a totally different contract number, that is, the number assigned when the original owner bought the contract from Disney.
The banking advantage is as follows:
Member "A" has two contracts, one for 200 points and the other for 100 points, each with the same use year and resort for 300 points total. The 2nd contract was purchased from Disney and has the same contract number as the original, with the suffix as stated.
Member "B" has the exact same thing except the 2nd contract was purchased resale and has a totally different contract number.
Both members have 300 points in two contracts. Both members use 150 points from the their 200 point contracts for a vacation and both bank the remaining 50 points. This leaves them each with 50 banked points and 100 points in contract #2 not banked.
They both get to the 50% banking window and want to bank their remaining 100 point contracts. Member "A" can bank all 100 points because his combined point total is 300 points meaning he can have up to 150 banked. Since he has 50 already banked he can bank the other 100. This gives him 150 banked points, or 50% of his total.
Member "B" cannot bank all 100 points as it's a separate contract. He can only bank 50 points because 50 points is 50% of 100 points which is what that contract is. He cannot combine contracts to set banking limits. Each contract is handled totally separately.
In this example I used the same resort but they could be different resorts such as the first contract at OKW and the 2nd at SSR. This makes no difference and the banking scenario as given above is still the same.
With Disney add-on's they will be the same use year so banking windows at 100%, 50% and 25% will be the same dates for both contracts. For a resale contract these dates are the same as the original contract if it's the same use year, but will be different if the two contracts have different use years.
Aside from this difference in banking I cannot see any other difference in having a true Disney add-on over a resale except that having a resale contract takes a little more point management work than having a Disney add-on.