Why don't borrowed points always get consumed by earlier reservations?

dropd

Mouseketeer
Joined
May 21, 2019
I have a frustrating scenario, that I'm curious if anyone has any advice about.

I have an October UY.

1) In the 7 month window, I booked 1 night at BLT in December. I had enough 2019 points to do this.

2) A few weeks later, I booked 2 nights at AK in April. In order to book those nights, I needed to borrow 7 2020 points.

I (stupidly) thought that DVC would automatically figure out that they should debit the 7 borrowed points from my account to pay for the December reservation, preserving my potential ability to cancel the April reservation and bank all of the April points should the need to do so arise.

When chatting with Member Services, they say the only way to make this happen is to literally cancel both reservations and re-book them. This is obviously not feasible given availability for both of these months is now extremely constrained.

Has anyone had success in getting Member Services to move borrowed points between reservations like I'm describing above? I'm pretty frustrated right now.

Edit to add: I saw at least one prior post in this forum from a few years ago that suggested that something like what I want is possible. On chat in the browser they definitively would not do this for me, I will try calling next and see if that yields anything different.
 
When you book, YOU select which points are to be used. If you call, always check to make sure they use the points you want. Sorry you made this mistake, but almost everyone does this at least once.
 
When you book, YOU select which points are to be used. If you call, always check to make sure they use the points you want. Sorry you made this mistake, but almost everyone does this at least once.

I did select the points to be used, I didn't make a mistake in points selection. I made a mistake in assuming (which I think is a fairly reasonable assumption) that you could choose to replace in-UY points for a booking with borrowed points for a booking.

I am curious if this is specifically because there are *two* reservations that I'm trying to swap between, and the system can't handle that swap in a single transaction. In other words, if I took the second booking out of the equation would MS allow this scenario:

1) Make a booking with 2019 points (not borrowed).
2) Call up MS and ask them to modify the booking to include some number of borrowed 2020 points instead, without outright canceling the booking.
3) Once the initial swap is done, make a second booking using just the remaining 2019 points

Edit: If this is something that MS could do, I might be willing to cancel my April booking and do it this way. The flexibility of being able to potentially cancel and bank the points for latter reservation later on without losing the borrowed points is probably more valuable to me than ensuring I get the exact resort/room combination currently booked for that trip.
 
Do you have multiple contracts? If only 1 contract, they cannot borrow points until you have used all the current points. So you had to use current when you booked BLT. Then you used the rest of current and borrowed to book the AKV. Still, you should be able to call MS and ask them to swap the borrowed to BLT and put all current in the AKV. You can't book home resort within the 11 month home priority and then call at 7 months to swap with other resort points...ie: book home of BLT at 11 months and then call in to swap out with your other SSR points at 7 months....that is a full cancel and rebook. But you said you booked BLT at 7 months. And just want to swap current and borrowed points. I think it can be done but some of the folks at MS don't know a lot of stuff. Try calling again.
 
Last edited:


You can take points out of a reservation and replace them with ones not already in a reservation without having to first cancel the reservation. You can do that by either calling MS or using the online modification pages. But rule followed has always been that you cannot just switch points from one reservation to another without first cancelling or modifying one of the reservations to take out the points you want to put in another reservation. Moreover, never assume MS does anything automatically. What you thought would be done automatically has never been done automatically. Nothing concerning the points used for an already existing reservation ever changes at all absent doing an online modification of the reservation or calling MS.

Perhaps if you talk to a supervisor in MS, you might get relief, although what you ask is not something required.
 
Last edited:
I have 8 smaller contracts in 2 UY and at 3 home resorts. I had some resies that got cancelled leaving me with points I needed to bank. I also had some current points. I was trying to book using 2 contracts and wanted to use all the banked first and then a small number of current. But it only lets me select contracts in an order so first contract it used all banked then all it's current and then went to 2nd contract to use small number of the banked leaving me with several banked. So I made longer resie using all the points (of course the resie I wanted couldn't be made longer so I made a fake one for other time and resort that used all my points) and then modified to drop days and it left the current points instead of banked (then I modified that one to the resort and dates I wanted). ANother reason to NOT buy a bunch of small contracts. Ugghhh.
 
Last edited:
The key is that your borrowed points are still in your April reservation. So, they are being used to hold that reservation.

Now, if you canceled or modified that and the borrowed points were in your account, you could go online, modify the December night and it would pull the borrowed points and free up current UY points. I have done this several times. When I was concerned that the second trip wasnt a definite, I’d make a trip, borrow the points. Cancel it a few minutes later, then modify the first one. It would free up current UY points and then I booked the 2nd trip.

However, they can’t swap points That are in reservations. That is what you would like which is not possible.

The problem right now, even if they could, is that if you are less than 31 days out for the December trip, any freed up points would be holding points and could not be used to secure that April stay until 60 days out.
 


I have 8 smaller contracts in 2 UY and at 3 home resorts. I had some resies that got cancelled leaving me with points I needed to bank. I also had some current points. I was trying to book using 2 contracts and wanted to use all the banked first and then a small number of current. But it only lets me select contracts in an order so first contract it used all banked then all it's current and then went to 2nd contract to use small number of the banked leaving me with several banked. So I made longer resie using all the points (of course the resie I wanted couldn't be made longer so I made a fake one for other time and resort that used all my points) and then modified to drop days and it left the current points instead of banked (then I modified that one to the resort and dates I wanted). ANother reason to NOT buy a bunch of small contracts. Ugghhh.

Your situation is different from the OP. You cannot do a single reservation using different use years. You cannot even do that by calling MS as the only option is to either transfer points from one use year to another or make two separate reservations and then have MS link them.

If I am guessing right that is not what you tried to do. instead, you attempted to do an online reservation using two contracts from the same use year both of which had banked points. After you chose the contracts, and hit continue with the reservation, the next page indicated that the system used all the points, current and banked, in the first contract and left unused banked point in the second contract, despite that it is supposed to use all banked points first.

Be aware you are seeing a system glitch that many have seen occur, and what you see is not real. If you just continue to go through all the pages and complete your reservation, when you get to the last page that shows actual use of points, it will show that all banked points were used first. Moreover, if that is not what occurs, you can call MS and have it fixed when you reach that last page.
 
Last edited:
The key is that your borrowed points are still in your April reservation. So, they are being used to hold that reservation.

Now, if you canceled or modified that and the borrowed points were in your account, you could go online, modify the December night and it would pull the borrowed points and free up current UY points. I have done this several times. When I was concerned that the second trip wasnt a definite, I’d make a trip, borrow the points. Cancel it a few minutes later, then modify the first one. It would free up current UY points and then I booked the 2nd trip.

However, they can’t swap points That are in reservations. That is what you would like which is not possible.

The problem right now, even if they could, is that if you are less than 31 days out for the December trip, any freed up points would be holding points and could not be used to secure that April stay until 60 days out.

Ah, perfect, thanks this reply contains every bit of info I was looking for and was super, super helpful. My understanding of this is great now so next time I'm in a scenario like this I know exactly what to do.

For this particular instance, it had not occurred to me that swapping out 7 points from my Dec. reservation for 7 borrowed points from my April reservation would cause the 7 Dec. points to be put in "holding", but it makes sense. That makes the maneuver you described, which I otherwise would have happily done, not appealing. I don't think it's worth the tradeoff to swap 7 borrowed points for 7 points in holding :)

Thanks!
 
Your situation is different from the OP. You cannot do a single reservation using different use years. You cannot even do that by calling MS as the only option is to either transfer points from one use year to another or make two separate reservations and then have MS link them.

If I am guessing right that is not what you tried to do. instead, you attempted to do an online reservation using two contracts from the same use year both of which had banked points. After you chose the contracts, and hit continue with the reservation, the next page indicated that the system used all the points, current and banked, in the first contract and left unused banked point in the second contract, despite that it is supposed to use all banked points first.

Be aware you are seeing a system glitch that many have seen occur, and what you see is not real. If you just continue to go through all the pages and complete your reservation, when you get to the last page that shows actual use of points, it will show that all banked points were used first. Moreover, if that is not what occurs, you can call MS and have it fixed when you reach that last page.
I went all the way through and it did not. It left some banked in 1 contract. Yes, this was one UY.
 
OP, I feel your pain. It is a common frustration with points-based timeshares.

One of my other points-based systems runs a nightly 'housekeeping' process to shuffle the points used for each reservation in a owner-friendly method. Phew!
 
I had to do a "point shuffle" today too. We have a 50-point HHI contract that we use strictly for HHI trips every three years. Any "straggler" points get used (hopefully) at WDW at 7-months, if we get the opportunity to combine them with our 100-point AKV contract.

I booked a 4-night trip for April 2020 using our HHI points (banked 2019, current 2020 and some borrowed 2021) with the intention of adding the 5th night at 7 months when I could have access to our AKV points since I would need 5 more points. Well, life happened and I forgot and by the time I realized it, that night was no longer available. Naturally, it's the Thursday before Easter so a waitlist isn't likely to come through. Fortunately, we only need a studio for that last night since the rest of our group is leaving early and we will only be a party of 4. A studio miraculously popped up one day and I grabbed it! The reservation took 12 of my 2020 AKV points and the remaining 2 banked 2019 AKV points, which still left me with 26 points in my 2021 HHI UY. I don't want to have ANY points left in that 2021 UY since we will be "forced" to use them at 7 months at WDW and I'd rather not risk losing that many points.

I called Member Services and asked if they would reallocate (borrrow) 12 of the 26 remaining 2021 HHI points and add it to the 2 banked 2019 AKV points and put those towards the studio reservation (14 points needed for that night). Since that reservation was made within the 7 month window, I was not circumventing any home resort priority window. At first, she balked and told me that she would have to cancel and rebook and since I was holding on to the only remaining studio, I would probably lose the reservation in the process. I was disappointed with that answer because I was fairly certain that it could be done, if not by her, then by someone higher up the line. I said that I certainly did not want to risk losing the reservation and she told me to hang on while she put me on hold. When she came back, she said it was all taken care of and my 2020 AKV UY was now back to it's full 100 points :thumbsup2 . She also set up notes on my wait list so that it takes (borrows) the remaining 2021 HHI points before taking any of the 2020 AKV points to fill it.
 

GET A DISNEY VACATION QUOTE

Dreams Unlimited Travel is committed to providing you with the very best vacation planning experience possible. Our Vacation Planners are experts and will share their honest advice to help you have a magical vacation.

Let us help you with your next Disney Vacation!






Top