Why not DVC?

[ghtx]

Just checked. Saratoga Springs, 1-BR villa is available starting tomorrow, July 25th through August 1st.

So it is not impossible to get a last minute reservation...except at Christmas...

Saratoga and OKW are nearly always available, but all of the others are nearly always booked, not just at Xmas time.

 

[RMulieri]

Don't buy DVC.

Instead, rent points.

Cheaper, no long commitments (i.e. you don't HAVE to travel every year), all the benefits of DVC deluxe villas.

This sums it up for us..Plus the annual fees are too much for us and we do visit other Orlando attractions as well.In fact the last trips we did we enjoyed Universal resorts alot more ..My SIL and BIL have DVC and we can use their points too since they never go anymore and regret purchasing .

 

[MichiganDVC]

With an upfront ~$25,000 cost for a minimum points purchase, a DVC ownership would take roughly 1/3 of my savings out of play.

When we stay off-site it's at either the Sheraton Vistana Resort or Wyndham Bonnet Creek in a 2-bedroom unit. The units are 1,000+ sq. ft and beautifully updated. Both are less than 10 minutes to the WDW gate and both cost me less than $1,000 for a 10-night stay. That makes the cost of DVC even harder to swallow.

1. If you have the money upfront, I wouldn't consider buying direct. Resale is significantly cheaper and there is no difference, except that you can't use your points for non-DVC things, like cruises or Adventures by Disney. But those are TERRIBLE uses of points - you don't get the value per point that you get staying at a DVC resort.

A typical contract, right now, is 150 points at Saratoga Springs for $10500. This is essentially what I paid in 2010 for the exact same thing.

2. Comparing offsite suites, villas, and homes isn't exactly fair. As I've said before, the farther away you go, the cheaper the rental gets! Someone was going on and on about the StoryTime 6 bedroom villa-homes a month ago, so I looked into it. It looked like someone's house. Not in a good way. I mean, you could paint your kid's room at home like Toy Story, right? The rest of the house looked just average and I thought to myself, "This house could be anywhere...Cleveland, Omaha, Hartford. There is nothing special about it."

Point being, everyone knows you can get a villa offsite for cheaper. But you need to rent a car, get yourself to and from the airport, deal with all your own luggage, and you must drive yourself to and from the parks each day, currently 10-20 minutes just to get to your parking spot. Hope there's no traffic. Hope you know where you're going. What happens when the in-laws are tired and want to go back early? Does everyone leave and drive them back? Does one parent leave and the other stay with the kids in the parks? What if one younger kid needs a nap, but one older kid wants to stay?
These aren't problems when you are staying at Beach Club or BLT.

 

[MichiganDVC]

Saratoga and OKW are nearly always available, but all of the others are nearly always booked, not just at Xmas time.

Nope. In March I booked Kidani and BLT for July (last week) with zero problem. My point was TOMORROW's availability, to make the point about very last-minute vacation plans.

 

[Dan Murphy]

......So you have to ask yourself - $17,000 for 250 points, purchased resale. + $1300 annual fees for an average of 34 years = $57,000; =$1670 a year.
$1670 a year for 14 days in a studio or a week in a one-bedroom at WDW. Or an ocean view studio for a week at Aulani every year. Would that be worth $1670 to you? ($238 a night?)

Will annual fees not increase, or are those locked in?

 

[RSWA2]

Will annual fees not increase, or are those locked in?

MF are not a locked in cost and are different for each DVC resort

http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=2823943
See post #2

 

[MichiganDVC]

Will annual fees not increase, or are those locked in?

They do rise, and historically the average rise is about a dollar every 10 years. I don't ever see them getting out of reach, because DVC continues to build and continues to want to sell DVC memberships to people, so if the maintenance fees are out of hand no one would buy...

 

[Tbiafore]

1. This will be our forth trip as a DVC owner in 3 years. My kids are showing signs of slight burn out with saying other places the would like to go do. My wife and I decided to go every other year after this next trip in Sept. and use the points to either go on a Disney cruise, or sell them every other year which will more than cover the taxes and I will actually get to pocket a good chunk on top of that based upon going rates right now.

2. In times of tight finances, by having DVC the villas come with full kitchens, which makes it nice to have food delivered and eat at the hotel, which is much cheaper than the restaurants/dinning.

3. The biggest reason we purchased is I work too much, I always had excuses on why it wasn't a good time to go on vacation and by having DVC it sort of forces you to go on vacation, which in all honesty is a blessing as the last four years is not my children's memories of their dad working himself to death and never seeing him, yet spending some magical time at the most magical place on earth.

--Thor

 

[brertoad]

If I had known about DVC 15 years ago, I would have bought it, even if I had to finance it. I realize that would have greatly reduced the actual "savings" aspect of buying DVC, but the other reasons in my case would have been; we would have had 15 years more of vacations, an improved quality of life, increased happiness, and would have had some memories with my family that you can't put a price on (my father died of cancer in 2005). So, I really wished I knew about it a long time ago, and it would have been worth it to me.

We purchased DVC in 2012. In 2011, I had booked our first "real" Disney vacation. We've had passes forever, but would only drive to the park and back home again. I had an annual pass since I was a kid, but we never stayed on site, my family would also eat outside the parks too, only had QS, snacks, or desserts in the parks, we never ate TS meals.

So in 2011, we bought a Tables in Wonderland card, and wanted to check out some of the resorts restaurants. We saw WL for the first time up close, we loved it. That night when we got home, I booked a vacation for DH's birthday the next month. I had a 35% discount for AP holder room only, and it was about $225 a night. After that we wanted to keep coming back and staying on site. We tried AKL also, and then Pop Century, then back to AKL, then another planned stay at POR. Within less than 6 months we had spent about $2800 on hotel rooms. I heard about DVC from a family we met at 'Ohana, but never followed up on doing any more research. I started looking into it more and more. I realized that we were just throwing our money down the drain - money we could have used on buying DVC, and I didn't want to stay at value resorts if we could afford not to.

Yes, it was a large chunk of money all at once. Yes there are maintenance fees. But, we plan on using our DVC a lot.

The cost of our maintenance fees approximately $900 a year (RATHER THAN $2800+ for our spending habits, at the rate we were planning, we would have easily spent $3500 for the year) we can book at the very maximum 21 nights in a value studio at AKL. Or doing various combinations, we can easily book 14 nights at very nice accommodations around the many DVC resorts we love. Deluxe accommodations for less than Value prices. I LOVE OUR DVC. We already got about $4800 worth of vacation since Sept 2012.

Plus, we saved $200 off each PAP last year when they announced the $399 deal. We bought 2 vouchers and 2 passes, total savings $800. Perfect timing for us.

If we didn't own DVC, I would probably go with renting DVC points. But in the long run, owning is more beneficial to us. Our break even point is about 4.5 years, that takes into consideration the annual dues. After that point, we will be saving about $2600 a year on our lodgings.

 

[DougEMG]

I'm an owner and think it is great for my needs, but some reasons for someone not to be interested in DVC (other than money) are:

(1) If you don't want to make the long term committment of owning a timeshare. You can get the same DVC room paying cash or renting from a member.

(2) If you can not book far enough in advance to take advantage of the 11 month and 7 month booking windows. If you typically book last minute, don't bother looking at DVC since you will probably not get what you want.

(3) If you don't want to comit to having to go to WDW at a minimum of every 3 years.

(4) If you like staying in a deluxe room, the DVC rooms are not maintained or furnished as well as a deluxe room so you will be disappointed.

(5) If you always stay concierge, there are very very few concierge rooms in DVC.

(6) If you like daily housekeeping, that is an extra charge with DVC.

While maintenance fees are an annual costs and do increase every year, they increase no faster than hotel rates, it is fairly safe to assume that your MF increase at the same rate as the WDW hotels do.

 

[Bob NC]

Many reasons I have been a lifelong WDW fan and have not bought into DVC.

For one thing I don't automatically call a regular hotel room with a microwave and paper plates a "Deluxe Resort Room."

I don't always choose Deluxe resorts to stay at. Even though I have stayed at Poly maybe 5 or 6 times, right now I probably consider CSR a nicer resort.

I may not choose to take a WDW vacation EVERY year.

No matter how many ways you slice it, DVC is STILL a timeshare. You are paying up front for something you may not even care about 10 years from now.

Do I rent points? YES. When we have 10+ people going to WDW it's nice to have a big ole Key West 2 bedroom villa to stretch out in. Do I rent points all the time? NO.

In my book DVC is just another way for folks to stay connected to WDW, I would bet that for most folks needs it is never an economical choice. It's an emotional choice. It is very seldom a good deal for someone to lease a BMW, but if you talk to the guy that is in the lease he will give you all kinds of reasons why it's a good deal.

On this board of course you will find the DVC owners considering this the best deal ever, in reality it's not, but the whole point is Disney knows they can convince a certain number of folks that it IS the best thing since sliced toast.

I go to WDW *almost* every year, I stay where I want and I didn't have to send Disney 20 or 30K up front to do it.

 

[bennifer]

DH and I go back and forth on purchasing all the time. My 2 biggest reasons for not are #1 - annual dues and #2 - I don't know if my family will want to keep going forever! I would go twice a year every year for the rest of my life if money were no object, but with one son leaving for college in the fall and the other one just starting to enjoy vacations, I just can't commit to DVC right now. What if (gulp) younger son doesn't love Disney like his brother and I do?

 

[eastatlantaguys]

I scrolled through most of the post and many of my thoughts have already been expressed. I will tell you one of my major reasons for purchasing DVC was because of my job. My pay is 100% commission so I never know what one year to the next will be like. We live 7 hours from Disney and 8 hours from Hilton Head so close enough that we don't have to fly and we can exchange the points into RCI if we want to go somewhere other than Disney (I think 160 points get's us a week). At the end of the day we had the money to prepay for many years of vacations without having to finance the purchase and the dues are low enough (and will be for many years) that we can easily budget for them on a monthly basis.

Since we Purchased we have stayed at the Grand Californian, 7 days at Aulani and have a week trip planned in December to take my mom and step dad to the Villas at Wilderness Lodge. If we do trips like this for 2 more years then we could easily sell at a heavily discounted rate and still come out ahead on our purchase.

I will say that if you cannot purchase it with cash then you should not be buying it... Just my 2 cents!

 

[minniemomRN]

Many reasons I have been a lifelong WDW fan and have not bought into DVC.

For one thing I don't automatically call a regular hotel room with a microwave and paper plates a "Deluxe Resort Room."

I don't always choose Deluxe resorts to stay at. Even though I have stayed at Poly maybe 5 or 6 times, right now I probably consider CSR a nicer resort.

I may not choose to take a WDW vacation EVERY year.

No matter how many ways you slice it, DVC is STILL a timeshare. You are paying up front for something you may not even care about 10 years from now.

Do I rent points? YES. When we have 10+ people going to WDW it's nice to have a big ole Key West 2 bedroom villa to stretch out in. Do I rent points all the time? NO.

In my book DVC is just another way for folks to stay connected to WDW, I would bet that for most folks needs it is never an economical choice. It's an emotional choice. It is very seldom a good deal for someone to lease a BMW, but if you talk to the guy that is in the lease he will give you all kinds of reasons why it's a good deal.

On this board of course you will find the DVC owners considering this the best deal ever, in reality it's not, but the whole point is Disney knows they can convince a certain number of folks that it IS the best thing since sliced toast.

I go to WDW *almost* every year, I stay where I want and I didn't have to send Disney 20 or 30K up front to do it.

Well stated!

 

[Planogirl]

I have several reasons, the primary being that we just simply don't feel like we can afford the upfront cost. I also don't want to be locked into particular resorts and we can't easily preschedule too far in advance.

 

[DisneyNDecember]

The annual dues... too pricey !!!

 

[Robbi]

We go at least 2x/year. Each trip's accommodations costs ~$8000. DVC made sense for us so we bought 300 pts. Our children are spaced far apart in age. The boys are not interested in WDW. Of course they are not married and have no children. I'm pretty certain once they do have children, they will appreciate the free rooms.
Our daughter is the youngest of the 3 and loves Disney World. She's expecting our first grandchild, Andy, in September. We expect we'll go to WDW often. Andy will be our excuse to get to DLR too.

 

[Wendybird55]

We've been renting DVC for the past 5 years or so and have done our research and are very aware of the value. Would it be a good purchase for us? Yes. So why haven't we done it? Well..it is a lot of money upfront and we prefer if we bought to pay in full and not have to finance...don't want anymore bills to pay. A few years back we were very close to buying, but then I needed dental implants and the money went to dentists and oral surgeons instead of Disney and since then there has always been higher priority items that needed the $ besides Disney we continue to rent.

 

[Brian_WDW74]

This thread isn't about theme parks attractions and strategies. Since it's discussing the pros and cons of buying into DVC, I've moved it to the DVC-Mousecellaneous forum.

 

[MinnieLovesMickey12]

We looked into buying DVC two different times. I almost bought into it both times then changed my mind at the last minute.

I'm glad I did.

We ended up buying several resale contracts of Wyndham timeshare points. We bought Wyndham because we can stay at Wyndham Bonnet Creek with our points and then we can also use our points to stay in resorts all over the country.

I bought 3 Wyndham contracts off Ebay for a total of 308,000 points for $800 total expense. That 308,000 points is enough points to take about 3 different weeks vacations per year.

My maintenance fees are going to cost around $120 a month.

The initial expense of DVC even if you buy resale is very high to get enough points to actually stay in anything bigger than a studio for more than one week a year.

I know we will go to Disney for years to come but I don't think we will still be going 30 years from now.

And I can use my Wyndham points through RCI to trade into a DVC resort if I want to.