I am here right now! We arrived on the auto train, which was 45 minutes late, and we got here around 12:30 or so.
When I checked in, I had emailed Josh, and then he had called me back to make sure he understood. We are here 2 weeks, and I rented each week from a different owner. Each of them has a different kind of ownership, so the confirmation certificates were very different. Because it had been harder than usual to find owners who wanted to rent through the TUG classifieds, I had made a backup ressie through the Marriott website, which I then cancelled when I got the confirmations.
Peior to arrival, I had emailed Josh asking to be in same unit, Fountains 1, 3rd floor, pond view (not pool view), with a preference for buildings 12, 13 or 16.
Josh had pre blocked the room for us. When I arrived, somehow the backend system had cancelled one of the weeks I’d rented and reactivated the Marriott ressie. The very pleasant young man at checkin went and got Josh, who was working on a Saturday. My problem was that one of the owners had disregarded my last name—Cox-Holmes, and made it for Erin Holmes. Josh had corrected this manually when linking the ressies, but the backend end system had overrides that.
Josh was very apologetic, got it straightened out, moved some things around, and got us relinked. The only downside was the room wasn’t ready then. We went to Disney springs for sunglasses for my hubby, and new Vera bradley backpacks for me and my daughter and got the text at 3 that our room was ready.
Room 1342 in building 12. Spotlessly clean and beautifully refurbed. I’ve made a coup,e of requests for the porch fan to be fixed, and for more washcloths, and the response was instant. You can now text guest services. I have unlimited Verizon data, which is working flawlessly. I did check the WiFi, and it seems to be working. We got a notice on one day that it was intermittent, and then another a few hours later saying it was fixed.
The ONLY minor downside is the food franchise at the fountains pool is now called Azzula. My daughter and her new hubby went there one evening. They promise artisan pizza, and they said it was pretty bad. The chips and salsa were chips and a plastic Heinz salsa container with a pull off top, and the nachos was a plastic container of cheese with a pull off top. ONLY negative. We got snacks from Publix and take own to the pool.
The AKL is the resort I love at WDW, but it is amazing to me that we can get a week at the Vistana —this time I paid each owner 1200, which was high—and we get such a beautiful spacious unit, with amazing uncrowded grounds for a fraction of Disney costs. We had dinner at Ohana, and the Poly was wall to wall people . Every in of the pool was packed. We are so happy to leave the Disney madness at the end of a fun day and head back here.
Glad to answer any questions.