Bing Showei
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2017
You overestimate most Disney timeshare owners’ understanding of the product. I used to as well until I started talking to more and more of them.A lot of members have said this, but I never understood this argument since new resort owners are hardly likely to use their precious $188/pt contracts to sleep around.
I stood on the Friendship boat and chatted with a woman who was teaching me, as a self-proclaimed new Disney timeshare owner, how I’m able to use my points outside of WDW. She explained how she used her BCV points to visit several hotels/resorts across the country on her points for the years when her kids tired of Disney World (first time back to WDW in 6 years).
Then there was the couple who chatted me up at a kiosk about how great their timeshare ownership was and all the cruises they’ve done on their points; loved their ownership. No regrets. Have gotten great value out of it. And honestly, judging by how happy they were with it, I couldn’t argue otherwise.
Some owners buy in not understanding the product. Some buy knowing the product, but not caring how to maximize value. They’re happily using their new points the way it was sold to them: with flexibility. And yes, this includes the idea of using them anywhere in the system in any way the system allows, including less economical choices that would cause most of us here to recoil in horror.
On these boards, we’re in a bit of a bubble. Our outrage is amplified in the echo chamber. Our obvious “common sense” would read as a bizarro-world manifesto counter to all of the guide’s marketing spiel. And our systematic valuation of resort points will read like a foreign language to a lot of owners, or eye-rolling fodder.
All this is to say that those “precious” $188 points are precious to you. To the owner, they’re “Vacation Club” points. And as long as they’re being used on a vacation, they’re being used exactly as they were designed to be used.
Save for a another SSR (ginormous resort at a non-preferred location), I believe, as others have suggested, that any new timeshare resort on the WDW campus will probably have a net zero effect on demand. Old owners will want to try it out. New owners will want to try other resorts. After an initial break-in period, it will mostly cancel out any 7-month impact. Once the Riviera/Reflections resale contracts become a larger part of the system, it’s anyone’a guess what will happen, but if I were a betting man? My money would be on 7-month maintaining the status quo system wide.