Paul Krieger
Amy and I are new Orlando, Florida residents where we live with our dogs Odie the greyhound and Hermès the Spanish galgo. We are DVC owners at Animal Kingdom Lodge, BoardWalk Villas, Grand Californian, Grand Floridian, and Polynesian, Disney World Annual Passholders, and love educating Disney Vacation Club members on how to both use and maximize the value of their DVC points!
Two thoughts…
1) RIVIERA RESALE VALUE – If you’re going to buy points resale, the way to think of it is you can either buy (A) points that work at any of the original 14 resorts or (B) points that only work at 1 resort. The price of Option A is pretty well established–say $100/pt. No matter how nice Riviera is, nobody could reasonably conclude that the ability to stay at that 1 resort will be as valuable as the flexibility of staying at Grand Floridian, Aulani, Grand Californian, Bay Lake Tower, or any of 10 others. You’re literally committing to 50 years of vacations at the exact same resort with option B, just like a traditional timeshare, so the value is clearly going to be less than the $100/pt you would pay for option A. How much less will be up to each buyer, but my guess is it will be something like 60-70% of the cost of a point at the first 14 resorts. So if those are $100/pt, then I’m guessing it will settle in around $60-70/pt as long as these restrictions are in place. The first few will sell for more than that, but long-term there just won’t be that many people wanting to lock into one resort for 50 years, and the price will tank. (Note that this doesn’t even factor in the sky high dues of $8.31/pt for Riviera, which will further drive down the resale price.)
2) WHAT DISNEY SHOULD DO – Seems like Disney’s goal was to encourage purchases of new/direct contracts over resale, but the steps they’ve taken have had the exact opposite effect, because in practice the change just means that points from the first 14 are much more valuable than Riviera points from. If they’re going to make a change, a good alternative would be to say that resale points can be used at your home resort or any resort built prior to your home resort. So for example, the resale points for the original 14 resorts can be used at any of those 14, resale points for Riviera can be used at any of the first 15 resorts, resale points for Reflections can be used at any of the first 16 resorts, etc. This would give everyone an incentive to buy direct and get points from the newest resorts without causing all the problems of the current restrictions.
A resale contract requires some person at some point to have purchased a direct contract. There just aren’t enough resale contracts available to satisfy the demands of everyone who wants to buy into DVC. The echo chamber of the DVC boards will have one think that most people buy resale but that’s just not possible. The vast majority of contracts are sold direct, and regardless of what anyone may secretly hope, DVC won’t rescind the restrictions and Rivieria will sell just fine. One other point about the show, fixed week contracts do not sell well at well, they aren’t “coveted” by any metric. DVC previously introduced the run-Disney promotions for fixed weeks in order to stir up some interest and they’re now adding incentives but only because fixed weeks have not shown to be of much interest to potential DVC members.