In what is quickly becoming a far too frequent occurrence, Disney Vacation Club appears to be preparing to release revised 2022 Disney Vacation Club Points Charts as a result of member feedback and complaints.
If this sounds like deja vu, that’s because, in many ways, it is! In fact, this revision would mark the second time in the past three years that DVC has issued revised charts after pushback and questions from members regarding the intent of the changes.
Today we are taking a deep dive into what is going on and why Disney Vacation Club is potentially going to issue revised point charts for the remainder of 2022!
Base Year and Breakage 101
In order to understand what and why this is occurring we must first explore several key concepts to Disney Vacation Club ownership and membership:
The first important concept to understand is that all point charts are created off of what can be referred to as a base year. This represents the total number of vacation points for a given resort mapped out over a calendar year. While small fluctuations can occur in the total number of points from year to year due to the placement of weekends and holidays, essentially, each year’s point charts must be comparable to this base year and not fluctuate far from these numbers.
Next, it is important to understand that any overage or fluctuation in these charts greater than the base year total reflects an overage of points in the system for a given resort. These excess points allow Disney Vacation Club to make larger changes in the number of points required to stay in a room for a given night and create an excess inventory and additional opportunities for DVC to capture more money via a process known as breakage.
Breakage Income is revenue generated by DVC through selling rooms for cash that are available within 60 days of check-in. While a portion of this income (capped at 2.5% of the resort’s operating budget) is indirectly returned to members via a credit towards annual dues, the remaining excess breakage is absorbed by Disney Vacation Club as profit.
What is wrong with the 2022 Points Charts?
To understand what is wrong with the 2022 Points Charts, we need to briefly look at the history of these charts over the past three years.
In 2020, the proposed Disney Vacation Club points charts attempted to increase the total number of points in a calendar year by reallocating how two-bedroom lock-off villas (the lock-off premium) were calculated into the points charts. We could go far down the rabbit hole here, but for simplicity, I’ll say that if you are interested in reading up on what exactly happened in 2020 that resulted in the points charts being reversed, head over to DISboards.com.
The year 2021 brought us the change of seven vacation seasons, as opposed to the historic five vacation seasons, claiming that this rebalancing would “encourage travel throughout the year with the goal of improving availability”. This was primarily met with a positive or neutral response from members, and no revisions were made.
The problem with the 2022 points charts comes back down to how Disney Vacation Club can create excess points within a calendar year and can be seen by exploring one specific holiday – Easter. As a result of the new seven vacation season system implemented in the 2021 points charts, Easter can fall into three possible travel periods. This causes what would perhaps be a cheaper time of year to have an inflated point cost without changing how the other seasons are calculated. As a result, the total number of points for the year is severely inflated, which, as we mentioned above, allows DVC to create excess inventory, make certain booking categories more expensive for members, and ultimately get more money through excess breakage.
I will end this explanation by saying that this is a very surface-level answer to what is going on. For more details, I would again encourage you to head over to DISboards and check out the thread on this issue.
We can scrutinize the issues discussed above in various ways ranging from the legality of certain point chart changes to whether Disney Vacation Club is acting in the best interest of its members. In the end, we leave those questions up to you to decide. DVC, however, has apparently heard the concerns of many, and according to several recent reports of conversations that have occurred with management, we may soon see a revised set of 2022 points charts for the remaining booking months available. The hope is that these revised charts will better balance the adjustments previously made and continue to allow members to stay at their home resort for the same number of points they have historically used.
Check back next week as we discuss this issue in greater detail on The DVC Show! We will be keeping a close eye on how this progresses in the coming weeks to see whether Disney Vacation Club follows through on revising the 2022 point charts.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and whether you think the 2022 point charts need to be revised!
When is the 50% borrowing rule going to end?!!!!!!
What happens if they change the points and you’ve already booked using your points based off of the previous point chart?
If changes are made they will likely only be made to the second half of 2022 and not impact previous bookings.
No kidding!!!! Been waiting for a long time. We paid for points to use them not to only use 50%!!!!!!
Just to clarify… This discussion does not impact the 50% borrowing rule. To my understanding, that decision is completely justified based on the POS and other club documents. It is unfortunate and negatively impacts many members, but it is something they can do in the short term to help alleviate stress on the booking system due to many points being backlogged and extended.
Don’t understand how a backlog of points exists when they continue to sell rooms for cash at all dvc resorts. This 50% rule was the main reason why I just sold my Saratoga after a decade. Last year was understandable. But I expected guidance and answers this year and I didn’t get any. Expected more from this company.
When DVC began and for the first several years, borrowing was limited to 50% of the points in the next Use Year.
There are a number of other examples of similar changes in DVC policies throughout the past 30 years.
But DVC guides have been selling people on the idea that they only need to start with enough points to go once every 3 years because they could bank and borrow. Between that and “rebalancing”/ inflating point costs, 100 points 5 years ago isnt the same as 100 points today.
I don’t have a problem with DVC adjusting the point charts to better balance demand. In fact I think that is needed.
The problem is DVC cannot pass up the temptation to stick their hand deep in the cookie jar while doing so. Two attempts and 2 strikes already. The balancing is supposed to be in the owners’ best interest *full stop*, not a tiny bit in the owners’ interest and a ton in the interest of increasing Disney profits. What keeps resulting is a less valuable product for owners. How many attempts will they continue making to snatch extra cookies at the expense of owners? Then when caught they insult our intelligence by giving us scripted responses via less knowledgeable staff who clearly do not fully understand the product.
BTW… has anybody gotten a straight answer yet why we keep seeing rooms pulled from inventory before the 11 month mark? Over and over and over again?
The reason I purchase my DVC, was the selling point that I live in CA and travel to FL every two years.My agents told me that if I purchase 150 points I could bank my 150 every year so on the second year I would have a total of 300 pts. The reason for that is that I will be able to book a 3 bedroom room for 4 days whichis 288 pts. Now with this change it effect us dramatically. I would have purchase more pts,however the value has increase. Which I feel is not fair!! I feel Disney is losing Walts vision!!!!
I am so glad Disney showed their true colors before me and my wife spent 40k in DVC
Not only have they been changing points, requiring more points, decreasing services, additional costs for this or that, reducing artists -performers in the parks, increasing costs every year to us owners, while they continued to make record profits and super inflated bonuses to the top board people. This is not the Disney Magic we are were in it for. New hotels/ resorts with hardly and Disney whimsical themes. Remodeling that is removing Disney themes and replacing them with cookie cutter off the shelf good like any other hotel has. 20 years ago they were still building Magic and not it’s just another hotel, but more expensive here since it’s Disney. We already pay a premium in being a DVC owner, when will the realistic ideal balance pay it forward to all of us?
Thank you for your articles and always keeping us informed. We really appreciate you teams work!
You nailed it Paul. It’s about money. This should go into a class action lawsuit as owners, to not allow this going forward.
Breakage can be hard to understand. I think an easier way to see the impact is to calculate how much it would cost DVC members to purchase one time use (OTU) points at $19 each to cover the extra points added to the inflated point charts. On the DisBoards one user calculated over the remaining life of all the DVC resorts it would be $72 million.
So besides Easter, has anyone looked at the total amount of points that a resort started with and compared that to the total amount of points to stay at the same resort for the year? Are we talking 1 million points in 2019 verses 1.5 million?
Thanks for the podcast Pete!!! Your shows are so informative and help communicate the bad with the good. Shout outs to your guests who also helped in clarifying the proposed changes.
The article says:
“Breakage Income is revenue generated by DVC through selling rooms for cash that are available within 60 days of check-in. While a portion of this income (2.5%) is indirectly returned to members via a credit towards annual dues, the remaining excess breakage is absorbed by Disney Vacation Club as profit”.
This is not quite correct. The breakage income returned to the members to offset annual dues is capped at 2.5% of the resort’s operating budget. It is not 2.5% of the income. This is defined in the POS document for each resort.
Thanks for dedicating one of the DVC Shows to this subject.