Whenever people ask about Use Years for add-on contracts, the common advice is to make sure that the Use Year of your add-on contract matches the Use Year of your existing contract or contracts. This helps make it easier to track your points and their expiration date. Plus, it makes it easier for you to combine points for bigger vacations.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad decision to have contracts of different Use Years. In fact, there are some instances in which having different Use Years can work well and even be advantageous.
You Don’t Plan to Combine Points
Having contracts with different Use Years gets sticky when you want to combine points from both contracts for the same trip. Even if you have two contracts with the same home resort, if they have two different Use Years, you’ll have different Memberships for these contracts. This means that to combine your points, you would have to transfer them from one Membership to the other. Nevertheless, if you don’t plan to combine your points for trips, having different Use Years won’t make much of a difference.
You Get More Waitlists
A nice perk of having more than one Use Year is that you can place more waitlists at the same time. You can have up to two concurrent waitlists per Membership. If you had two different Use Years, that would be two different Memberships. This would give you a maximum of four concurrent waitlists, which could increase your chances of getting a room that you want.
You Can Bring More Guests for Certain Membership Extras Events
Sometimes Membership Extras events are limited to a certain number of guests per Membership. For example, the party size for the Test Track 3.0 preview was limited to a Member and up to 4 guests per Membership. If you have more than one eligible Membership because of your different Use Years, you could potentially register for more spots.
Different Point Expiration Dates May Help with Travel Plans
If you travel at different times of the year, sometimes it can be helpful to have more than one Use Year. It’s always a bit risky traveling towards the end of your Use Year, especially once you are past your banking deadline. Should you need to cancel that trip past the banking deadline, you would not be able to bank your points, and you would only have until the end of your Use Year to use them. However, if you had more than one Use Year, you could strategically select which contract you use to book a trip to avoid traveling at the end of your Use Year.
All in all, deciding whether to match Use Years or get different Use Years is a matter of personal preference and what works best for your travel patterns. While having different Use Years may require more careful planning and point tracking, it’s not impossible to manage.
