Percentage of stays at home resort

[Ben E N]

So far, 1 trip completed and 3 future trips booked, 0% have been at my home resort Poly. In the future, I plan for it to be a 50/50 split. My upcoming trip this weekend, I booked the room 4 days in advance so I just took whatever was available, which was Beach Club studio (as someone above posted, is an exception and not the norm).

I grabbed your Poly spots because I figured it would start to get harder to book there now that its sold out. Bought our BLT points just over a year ago. One trip at Poly down, with another set for the spring and also a short stay at CCV over the winter. Then it's back to our home resort over the summer. I would be fine staying at BLT every time, but why not check out other places as well?

 

[disneyeveryyear]

So far, 1 trip completed and 3 future trips booked, 0% have been at my home resort Poly. In the future, I plan for it to be a 50/50 split. My upcoming trip this weekend, I booked the room 4 days in advance so I just took whatever was available, which was Beach Club studio (as someone above posted, is an exception and not the norm).

Wow, a BCV Studio weekend during F&W with 4 days notice! That is amazing.

 

[disneyeveryyear]

I am not sure what our %age would be. I would think maybe 50% at our home, SSR. We have also stayed at OKW, BCV, BWV, Poly, VB and BLT. We have a March trip booked at CCV, so all we are missing from the list is BRV, VGF, Aulani and HHI.

 

[juju12345]

0%. I bought SSR direct from Disney years ago before it sold out. I’ve never stayed there. I’ve stayed at BLT, BWV, AKL, Polynesian, OKW, and HHI. Sometimes I’ve had to wait list or stalk the website and sometimes I’ve gotten second choice or taken views I didn’t want, but I’ve always been happy with my Resort stays. I only start planning vacation 6-7 months out anyways so home resort advantage never has mattered to me. I have nothing against SSR but I just haven’t gotten around to staying there yet .

 

[bwvBound]

I’m considering buying my first contract and am struggling with the home resort decision.

For the DVC vets, what percentage of your stays would you say are at your home resort?

Ah ... 14+ years of ownership and only 2 stays at our home resort (and one of those stays was booked via RCI, not using our DVC points). I think we owned for 5 years before booking our home resort. I can't calculate the percentage as I don't have a full history of every trip taken with our points. Sorry!

 

[GGGT]

We own at 4 resorts:

PVB: 100%
VGF: 100%
VWL/BR: 100%
SSR: Maybe 5%

 

[kboo]

We are new-ish owners at 2 resorts and so far: BLT - 100% and VGF 100%. LOL.

We plan to use VGF at VGF 100% of the time, or close to it. Kids are still small, and we are still in double stroller ages, so BLT points will be our "sleep around" points but still expect to be using them at BLT 90+% of the time, with an occasional AKV or Poly stay if something is available at 7 mo, but we won't sweat it.

Since we discovered that using our bajillion already-paid-for Starwood points gets us in the EP area without using DVC points, we've adjusted our strategy to use those points instead of DVC to spend the first few nights of a longer stay smushed in a hotel room (I know, the horror!) at the Swan or Dolphin before moving on to BLT or VGF. The other bonus is that I can use Starwood points as early as 364 days in advance, rooms are often still available <7mo in advance, and with few penalties for canceling or changing. The only drawback is "only" having a hotel room.

 

[gillep]

We own at AKV and BCV, probably stay at our home resort about 70% of the time. We do a yearly winter trip at AKV and now that we have our BCV contract a yearly BCV food and wine trip, our Spring trip is the one that we like to use to try different resorts, also, we may do a split stay for our food and wine trip with a different resort, or add in another trip and try to check out some place new.

 

[pineapplepalms]

CCV and BWV points we will use mostly at our home resorts, especially since those will primarily be used for trips involving races, festivals, or in December where availability is more limited. Our SSR points are used to stay all over (so far we've used them at VGC and BWV) for trips where we can be more flexible in terms of location and/or timing, but some of the time will also be used to stay at SSR. I'm looking forward to staying there after the upcoming refurb since we really enjoy DS.

 

[SherylLC]

We're here at home resort BCV for first time since we're relatively new owners. We've met two different 12+ years owners who both own SSR and said they never stay there. One was currently at Boardwalk, the other at Beach Club.

 

[FFMickey]

Haven't needed at the home resort priority yet because we managed to use our points at VGC and at Aulani. Just returned from a split stay at WDW and stayed a couple of nights at our home resort PVB.

 

[GDUL]

100% at OKW when we are at WDW but we have stayed twice on points at HHI.

 

[MamaRoo]

Thanks all - this is helpful. My plan is to try to do Hawaii and WDW every other year. I was looking at buying one contract, but now I’m thinking I may go for two smaller contracts; one at Aulani and one at a WDW resort to be determined (probably BLT, Poly or CCV).

 

[lovin'fl]

Thanks all - this is helpful. My plan is to try to do Hawaii and WDW every other year. I was looking at buying one contract, but now I’m thinking I may go for two smaller contracts; one at Aulani and one at a WDW resort to be determined (probably BLT, Poly or CCV).

Good plan. We like buying multiple small contracts because we can have multiple 11 month booking priorities and we could resell off bits and pieces if we needed (and we did resell 100 AKV points a couple years ago when money was tight).

 

[jarestel]

We've tried most of the WDW resorts and found them all to be quite nice but are now content to stay almost exclusively at our home resorts. If you plan on joining the 7 month booking frenzy, I think maximum flexibility on dates and room size will dramatically increase your success rate.

 

[AdamsMum]

90% I own at BWV and BC and have stayed at AKV twice (beautiful but remote), Poly and OKW (Poly was okay, OKW was disappointing mainly because I didn't have a car) when I was booking late and couldn't get my home resorts, but I bought where I wanted to stay.

 

[AnnaS]

Just an estimate, I would say

Beach club points 100%
OKW 50%

 

[Wakey]

Rare. I bought to sleep around the resorts, travel in summer and get 1 or 2 beds. As a result I get my pick of all resorts and nearly all views (BLT standard and AKL Club are the only ones I've ever found challenging).
I have no problems staying at SSR, in fact I'm actively planning to book it for after the refurb. I love the ability to walk to DS. Don't care for AKL (even though its still v nice I'm talking relatively ) as the inability to even walk or go for a run outside. I cannot understand why they didnt put a nice path in to AKL.
However reason I don't usually stay at SSR is I think I may as well stop there when I have no choice such as if I go at Xmas where that will be likely. So I may as well 'fill my boots' going everywhere else in the meantime.
Problem is because I only usually go every other year, there's normally a new one to try every time.

 

[Happy2BMommy0812]

75%? The best advice I got was to buy where I wanted to stay. With that in mind, we passed on Saratoga when it was offered to us on a cruise way back around 2011. It was inexpensive, but we were in our 20s, not sure how many kids we would have, and not sure we wanted to spend the money upfront. Several years passed and BLT and VGF came around. Then they announced Poly, our favorite hotel. We cruised and decided to buy in despite it being double the cost of that Saratoga offer years ago. We have the money upfront, we are done having kids - 2 boys, and we will always want to spend part of our time at poly. We LOVE it here.

Also, we vacation inn October, when food and wine and Halloween draw a lot of DVC members in. I’m glad we don’t have to rush at the 7 month mark to try and get a resort we want. We book poly at 11 months easily and then, if we want to change it at 7 months, we can try or waitlist but don’t really care if the change happens.

That said, we have used points here and there to try other resorts but always end up with most nights at poly.

December 2016 - 1 night BWV, 1 night BLT, 5 nights Poly
Summer 2017 - 1 night VGF, combined points with family for 5 nights grand villa OKW
October 2017 - 2 nights BCV post cruise for food and wine
NYE/January 2018 - 6 nights Poly for marathon weekend
October 2018 - 8 nights poly
Planning to book 8 nights poly in October 2019 OR, depending on my sons fall break, maybe less days in a 1 bedroom at BWV or BCV or even the new Rivera place. But again, if it doesn’t work out for a 1 bedroom, poly is fine with us!

 

[E2ME2]

So, as you see in my sig.line, I'm at 57% home resort (4/7 at SSR).
We use DVC to SnowBird in Winter.
We always grab our placeholder ressie at SSR at 11-Mo, and trade at 7-Mo. if we want.
So far we have been able to trade for everything at 7-Mo. except AKV-Value or AKV-Concierge.
We even had AUL booked in 2015, but had to cancel for a last minute illness.
Thankfully we purchased Travelex for that trip, and DVC was very accommodating.