The Disney vacation club (DVC) is a Disney version of a time share. It’s a little different from a typical time share in that you aren’t buying into a specific home or hotel room you instead purchase points that you use to book a resort room, cruise, or Adventure by Disney trip.
With your membership you will use your points to book your hotel room during your trip to Disney World, Disneyland or Aulani in Hawaii. The vacation club points are only used for the hotel, theme park tickets will be a separate expense. You will be able to purchase annual passes at a discount to Disney World along with special member only nights.
You will start by purchasing a set amount of point to be used yearly. They amount of points you need will depend on what time of year you like to vacation, the more popular times of year like summer and Christmastime will require more points to book. You then need to choose your home resort. At the moment the DVC website is selling Copper Creek villas or Aulani but if there is a different resort you are wanting to purchase just ask they sometimes have properties not listed. You will not have to stay at your home resort you just priority in booking this particular resort before other DVC owners.
The vacation club might be a good choice for your family if you like to take yearly trips to Disney. You will be saving money if you use it consistently and the resort rooms are bigger than the standard resort rooms. The one and two bedroom villas offer full sized kitchens and washer/dryer in the room so it’s just like home.
The current rate for point purchase is $182 per point with the lowest amount of points you can purchase being 100 but they go up to 299. So you would be looking at $18,200 as your purchase price, plus closing cost but in addition you will have yearly dues that go toward maintenance of your home resort. These are just over $7 per point which would cost over $700 per year, these are usually due in January of each year and do go up every year or so. Between the 2 resorts you can purchase your membership would last until 2062 for Aulani or 2068 for Copper Creek. So if you break all the cost down for the 100 points you are essentially paying a little over $1100 per year for the course of the membership.
With your membership you do have ability to bank points for the next year or borrow points from next year to use this year. If you are not planning to vacation there are website that rent DVC points to non members and they will pay you to purchase your points. We have rented points before and it not only saved us money we got a nice big room to spread out in. Normally we stay at a value resort room which don’t offer too much room but we are seldom in the room during our Disney vacations.
We have looked into purchasing into the DVC but it just didn’t make sense for our family. But if this is something you think your family would benefit from Disney does offer specials from time to time. Right now there are offering a little bit of a savings depending on how many points you purchase. If you take a vacation club tour while visiting Disney World they will sometimes give out special fastpasses or gift cards so if you are even just a little bit interested you should check it out.