Disney Vacation Club: how it actually works

Disney Vacation Club is not a package, not a loyalty program and not a discount. It is the purchase of a real estate interest in a Disney property — a timeshare, in Disney’s own words — sold only by Disney Vacation Development, LLC. What it gives you each year is Vacation Points, and those points are what pay for accommodation.

What you are actually buying

You buy an ownership interest in one specific Resort. Not in Disney Vacation Club at large: in Disney’s Riviera Resort, or in The Villas at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa, or in Aulani, Disney Vacation Club Villas, Ko Olina, Hawai‘i. That Resort becomes your Home Resort, and the choice follows you for decades.

Two things the brochures do not set in large type. The contract has an end date: when the term runs out, the interest is no longer yours, there is nothing left to sell and nothing to leave behind. And annual dues are payable every year, in US dollars, for the life of the contract. They rise.

The portfolio now holds eighteen Resorts, from Disney’s Old Key West Resort, the first one, to The Cabins at Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort and The Villas at Disneyland Hotel in California. Three of them sit nowhere near a theme park: Aulani in Hawai‘i, Disney’s Vero Beach Resort and Disney’s Hilton Head Island Resort.

Vacation Points, and the year that governs them

Every year your interest gives you a fixed allotment of Vacation Points. A night costs a certain number of points depending on the Resort, the size of the villa, the season and even the day of the week. A Tuesday night in September and a Saturday night between Christmas and New Year are not remotely the same.

Your Use Year — the month your allotment renews — is set when you buy and cannot be changed. It reads like an administrative detail until a trip falls through: depending on the month you cancel, your points are either salvageable or gone.

• Banking: unused points can be carried into the following year instead of expiring, provided you do it within the deadline.
• Borrowing: you can draw on next year’s allotment to complete a stay this year.
• Used together, the two turn a modest yearly allotment into a bigger trip every second year.

The Home Resort, the decision that matters most

Here is the mechanism few people understand before they sign, and it is the one that decides whether the purchase serves you.

From eleven months through and including eight months before your arrival date, for a stay of up to seven consecutive nights, only Members who own an interest at that Resort may book it. That is the Home Resort Priority Period. At seven months the whole of Disney Vacation Club opens up, and everyone starts from the same line.

The consequence is blunt. If you dream of an overwater bungalow at Disney’s Polynesian Villas & Bungalows during the March school break, owning somewhere else will not help you: at seven months there will be nothing left. You buy the Resort where you actually want to sleep, on the dates you actually want to travel.

Buying from Disney or buying from a Member

A Disney Vacation Club interest can be resold between private parties, often well below Disney’s price. The difference is not the villa — it is everything around it.

What a direct purchase gives you

Disney calls them Membership Extras: discounts, Member-only events, and the ability to trade points for a Disney Cruise Line sailing, an Adventures by Disney trip or a hotel outside the network. Since 3 June 2021, you must hold at least 150 Vacation Points purchased directly from Disney Vacation Development, LLC to obtain the Membership Card that unlocks them.

What resale does not give you

An interest bought from a private seller gives you the villa and nothing else. No discounts, no exchanges, no card. And Disney’s own warning deserves reading to the end: these are incidental benefits, subject to change or termination without notice. Paying Disney’s price for the extras means paying more for something Disney reserves the right to withdraw.

What a Canadian has to weigh on top

Everything happens in US dollars: the purchase price, the annual dues, any eventual resale. The exchange rate works both ways over forty years.

It is also foreign real estate, with everything that implies on death and succession. And timeshare solicitation is regulated in Quebec — Disney itself states on its website that its material is not an offer where registration or other legal requirements for timeshare solicitation have not been met.

On those questions the right person is not a travel advisor. It is your notary and your accountant. We do not sell Disney Vacation Club interests, no travel agency does, and we will not tell you whether it is a good buy: it is not our trade, and pretending otherwise would do you harm.

Staying in those villas without being a Member

Here is what almost nobody says out loud: Disney Vacation Club villas can be booked like any other Disney Resort hotel room. You need no interest, no card and not a single point.

A suite with a kitchen and a washer at Disney’s Riviera Resort, a balcony over Crescent Lake at Disney’s BoardWalk Villas, a cabin among the pines at The Cabins at Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort: all of it books by the night, with no forty-year commitment attached. For a family that goes to Disney every three or four years, that is very often the right answer.

This is exactly the kind of trade-off our Créateurs de Magie work through. Talk to an advisor when you plan your Walt Disney World stay: the question is not whether Disney Vacation Club is good, but whether it is good for you.

Points get used off property too, and the area you pick changes a lot. Our guide to the Orlando region compares real distances and drive times.