Disappointed with Room availabilitiy

My wife and I both work, 2 of my kids are following a college schedule, and 2 a high school schedule. So trying to find a time where we can take a vacation together is quite the challenge. Even harder is trying to plan this 11 months in advance. I have found that trying to plan a DVC trip without knowing 11 months ahead of time is a big problem. Trying to get a 2 or 3 bedroom 3-6 months away is impossible. I looked for an available weekend in October, November, December, and January and can't find anything!! Not even Key West or SSR!! Do they not have enough availability to meet the needs of the customers? If I was not a DVC member, I could go on to the website and book a room for cash for many weekends in many different hotels. Being a DVC member seems to put me at a disadvantage. Does anyone else run into these problems? Any solutions?

It is getting harder to book inside 7 months. Looking at SSR though I show full availability for a 2 bedroom Jan 4 - 31 and OKW has some availability Jan 4-10 and 12-31. Anything directly around the holidays is tough to get at this point. When I was dealing with school schedules I would hold my home resort at 11 months based on the current years schedule, they could always be changed if need be.

Interesting points. We have been fortunate that we are generally booking right at the 11 or 7 month window. We're not really been spur of the moment people, at least not yet with kids still in school. We've only been DVC members for less than five years, but it would be interesting to know members vs. total points available vs. inventory. Does this data exist? The inventory is easy, but do we know members and the total points pool? I'm sure Disney is signing up new members every day, but they don't build hotels every day. And it's probably based on demand vs. proactive planning on their part.

I've been wondering how much of this 'hard-to-get-a-room' is actually "IT glitches". Disney's IT support in general is horrendous, and seems to be getting worse, not better

So........say......... you go look at the RAT today ...and see that there are no rooms of X type at ZZZZ resort open for December XX-YY. You ASSUME that figure represents the total availability of X type rooms at ZZZ resort for Dec. XX-YY. Out of luck......so you move on.

But unbeknownst to you... some time later after you "gave up" on this possibility, another person searches that same exact set of parameters.. and gets the exact room you were looking for.

If we even hear about it, we assume it was because of a "reservation cancellation". But maybe not.

If we all seem to experience glitches with the Disney IT in other aspects of their operations...... why would it be different with the DVC reservation system?

best,

..............john

To be honest, the 3BR Grand Villas can be hard to get because there are so few of them anyway. But the DVC attendance in Oct-Jan can be pretty high - many of those time periods offer the lowest points-per-night requirement, so many members book then. You also have Halloween, Food & Wine, Thanksgiving / Christmas / New Year, the Arts Festival, and at least 2 major running events in there.

We have found if we can make our reservations by the 8-month mark, we're usually OK. But we have also had decent success with waitlisting for rooms. You need to decide how long you might be willing to wait to get confirmation - but we have gotten responses in as little as 2 weeks at times. I wish you luck with your arrangements - hope something comes through.

There are 2 things that I can see making it harder: First, banking and borrowing can shift demand from one year into the next - they probably assume that banking and borrowing will pretty nearly balance each other out. Second, the more resorts they add to DVC, the more people there are who can try a different resort at 7 months out. I have found it harder to book a non-home resort 7 months or less in advance.

By law, they have to have enough rooms at each resort that if everyone used their points at their home resort, there would be enough rooms to go around. Now, could the last few people to make reservations get a block of consecutive days in the same room - maybe not. They also can't sell more points at a resort and increase the points cost for existing members - they can only shuffle points from day to day or season to season - up a little here, down a little there. That has happened.

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Originally Posted by FiggyFan

By law, they have to have enough rooms at each resort that if everyone used their points at their home resort, there would be enough rooms to go around. Now, could the last few people to make reservations get a block of consecutive days in the same room - maybe not.

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Maybe stretched throughout the year but not if everyone travels in the same part of the year which Oct-Jan is rapidly becoming.

Another thing that adds to making it harder is the Poly Bungalows and CCV Cabins. Those points were allocated to people that may never have an intention of using those spaces so are looking/using regular rooms. Also since Poly is studios only, many of those may need larger accommodations at times. There are close to 4 mil Poly points declared which have the potential to add to the mix.