Thanks! So, with DVC it doesn't actually cost $500 a night, gotcha. Thanks!!!
DVC is a point system. When you buy in, you buy a contract that has a certain number of points allocated to it. The points act as currency. Each DVC resort has a
point chart that lists out the cost per night in points based on things like, time of year, day of the week, view, room type, etc.... You can see the 2019 & 2020
point charts here
https://www.wdwinfo.com/disney-vacation-club/dvcpoints.shtml
So lets say you buy an Animal Kingdom contract with 100 points for $115 per point, you would pay $115 x 100 = $11,500 upfront for your contract. This means, every year you would get 100 points to play with. If you look at the point chart, you will see that if you traveled during Dream Season every year, you can stay in a Standard Studio room for 1 week for the cost of 95 points.
A few things to keep in mind:
- You pay the contract price upfront. This is a one time cost
- Every year you pay annual dues in January. Animal Kingdom's 2019 annual dues for example are $7.44 per point. So if you have a 100 point contract, you would have paid $744 in January 2019. Annual dues usually increase marginally every year.
- You can book at your "home resort" 11 months out from your date of travel. At 7 months out, your free to book at any of the DVC resorts (there are a few restrictions that were put in place earlier this year that you should know before buying, but I won't get into that here). This means, DVC doesn't necessarily mean you have to stay at the same resort every single year.
- Every DVC contract has an expiration date. For example, Animal Kingdom's contract expires in 2057. After that expiration date, the contract goes back to Disney.
- You are allowed to bank points into next year, and borrow points from the following year. This means, technically you can use up to 3 years worth of points on a single vacation. Theoretically, if you travel during Dream Season once every 3 years, you could buy a 35 point contract and have enough for a week, once every 3 years.
So here is a very very very simplified version of the math involved. If you are really interested in DVC, I suggest you do more advanced calculations than this. However, this is a basic illustration just to give you an idea.
Animal Kingdom 7 night trip in Dream Season annually.
- Buy contract for $11,500 upfront
- pay annual dues every year of $744 per year
- get 7 nights annually
Total cost = 11,500 + (744 x 37 years) = $39,028
Nights = 37 years x 7 nights per year = 259 nights
Cost per night = 39,028 / 259 = $150.69 per night.
So as you can see, DVC is much cheaper than the normal rack rates you see on Disney's website. Of course, it will actually end up costing more than $150 per night because annual dues do increase every year. You also have to pay a bunch of cash upfront that could otherwise been invested. But this simple calculation should atleast get you in the ballpark of the real cost of DVC.