If you think studios are really meant for 2 people.....

In full disclosure, we will be 5 staying in 2 studios. 1 studio, 1 hotel room and 1 bedrooms won't work for our group since D20's bf is now travelling with us. If D's bf was not traveling with us, I'd not hesitate to drop the 2nd studio. As a family of 4, we have previously always stayed value or mod - 1 room. I would not travel with another couple and share a hotel room or a studio. Probably not a 1 bedroom either. I think that's different though, since I don't already share a home with them

I see studios as slightly better than a regular hotel room. You get the balcony and the kitchenette. Perhaps some don't like the sofa bed, but I like that it can be folded up and gives more space to move around and a usable "living room" during the day.

For us, DVC was a way to stay "deluxe" (I know....not really) for less money, but never for the kitchen, laundry, etc. Cooking and doing laundry are in no way an "upgrade" as far as I"m concerned!!! A 2 bedroom would be nice in terms of having a gathering space, but isn't worth the points IMO.

We've never looked into other timeshares.
 
I have only been a regular hotel room kind of girl. In fact gasp.... always booked ROH ( room of house) cheapest category.(now I think of view)
After 1st WDW family trip to WL fell in love and I am so happy we bought back then in 2006.

The ONLY reason I purchase DVC was for the flexibility. No fixed week, room type, or resort.

We are a family of 4. Myself, DH, DD and my mom. She lives with us so we do a studio just fine.
In fact I just booked next Easter in a studio for the 4 of us. I am happy to have that option during such a point heavy period. In fact I am estatic that my home of WLV(BRV;-) )
STUDIO sleeps 5!!! Gives us each a bed! Well I have to share with DH:p

However.... I do love my splurges...last year we had a 1BR OV at Aulani:cloud9:

And next month we will be at BLT 2BR lake view for my DD sweet 16. We are bringing 3 friends instead of a party.
DVC has enabled us to have amazing vacations. Sometimes we splurge... sometimes we “crowded” in a studio. And happy to do it:-)
Kerri
 
Only studio we do is OKW so we each get a queen bed to sleep in. And when our son suddenly joins us, it is a pain for the two of us to try to sleep in one queen bed. HGVC has studios at some of their resorts and are limited to just two people, not one more under the age of three. We stayed in one at Parc Soleil in Lake Buena Vista and it had a king bed which was nice, but only one upholstered chair for sitting and two chairs by a table for dining. With early DVC studios were limited to four person. Until DVC raised the price of new contracts to a billion dollars a point and young families cannot afford more than the minimum number of points and book a studio. I hate the murphy bed being added because it took away storage and a separate table for dining (homework, computering, etc) in most of the rooms. Plus it crams five people (plus one more under the age of three) in that smaller space.

We mostly stay in one bedroom villas.
 
I hate the murphy bed being added because it took away storage and a separate table for dining (homework, computering, etc) in most of the rooms. Plus it crams five people (plus one more under the age of three) in that smaller space.
As someone with young kids (and with families where I live trending to only have 1 kid), I LOVE the idea of the murphy bed in the studios because it enabled us to put our DD1 in the murphy when DD2 was still in a crib, and it felt luxurious to have a whole sitting area with a couch. Next time we are in a VGF studio, though, I wonder if the girls are going to fight over who gets the murphy, and we will have both the couch and the murphy bed folded out.
 


When we bought into DVC our two kids were 7 & 11. We stayed in studios and went three to four times a year. Hubby got addonitis a couple of times and we began to stay in one-bedrooms & two bedrooms and spread out a little more. I love having a washer/dryer! Now it is usually just hubby and me and we always stay in a one-bedroom. My husband is a business owner and is always on call, so sometimes he is answering phones and doing work when we are there. It's much nicer to have another space to go to during that time. We have stayed in lots of hotel rooms over the years, but really enjoyed having a suite where the boys could go to sleep and we could stay up a little while.
 
I'm one of those who's often said that I thought the studios were designed for singles and couples. I'll clarify that a bit to say except for OKW, which has two queen beds in their studios.

It's the beds that make the difference. For me, a sofa bed in a hotel room is "afterthought bedding." As in, "yeah, I guess some guests might want to have extra people sleeping in here, so we might as well throw in a sofa bed." Having a queen bed with an open sofabed in a room is a very different space and convenience situation than a hotel room with two queen beds. There's not much space to maneuver when the sofabed is open and it all feels sort of temporary and makeshift.

I'm also thinking of the way DVC was originally pitched, where the extra space was the luxury. Four kids? Book a two-bedroom villa. A couple? Get a one-bedroom or a studio. When I travel solo, I really enjoy the extra floor space that you get in a studio.
 


We (DH and I) enjoy the SSR studios for the one or two days before a cruise. When we brought my bro and his wife last year, I reserved two studios because it was for two nights before the cruise. Aulani was an entire week and we reserved the two bedroom lock out for the four of us. Need the space. Growing up there were six in our family. Guess that's why we did a lot of camping in those years.
 
Normally I'm a "a bed is a bed is a bed" kind of guy. My interest in DVC was purely for getting a better (closer) location to DLR at a (eventually anyway) cheaper price. Then I did the Aulani "tour" at DLR. I walked into the studio model and thought, "yeah, it's a nice hotel room." Then they took us into the model one bedroom, wow, what a huge jump! After that I found myself aiming for bigger contracts/add ons.
 
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Normally I'm a "a bed is a bed is a bed kind of guy." My interest in DVC was purely for getting a better (closer) location to DLR at a (eventually anyway) cheaper price. Then I did the Aulani "tour" at DLR. I walked into the studio model and thought, "yeah, it's a nice hotel room." Then they took us into the model one bedroom, wow, what a huge jump! After that I found myself aiming for bigger contracts/add ons.

Yes, the rooms at Aulani are very spacious. Almost the size of a 2BR/ 2BA house for the suite the four of us stayed in 2014.
 
Ever since we had kids, we’ve always booked accommodations that have a separate bedroom and living area, no matter where we go. Our kids maintain their bedtimes while on holiday and we like the separate space in the evenings. That way we aren’t sitting in the dark, staying quiet come 8 or 8:30 pm.

When I travel with just one of my kids, a studio is fine. If it’s just me and dh, we still get the one bedroom. We are tall, and a queen bed doesn’t cut it.

I’ve always maintained that if my accommodations on holiday are not as nice as at home, I’d rather not go.
 
We bought DVC for the specific purpose of not having to cram all four of us into one hotel room, which to us is the same as a studio. Our son and daughter couldn’t share a bed, and at the Poly where we were staying at the time DD barely fit in the daybed while DS had the other queen. So we bought enough points to spend Thanksgiving week in a two bedroom.

It makes me sad to realize that the cost of points and number of points per night have risen so high that families can’t afford to buy enough points to enjoy the space that a timeshare should provide. As bwvBound said above, it should be a home away from home.
 
Of course the studios were "meant" for 4 people. That's how they were conceived and how they are furnished. I have issues with them cramming a 5th sleeping surface into the studios that originally accommodated 4. Especially when the 1-bedroom villas in the same resort still only have sleep surfaces for 4. DVC basically marginalized the value of those studios to those of us who would rather have the storage space instead of the weird dining table/murphy bed set up that they created in the BWV. Rant over.

However, just because the studios were designed to accommodate up to 4 (or 5) people, that doesn't mean that they comfortably hold that many. Heck, my Altima has seatbelts for 5 people but there's no way that I would travel for days on end with 5 people in the car! A short trip of just a few miles, yes. But not for day after day after day. Someone is going to get left on the side of the highway by Day #3! And that's how I feel about having 4 (or more) people in a studio - fine for a night but not for longer. And definitely not even then in some cases such as me and my husband plus my sister + her husband, or my daughter + her fiance.
 
Do you / have you never booked regular hotel rooms?

I'm asking because it seems a lot of DVCers comment on studios really only being for 2-3 or "cramming into a studio" etc. I admit to only staying at SSR so far but I found it very comparable to a regular hotel room - felt more spacious actually. We WERE only 3 for that stay, but 4 adults (teen children) would not have been a problem.

So, I guess I'm just curious as to whether many have just become accustomed to larger accommodations and now can't "go back" or if you have just never been a 1 hotel room kind of traveler.

(and it seems consensus is that BLT is really smaller than the others - so I guess I'm excluding BLT from the conversation)
A lot of people fit into the rooms but from a timeshare perspective, studios ARE aimed at 2 people or 2 people and a small child.
 
I would not fit 4 or 5 people into any DVC studio for a week or so. Maybe for the 1st day, if you arrive late and as part of split stay to get the dining plan for only 1 night. Even though the 1br' are nice with the extra space I dont see my self booking them as we dont use the kitchen or W/D enough to justify the additional point cost. For 1 week in a 1br I can almost get 2 weeks in a studio.

Last year we stayed 3nt in a hotel room at GF because of Irma and it had 2 queen beds which was nice. I dont know the size of the room but it felt larger than the VGF studios we came from.

IMHO DVC should have set a total limit of 3 persons in the studios, this would ensure that everyone had a pleasant stay. Some will argue that staying 4-5 is still a pleasant stay and each to his own. IMO not being able to move around with the Murphy and couch unfolded is not pleasant

Hands down if I can't have a pleasant stay I rather go less or not at all.
 
As a kid, we put all of us (mom, dad and three kids) into a hotel room. As a young adult we packed six or eight people into a hotel room if we took a road trip or went to a convention.

With my own kids, the vast majority of our stays for vacation have been suite hotels or multi room timeshares. We've spent a night here or there with four of us in a regular hotel room, but they were toddlers the last time that happened for any extended period. We have cruised Disney in one room, but Disney makes that pretty easy to not feel like you are on top of each other.

I figure that its vacation and being vacation we should all be comfortable. We are still tend to commando a bit at Disney even after years of DVC ownership, and so while we don't spend a lot of time in the room, the room has to be relaxing and as stress free as possible, with space for mom the introvert to hide and for dad to read his book, and siblings to spend time apart.
 
We book a lot of hotel rooms as we drive to WDW and sometimes as far as Miami. Most hotels we stay in are moderately priced. And most of those have a queen pullout couch seating area separated by a pony wall from the two queen beds. So the rooms are much larger than even the OKW studio. I wouldn't see any problem for a family of four or five sleeping in one of those rooms although the single bathroom could be a problem. But the DVC studios at WDW are much smaller. To me the studios are fine for 2 adults, not for a family to stay there for a week. Your family might never have temper flares and cranky days nor have a teen or adult that really craves some privacy. But when we have family join us we book 1 or 2 BR villas.
 
we are fine as a family of 4 in a studio, we have always traveled staying in one room at a hotel, disney...cape cod... we dont live in a huge house and when away from home for a week at disney or 2 nights at the beach we were always fine in one hotel room. We bought DVC for the options of locations and booking ahead to secure our room. NO issues ever on size of the rooms, some years my youngest slept with oldest in the pull out couch and some years he was on the murphy bed or on the floor, never felt cramped or that we needed more space.
 
Part of the reason it took us until we were 'child-less' to purchase DVC was because the guides kept quoting huge point totals assuming we would want a 2Br arrangement (which I'm sure the kids would've loved) but it meant we always walked away. When it was finally down to just us they quoted 'studio' totals and we bought/bit. Now we have on multiple occasions shared our studio with 2 other adults for a night or two but it is cramp - not the sleeping but the luggage. This past October I enjoyed a 'girls trip' with my daughters and a friend where we stayed at a BC studio which is set up to sleep 5 and it worked because we used part of the entry way for luggage - 2 in the bed, 1 in the pull out and 1 in the trundle. It was tight but it was doable AND they want to do it AGAIN. Since we only spent 1 day in the parks out of a 5 day stay the size of the room didn't effect them at all. Seems kinda silly that a room that is meant for 2 people is set up to sleep 5 where a suite that has a separate bedroom and living area along with a full kitchen is set up to sleep 4.
 
We just bought DVC early this year and I’ve still yet to see a DVC studio but everything I hear indicates that they’re akin to a standard WDW hotel room. We’ve stayed with 4 adults and a baby in a value room with no problem and with 2 adults + 3 kids in a moderate. We’re staying at a moderate on cash this summer with 2 adults/3 kids + an infant and I don’t foresee any problems. Like a previous poster said, it mostly depends upon what you’re accustomed to. For reference I’m 6’4”, 320lbs and usually end up sharing a queen bed with DW, 3 kids, and a black lab. I’m used to being crammed. That being said, I’m hoping to hold onto studios until I’m forced into a 2br because I fear I won’t ever want to go back once I get a little elbow room.
 

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