The Special Season provisions apply to things that could be special, high demand seasons such as Christmas. It was used for Christmas week in the 1990s. Any member could, beginning about 2 years before an applicable Christmas, put themselves on a reservation list for any room and resort for that future Christmas week (no limitation that it had to be home resort). The list was closed about a year before the applicable Christmas, at which time DVC would start calling all such members in the order they got on the list to determine if they still wanted the reservation. It did that until the resorts were full or the list expired. If, thereafter, there were still any openings, the week would then be subject to the regular 11-month reservation window. The program was ended mainly because it required too much work for DVC, a reason why we are unlikely to ever see it again, except perhaps if something like the summer olympics comes to Orlando.
DVC cannot use that provision as an excuse to create special seasons for times that simply have excess demand, like the first two weeks of Dec or other times during the Fall season, because of DVC's failure for over a decade to alleviate the excess demand via shifting points among seasons, a process started with the new
point charts for 2021 and which might continue with 2022 charts.
The Special Season and other provisions in the official documents say nothing about DVC being able to charge fees for making or changing DVC reservations. Under Florida law and regulations, that absence of terms in the POS's which would allow charging such fees means trying to now charge fees would be deemed an improper use charge.
The issue of rooms booking full before or right at 8 a.m. at 11-months out is limited to certain rooms, and for a number of those just part of the year, e.g., threads to end walking on these boards seem to show up after the 11-month window passes for extremely high demand but low point times such first two weeks in Dec and marathon weekend in Jan, which emphasizes the point that the real problem is that there are far too many members trying to reserve rooms, particularly low-point cost studios, during the most-desired low point cost seasons, which weeks should actually have point costs similar to magic season.
For the rooms involved, the major cause of the 11-month problem is Disney, not, as many apparently want to believe, walking (which activity is mainly a response to, not the cause of, an 11-month issue): (a) until beginning with 2021, Disney failed to move points out of the lower demand times and into the excessively high demand fall season; (b) Disney built far too few club level and super low-cost value rooms at AKV while, for years, it sold AKV with a minimum purchase point for new purchasers of only 50 to 100 points; (b) Disney put only 46 studios in VGF to be sold beginning in 2013 at very high per-point sales prices, $145 for a short while to members and then $155, which combined with a much higher point structure than BLT, represented a 60% price increase over the the price for a week that BLT had sold out for in 2010 -- that was the beginning of its modern sales model to continuously raise the price per point beyond any reasonable amount (for a number of resorts the price has increased more than 100% in ten years), later enhanced by adding extremely high point cost bungalows and cabins, while keeping the minimum point purchase to 100 or less, all of of which actions effectively resulted in the oversell of studios; (c) Disney stuck high-point-cost cabins in CCV resulting in the oversell of studios by selling the cabin points to many who can afford only studios; Poly has thus far avoided the 11-month issue because more than 90% of the rooms are studios; (d) Disney created too few BLT standard rooms to handle demand for those lowest cost rooms; (e) Disney created too few bargain level (an OKW point cost for a near park resort) BWV standard studios to handle the Food & Wine and other high fall demand, and likewise too few BWV boardwalk view studios with their outstanding views; another Disney decision has done in those BWV studios entirely -- before 2016 the BWV 11-month issue was limited to times during the high fall demand season; by 2018, it had become a year-round problem because of one change: Disney put a fifth bed in the studios to allow 5.
Eliminating walking will not end the 11-month issue for rooms that have it. The solutions offered to walking are, when studied closely, much worse than the disease, e.g., allow only cancelling and then rebooking, an activity that would result in many who have to modify reservations for valid reasons -- such as drop and add a day due to a work schedule change, a flight change, or a change in school schedule -- not being able to do a change because availability has changed. And asking the modern DVC to rectify walking is like inviting the devil into your home to do you in, because what will happen is that it it will do something far worse than you ever imagined and assert it is being done because members overwhelmingly requested it, e.g., one of its explanations offered for adopting the new resale restrictions for reserving Riviera and future resorts was the assertion that many direct purchasers complained that resale purchasers were preventing them from getting reservations.
