Booking a trip to WDW with DVC points
Wednesday wasn’t a good day in the Berryman household, so to cheer ourselves up we booked a WDW trip for January 2024 that we had been talking about for the past few months.
As DVC Members it’s extremely easy to book a trip using our points. As we explain in our Disney Vacation Club page we have 175 points per year to use at DVC properties.
The first thing we did was check our point balance.
In the table above you can see we have no points left from our 2022 allotment. That’s ok because on December 1st 2023 we will receive our 2023 allotment. But we have already borrowed most of those points for our June 2023 holiday.
With 12 points left in our 2023 pot it may look like we don’t have enough points to take a trip to WDW, but remember you need to have the points for the first day of check in, not the day that you book the trip.
From December 1st 2023 we are also able to borrow from our 2024 allotment of 175 points, which means we actually have access to 187 points from this date.
Borrowing forward is the how we have been able to maximise our points and have either longer or more holidays each year.
Now that we know how many points we could spend we went onto the DVC website to check how many points a stay at Old Key West would be. We can book OKW as it is our home resort, if we wanted to stay somewhere else we would need to wait until 7 months before the first day of our trip to change resorts if there is availability.
A 9 night stay at OKW will be 98 vacation points. We can use the 12 points left in our 2023 allotment and borrow the remaining 86 points from our 2024 allotment. This would would leave us with 89 points still to use for the rest of 2024 should we want to change resorts or have another holiday later in the year.
So how much will this trip cost? We have our own calculation based on how much we paid for our overall DVC contract plus the dues per point.
DVC contract purchase price (£24252.34) ÷ Length of contract (35 years) = DVC price per year of contract (£692.92)
DVC price per year of contract (£692.92) ÷ Number of points (175) = Price per point (£3.96)
Price per point (£3.96) + Dues per point (£6.54) = Real cost per point (£10.50)
Real cost per point (£10.50) x number of points per trip (98) = DVC price of trip (£1029 or £114.33 per night)
This is how we calculate our trips, some people have different ways of working out the cost per DVC trip and you may find your own.
Unfortunately a deluxe studio at OKW is not available to book via the Disney World UK website so I can’t get an exact price comparison. However a Saratoga Springs Resort & Spa deluxe studio, which is a comparable point cost, is available to book and this would be £4,023 or £447 per night.
This means we are saving £2994 by using our DVC over paying cash.
The cost of this trip is just for our records, we won’t have a bill at the end of our stay or any resort fees to pay.
Our DVC contract is already paid for and it allows us to have these amazing holidays without worrying about the cost of the hotel we just have to pay for flights and food. We talk about saving for our Disney World holidays here.
If you want to try DVC before you buy or compare to Disney direct prices why not visit DVC Rental Store.