DVC - Waitlisting Dynamics and Walking a Reservation

Learn how to waitlist a reservation and discuss the highly controversial topic "walking a reservation".

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Wow, it is episode six of DVC for adults. This is going to be a highly informational episode. After you've purchased DVC, I hope the first five episodes gave you enough information that you can decide whether or not you want to choose to buy DVC or not. If it saves you money given your situation, I am trying to get my lighting situation good. Remember that this is a podcast. It is also on a YouTube channel, DVC for adults. You can find it in either place. Sometimes the video is helpful because you can see the screens that I'm going to share today. The rest of you, I will try to be as specific as possible possible, just like I always say. So today we are talking about wait lists and how to deal with them. And we are talking about walking a reservation, one of the most controversial items of discussion that you'll see on discussion boards, and how I feel about it. I'm going to save that to the end. And there's a logical flow to this, so you'll understand why I'm saving it to the end. So for those of you that are listening on the audio podcast, I'm getting ready to share my screen for the others. I am going to show you, look, look at what I've got booked right now. First of all, I had told you in the early episodes of this podcast that we were going to go to the Grand Californian using our points, which is mainly Hilton Head points, but I can use them at seven months. The problem is Grand Californian is a highly sought-after reservation. So I had it all booked up. We were in a one-bedroom for five nights. We're going to have six days, five nights, and we had an emergency situation in our family, and we had to change it, and we decided to move it to October. Well, look what's happened. I'm going to show you the details of this reservation. You're seeing one, two, three, four, five different line items involved with my reservation. We've got one night, then we've got two nights waitlisted, then we've got two nights booked at the Disneyland Hotel, and then we've got another night wait listed, and then we get two more nights booked at the Grand Californian. Not only that, what we've got booked at the Grand Californian is a two-bedroom villa. There's only two of us. That's all I could get into. Generally speaking, the pecking order of reservations, the ones that go the fastest are the studios because fewer number of points, then the one bedrooms because next fewer amount of points. I couldn't find any of those in October. And I had to go with the two-bedroom, and look, I only got that for three of our five nights. And just to cover myself, I went ahead and booked a studio at the Disney, the villas at Disneyland Hotel, which is a whole different complicated thing. I had to use my Riviera points for that because Riviera, because it's a bit restricted, you can't use resale points at of that. If you bought it the first 14 resorts they had, I won't go into details what those were, but Disneyland Hotel wasn't one of them. And I had to use, therefore, my Riviera points to book that because it's one of the newer ones. Now look at all this. This is what I've got, what the mess I've got. Wait list here, wait list here. So let's talk first about wait lists. Let me show you what I've done. I'm going to go to another screen now. Let's act like we are booking a reservation. You'll see here, you know how to get to there. Once you get to DVC, plan a vacation, all that stuff. There are two adults. Okay. That was my original dates. If I could book them all together, checking out, checking in on the October 4th, checking out on the 9th. I searched for studio, one bedroom, and two bedroom. Okay? Now. And you'll see there it says Grand California, and I click that down below. Let's check availability. Now, watch this. Alright, it's gonna tell me there are no rooms, zero, available for your selected dates. Look at that. Do you want to wait list to look studio? Do you want to wait list the one bedroom? Do you want to wait list the two-bedroom lockoff? By the way, if you don't know, lock off, two-bedroom lockoff villa is a combination of a one-bedroom villa and a studio with a door in between. That way you have two entrance doors from the hallway. So that's sometimes that's more convenient, like if there's two couples going together. Then the two-bedroom villa, which is what I tried to book. Now, I'm going to click on the two-bedroom villa to see what my options are. Let's look at it. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about walking a reservation. And for the record, if you I'll go ahead and say it now. I am not a fan of walking a reservation. It's unfair. And there's some people that would tell you it's unethical. Have I done it? Yes, I've done it one time. Now, let's look at this. Look, those are the four five nights I want it right there. October 4th through October 8th. Check out on the night. So all those nights right there. Look, the gray means that they're not available. The blue, I'm a little bit colorblind. I think that's blue. The blue means that they are available. Okay? So this is what you're sometimes going to have to deal with. Grand Californian books up fast every date, every time it books up fast. Holidays at Disney World, the resorts book up fast, especially the monorail resorts, because everybody wants to see the big Christmas trees and the resort lobbies. They want to see how the Magic Kingdom is decorated for Christmas, all that kind of stuff. That books out fast. Any holiday books up fast. Probably the next biggest one is college spring break and high school. I guess maybe even high school more, because that's younger kids typically. So that's when sometimes that's the only time families can take their kids on vacation to Disney World. Either that or summer, and summer's always busy. So sometimes you have to wait list. So back in when I did it back when we were supposed to go, I had all five nights. Guess what? I had to walk that reservation. That's the only time I ever had to do that. Okay. Now, here's what happens when you're on a wait list. Let's go back to this screen where you see all the wait lists. I would encourage you. Right now, this is a two-bedroom. All these are two bedrooms except for the Disneyland. And as you notice, my two wait lists are for this two nights of wait list is for the same two days that I've actually got a room at Disneyland. And of course, I'll cancel this one if this one comes through. I wanted a one-bedroom villa. A one-bedroom villa is just like it sounds it's a villa, one bedroom, big living room, full kitchen. That's what we like to do. Wasn't available. So the ones I could find, I booked a two-bedroom, which feels kind of silly, but you know, you do what you gotta do sometimes. So I could have would just wait, wait listed the one bedroom, but I have a feeling that's going to be more difficult to book. Now you may ask me, you see, I've got the night that this is check-in date to check out date. Now I've got waitlisted the night of October 5th as one wait list, the night of October 6th as another wait list. Why did I do it that way? Because the long the more number of nights you have in your wait list, the more difficult it is for it to come through. So I didn't care. I booked two separate nights, hoping that if I do it one night at a time, it's more likely to come through that way. Now I want you to pay attention to what I'm getting ready to say. Okay. I have heard. Let me say this first. Let me back up. I have waitlisted four times prior to this. One time it came through. Two times I actually kept checking every day and found what I wanted before the wait list comes through. Now you might say, how is that possible? Why didn't they hold on to it for the wait list? And then the other time nothing came through. So I have heard. I have no way of confirming this, but I have heard if a wait list comes through, they don't physically go in and reassign them until the end of the workday. Or maybe it's even automated. Maybe the automation does that at the end of the workday. So if somebody turns in this October 5th night and it's available to me and it's not the end of the day, well, they might send it to me. They might not send it to me until the end of the day. Whereas if I go in that day and see that night open, yes, it will show as open. They haven't locked it so that nobody could book it. If I see that open, I can book it myself and then cancel the wait list. So you got to deal with that. That actually happened to us. Here's another Hilton Head. They've got a limited number of three-bedroom villas. Not only three-bedroom villa we ever stayed in. I wanted it. I knew at the 11-month window, since that's where my points are, I had a pretty good chance. But I booked it for five nights, extended family, and guess what? Later that week, all of them were gone. Ten and a half months ahead of time. So that's all the things you have to think about. You will sometime go in and want to book something that is very popular, and you might have to wait list. So keep all that in mind. The wait list often comes through. You might find the rooms quicker, have a backup plan. You know, the great thing about always having something to book at 11 months out, book it. If you're at Disney World, book it. And then wait list what you really want it. And there's a feature in the wait list that says, do you want this wait list to replace another reservation when it comes through? And the answer, of course, in your case, would be yes. So that's a little bit about the wait list. Don't be discouraged. In fact, let me tell you this so you don't get scared. If you do what I just did, what I just said, and your wait list comes through and you checked you wanted it to replace another reservation, you get the notice about the canceled reservation first. So all of a sudden, you're gonna get an email that says your reservation has been canceled. And of course, that throws most people into a panic, and then you'll get another one that gives you your new reservation. So don't panic about that. Now look, we're gonna talk about a practice called walking a reservation. Here's why it's very controversial. By doing this, when people do this, it takes away rooms on nights that they're really not going to stay in, which then reduces the inventory, perhaps, for the people that do want to stay in those nights. So I might, I think that's what's going on at Grand California right now. So I'm hopeful that the wait list will come through. So that then means that you, your nights might be available, but the people have booked it for their walking the reservation. I think that's unfair to people that really want those days. If you want a real discussion on it, I mean passionate. I mean posts that have had to be deleted because they were so mean, hateful, and perhaps vulgar. And so, but I'm going to show you how it works, how I did it, and why it's such a problem. Let's say we're looking right at October 2026, and you can tell, let's say we want to stay in October 25th through the 30th. Look, all available. In fact, let's say this. We want to stay October 25th through the 31st and check out on the first. So we're going to book seven nights. We've got enough points to book seven nights. Now, what we know, this is a very hot item. As you can see, all the weeks before that have at least a few days that aren't available. So here's what walking a reservation means. Let's say that we want October 23rd through the night of October 31st and check out on the first. Walking a reservation would mean on seven months before October 23rd, two days before we're actually going to stay there, we're going to book that and then we're going to book it two night. We're still going to book seven nights, but we're going to book it two nights earlier and stop it two nights later. Because those are available. We really want the twenty-fifth, but we're worried that if we wait until seven months before the twenty-fifth, it will already be gone. That's why people do this. Okay? So we could do that. Then we get back on the twenty-fourth and revise our reservation to include the twenty-fourth through the thirtieth.

unknown 14:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

And then on the twenty-fifth, since we've already it it'll it'll hold that room for us since we've already booked that night, we change it again to the 25th to the 31st, and we've got exactly what we want. And it's kind of a way, I don't know if you could call it cheating, it's kind of a way of cheating the system so or manipulating the system, let's use that word, so that you get the nights you want, and uh you're finagling, so you're booking it early to cover the nights you want. So that is what walking or reservation is. You s you book it at first a couple of nights before you really want it, and then go in each day for those next two days and move it further out so that you have all the nights. And it's it does create a situation where you're more likely to get the days you want that way. I've done it one time, it was with this very Grand Californian reservation. I could tell by the unavailable nights that there were so many people walking reservations that if I didn't do it, I didn't have a chance. And sure enough, it worked out for me. So guilty, I do not plan to do that again. I probably, this is probably the only time I ever go to Grand California, and I'll probably stick to the Disney World area mainly. And it's not as crucial there. It is for some people because they want a specific resort. But, you know, I've got 14 resorts to choose from. When I go into Riviera in June, that will be all of them. And then what I'm going to try to do is go to the new resort that they're building in 2027, and that'll be 15. So I I've been to all the resorts. Now, sometimes it's just a couple of nights. In fact, we're leaving on a cruise within the next week. And because we fly allegiant from our area, and it doesn't always fly every day. We're going down two days early, staying at the Disney Resort in Vero Beach, which we love. It's one of our favorites, actually. Disney at Vero Beach two nights before and one night after, so that we can time it to our flights. So that's a little bit about wait lists. I've talked enough. I'm going to stop sharing my screen. I hope I was specific enough for all of you on the audio version of this. And I hope the screens were sufficient. If you have any questions for me, my email address for this is Greg Vacation Club. G-R-E-G vacationclub at gmail.com. And with that, we'll call it a day for episode six. And happy traveling.