DVC Things You'll Want to Do - But Shouldn't

Let's discuss how to best use your DVC points.

Transcript

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Greg Collins DVC for Adults Podcast. Me and my wife were once sitting in the hot tub at Disney's Vero Beach, one of our favorite places to go. You all know that by now. And as often happens when you're sitting around with other DVC members, the conversation leads you to DVC. And my wife actually spoke up first. I was kind of surprised. One of the guys said, you know, what do you own? How many points do you have? And then he's and then we mentioned that we bought resale. So he said, so you all can never go on a Disney cruise. Well, today we're going to talk about how he's right. And more importantly, how he's wrong. So we're going to compare some numbers, and there are things you can do with your DVC points that I'm going, you know from the title already what this is about, that I'm going to discourage you from doing. Some of you will do it anyway, out of convenience, even though you will see hopefully that it's not a good use of your points. You got your points to stay in resorts, and that's where the biggest values are going to come. But I'm going to share my screen for you all. That, well, that sounded deep Kentucky, didn't it? I'm going to share my screen and let everyone that is watching the video version of this to be able to see the numbers I'm talking about. And I again will make sure I'm specific enough to share that for the audio folks too. You are looking now at a chart from the DBC website on Disney's actual website on points required, DBC points required, if you want to trade them in for a cruise, for a Disney cruise. You'll even see here at the top that it calls it the Disney Collection Exchange. By the way, there is a fee if you do this. I think it's$500 at one time it was. It might have gone up this year. I didn't check that, but either way, that's$500 you could spend in better places. So let's check out what the gentleman was saying. We're going to scroll down until I get to a balcony. I call it a balcony. They call it a veranda. I am going to go with, let's look up here. There's a reason I go to the 5A. There are several different categories of that. I'll say the same thing. Deluxe Ocean View State Room with a veranda. And you'll notice you have two, four, six different choices of that. Even, and then there's family verandas too. But I chose 5A because that's on deck 10. That's the the higher up you are, the more points that will be required. And you will see, let me first scroll up and read something to you. This is right here reservation points per person based on double occupancy. So if there's two people in a room and we're going to go to category 5A, you will see that it is 198 points per person. That means, I'll show you what kind of cruise this is here in just a moment. It is actually, we'll go over here. It's in January of 2027. This is on the Disney Fantasy. It is in the Caribbean. And we'll base that when we go over to the cash page. So keep that in mind. 198 points each. So what is that? That is 396 points for the two of you. Keep that in mind. That's a lot of points. I would venture to say I don't own that many points. There's some of you that do, but this would well take a year's worth of points, if not two, to get you on a cruise ship. Okay? Now, so that's the DBC requirement. That is a lot of points. Some people still want to do it that way. They think it's easy. They can go right to the DBC website, pay their fee, and be without points for the next couple of years. Now, boy, it sounded like my sarcastic voice, didn't it? We're going to go over to the screen where I actually went into the cruise line website. This is a five-night Western Caribbean cruise from Port Canaveral. And this just happens to be Pixar Days at Sea. So that's going to be a good one. Disney Fantasy. You'll see the dates are January 29th through 2027 through February 3rd, 2027. It leaves out of Port Canaveral. By the way, Port Canaveral is the main Disney port. I will tell you that we haven't, we really haven't taken a Disney cruise for years and years. But Royal Caribbean also uses Port Canaveral. And if you should happen to have a later flight on your return day, on your debarkation day, the Space Center is right around the corner. So consider doing that. All right, look down here what we're looking at. We're looking at the exact same crews, the same room. You'll see this is a category 5A. There's a picture of the veranda. You've got Adult 1 and Adult 2 both costing$1,775. So two doses of that. Then you got your taxes, and then the total room price, as you'll see here, is$3,789.26. That's how much the catch is cash is worth, or how much it's going to cost you. If we go over here to the other side, I did pick a room on the 10th deck, which is a good one. You will see you have to pay a deposit. These are cash. This doesn't have anything to do with DVC at this point. And if I really wanted to book it, I would proceed to the next step and move on. So we saw that the DVC points for a cruise would cost you 396 points. We see that the cash for a cruise will cost you$3,789. Now, how in the world do we compare the two? Okay. Let's look at 396 points. And if you see me looking down, it's because I'm on my calculator. There are websites. I'm not going to give you their names. You can find them on your own if you search for DVC Point Rental. You can rent your points. Okay. Most of these organizations are starving for points from DVC owners that they can then turn around, mark up, and rent out to people who want to try DVC but don't want to buy DVC. I will tell you this. They will give you roughly$15 for each of your points that you allow them to rent for you. In fact, they have what's called it's called something to the effect of swap points, which means they'll take care of it. They'll find you a cruise that you want to take and then tell you how many points you will need to swap for that. Now let's let's look at this a moment. Let's say that they're giving you 15 points. You know,$15 per point. I'm going to take that cruise price.$3,789? Let's divide that by$15 because that will then tell you how many points you would have to give to this organization to convert to cash and then pay cash for your Disney cruise.$3,789 divided by those 15 points comes out to$25. Let me say that again, divided by$15, comes out to$252 points.$252 compared to the$396 that you were going to give to DVC to use your points for a cruise. You've already saved over$1,000 right there. You would only have to convert about$252 your points to get that same cruise by going to these organizations, renting your points, and instead of using them through DVC, take the cash and book your cruise that way. I hope that didn't sound too confusing. It makes sense in my mind, but I'm a substitute teacher, and I know a lot of times when I see plans on the desk left by a teacher, they knew what they were talking about. And I look at them and I say, What in the world is this? That happens sometimes. But my point is this the best use of your DVC points are for DVC resorts, whether that be Walt Disney World, whether that be Disneyland, Alani in Hawaii, our favorites, Vero Beach, Hilton Head, all that good stuff. That's what they were intended to be. When you start using the points themselves to do other things, well, then you're not going to get quite as good a value. So I shared that with the guy in the hot tub. I said, You're right. I can't use my resale points to get a Disney cruise. They're restricted. Only points that you bought directly from Disney at perhaps$215 a point can be used for that. Not the$77 per point points that I bought. Even though I can use those same points now, rent them, pay cash for a cruise, and save thousands of dollars. I told him that he was a little bit surprised. All he had heard was the Disney Direct uh speech that they gave him when he bought them, how many different things he could do with them, how he can convert them to other things, and that's where he left it. So that's it for today. I just wanted you to know that anytime you're going to use your DVC points for something other than a DVC resort, it's going to cost you a little bit more. You might have some convenience. You might still do it. You might think it's smoother. People can't believe that we book our excursions through the cruise line. It just gives us peace of mind, even though they're much more expensive than finding the excursions on our own when we get there. So that's it. Use your DVC points for DVC. You'll get a better value that way. And I'll see you on the next show.