Most popular use year?

[raionheart]

I'm planning to get my first direct DVC contract and wanted to get a general idea/survey of the following:

What Use Year did you go with and why?

 

[D-Trick]

The general rule of thumb is to get the closest use year that comes before the month you most often (or expect to) travel.

Travel in...
January? Buy a Dec or Oct.
June? Buy a Mar or Apr.
August? Buy a June.
etcetera.

If you often travel in a month that has a matching UY, buying that UY works too, but doesn't allow any leeway if you were to decide one year to travel at the end of the previous month into the UY month (straddling 2 months).

The reasoning is because if you cancel your trip, you'll still be before your banking deadline.

 

[HawaiianFish]

We bought our first Direct points and chose Dec, but mostly because my brother in-law (long time DVC guy) convinced us that it is easy as it coincides with the end of the year. But honestly, after you own for several years, and bank points and get add-on-itis, I think just keeping the same use year moving forward will be more important.
We travel in February and September, and will be buying Poly2 (speculation) next year and plan on picking Dec again.

 

[pinkxray]

Do you have certain months you travel? For us, I like to go to Disney in Nov. Also love RunDisney weekends which run between Nov-April. I despise summer heat in FL and will not go to Fl between July-Sept. We picked Oct as our use year and I love it. It has worked perfectly for us.

 

[HawaiianFish]

Do you have certain months you travel? For us, I like to go to Disney in Nov. Also love RunDisney weekends which run between Nov-April. I despise summer heat in FL and will not go to Fl between July-Sept. We picked Oct as our use year and I love it. It has worked perfectly for us.

We love Feb and Sept, mostly due to the lack of crowds and added benefit of cheap points on the charts. I agree with your feeling on the ridiculous heat in the Florida Summers, we live just outside of DC, so February gets us some warmer weather, and Florida is nice in late September. However…. We are traveling to the Poly on the 31st of July this year for a brief pool vacation, and to feel out whether we want to buy there next year, but won’t be going into the parks, and this isn’t our normal travel pattern.

 

[PalmettoPath]

The general rule of thumb is to get the closest use year that comes before the month you most often (or expect to) travel.

Travel in...
January? Buy a Dec or Oct.
June? Buy a Mar or Apr.
August? Buy a June.
etcetera.

If you often travel in a month that has a matching UY, buying that UY works too, but doesn't allow any leeway if you were to decide one year to travel at the end of the previous month into the UY month (straddling 2 months).

The reasoning is because if you cancel your trip, you'll still be before your banking deadline.

I'll go with that. We do three trips per year with DVC. Our first trip is in March and we have Feb UY for all our contracts. Works well for us.

 

[LittleBitGoofy]

Do you have certain months you travel? For us, I like to go to Disney in Nov. Also love RunDisney weekends which run between Nov-April. I despise summer heat in FL and will not go to Fl between July-Sept. We picked Oct as our use year and I love it. It has worked perfectly for us.

Same here. We weren't interested in being down there for the summer heat and last time we did Sept it was hurricane trouble, so October UY is perfect for us. October to May is when we go and then skips over the banking four months period of June to Sept.

 

[HawaiianFish]

Same here. We weren't interested in being down there for the summer heat and last time we did Sept it was hurricane trouble, so October UY is perfect for us. October to May is when we go and then skips over the banking four months period of June to Sept.

Totally true about Hurricane season, the last 4 times the parks have been closed due to hurricanes, they have all been in September…

 

[HawaiianFish]

The other reason we picked Dec is that we don’t travel later than Sept-Oct and do travel in Feb, Dec allows us leeway to bank points to the next year if we have have to cancel our fall travel and still be able to use in Feb. However, i cant tell you how confusing it is explaining to someone that our 2023 points are used in 2024. It took my wife a little while to catch on to that, and I’m still a bit baffled at the system.

 

[SaraSpringsIsHome]

We have a December UY at SSR. We own at SSR with a Dec UY because that is what they gave us and we didn’t know any better in 2006?

 

[CarolynFH]

We have a December UY at SSR. We have own at SSR with a Dec UY because that is what they gave us and we didn’t know any better in 2006?

I think that’s a very common situation. I remember simply shrugging when they gave us a September UY, having no idea what the implications might be. Fortunately for us, it’s been the perfect UY for our travel.

 

[FFMickey]

I think that’s a very common situation. I remember simply shrugging when they gave us a September UY, having no idea what the implications might be. Fortunately for us, it’s been the perfect UY for our travel.

Same here, we were given Aug UY and it allowed us to travel in the lower season of Sept. Now its perfect for us, avoiding the heat of summer.

 

[D-Trick]

Do you have certain months you travel? For us, I like to go to Disney in Nov. Also love RunDisney weekends which run between Nov-April. I despise summer heat in FL and will not go to Fl between July-Sept. We picked Oct as our use year and I love it. It has worked perfectly for us.

My much younger self a decade ago was all into runDisney. Just like you, went with October. Perfect!

Fast forward to today, and life changes. Haven't run a Disney event in 5 years, and now we've visted WDW in successive Septembers over Labor Day week. Lucklily, I'm familiar with our travel habits and aren't worried nor have we run into any problems yet. *knock on wood*

 

[MartyParty]

The general rule of thumb is to get the closest use year that comes before the month you most often (or expect to) travel.

Travel in...
January? Buy a Dec or Oct.
June? Buy a Mar or Apr.
August? Buy a June.
etcetera.

If you often travel in a month that has a matching UY, buying that UY works too, but doesn't allow any leeway if you were to decide one year to travel at the end of the previous month into the UY month (straddling 2 months).

The reasoning is because if you cancel your trip, you'll still be before your banking deadline.

I think this is one of the better answers I’ve seen for the UY question. We didn’t fully appreciate or understand UY when we bought but it worked out. We like going in Oct so our August UY has worked. Had to unexpectedly change our plans a couple of years altering our trip to Spring the following year but still within our next years August month.

 

[NY Pirate Princess]

I took this advice about buying with a use year before typical travel with fingers crossed. Our daughter plans to be a teacher so our dreadful August trips will become tradition! Am in ROFR for first contract with a June use year.

The other advice I have heard is if you are starting small and planning to buy more at the same resort, check out the use year spread for the resort. While it does shift a bit there are some small slices of contracts at some resorts. You might strand yourself looking for an impossible match.

 

[tom1944]

I took this advice about buying with a use year before typical travel with fingers crossed. Our daughter plans to be a teacher so our dreadful August trips will become tradition! Am in ROFR for first contract with a June use year.

The other advice I have heard is if you are starting small and planning to buy more at the same resort, check out the use year spread for the resort. While it does shift a bit there are some small slices of contracts at some resorts. You might strand yourself looking for an impossible match.

Same for us. Daughter is a teacher granddaughter is in school so end of August is travel time

The most popular use year is different for each resort.

For BLT I believe it is February.

I own SSR with an August use year and there are significantly more February BLT contracts for sale than August

It is another reason I might buy direct for my 2nd contract. The ability to just get the use year I want.

 

[MartyParty]

Curious, is there a way to find out most popular UY by resort?

 

[Sandisw]

Curious, is there a way to find out most popular UY by resort?

DVD determines how to allocate points to UY and no one knows why they do it the way they do as it’s equally distributed.

Here is some info from a few years go.
https://dvcnews.com/dvc-program/own...ty-of-disney-vacation-club-points-by-use-year

 

[MouseEarsMom33]

We were recently assigned a Dec use year. But I also think it may have been because we would still have access to and be able to bank our 2022 points by the 7 month mark. If I had chosen another month, it would have been more complicated for the 2022 points. I am new, so I could be wrong about this.

 

[Jayunit09]

We based our use year off of three things (we are from New Hampshire)

1. Follows the school year for our children who are young (Sept-June)

2. Being from NH, we would never leave here in the summer months when its actually warm here, and so much to do.

3. We bought at CCV with plans to go the week after thanksgiving or first week of december a lot of our visits.

So we went with September use year. Covers both Feb and April vacation. Easy for us to bank by end of April.