What is the difference between DVC villas in Jambo House and the Villas in Jambo house you can rent directly thru Disney resort website?
Trying to determine pro/con of renting points or just booking with Disney directly. To me it looks like rooms are in the same area and same layout for 1 bedroom.
Just not sure if the differences between the two routes....TIA......
The rooms are one and the same.
The DVC Villas at Animal Kingdom Jambo House are on the 5th (normal villas) and 6th (club level villas) floors.
At each DVC resort, a small percentage of the points [and therefore rooms] are "owned" by Disney and therefore they are able to offer them as cash reservations directly to the public [they also use them to take rooms out of inventory for maintenance]. They become available to book at between 10-11 months out [seems to be somewhat variable and once they start loading available rooms at a resort they appear to load them in batches, so availability changes as they are loading them into the system*] (this contrasts with room-only reservations for the hotel side at WDW, whose rooms can be booked at 499 days out).
In addition, if DVC owners at that resort trade in their points for non-DVC stays such as a
DCL cruise, those points become available to Disney to use and they can use them to offer the rooms to the public directly.
At some resorts [not sure about if they do it at AKL], Disney does do things like when they rent 2 bedroom villas directly to the public they are always dedicated 2 bedrooms. I don't know if that is a resort-specific policy or something they do across all the DVC resorts - perhaps someone can speak up about that.
So, the rooms themselves are the same. There will be a difference in the housekeeping services you get [daily vs the DVC pattern].
It really comes down to booking directly versus renting points from an owner and the pros and cons of that.
For our family, although the cost savings is appealing, we are not comfortable with the risks and constraints of renting points, so we have booked our DVC stays directly through Disney.
SW
*I spent a lot of time watching the WDW website and how and when it loaded DVC rooms for the public in preparation for our own DVC stays, so I would know when we could book, etc. Not all resorts load their DVC rooms at the same time. Within a resort, not all the room types will load all at once. There can be over a month of variability from when the "first" resort starts to load its rooms for a given date and when some other resorts do [which when I was watching were invariably the resorts I was interested in!]. And the loading pattern is not set. Which for me meant a chunk of getting up early and checking each day when it came time to actually book.