hmcgregoraz
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- Oct 24, 2022
Hi,
First DVC stay since buying our resale AKL contracts. They were purchased for a November trip to WDW, but we had expiring points that had to be used by October, and thus before that trip. I was able to get 4 nights, 1 bedroom at VGC basically right at 7 months using the expiring points for a short Disneyland trip with myself (Dad) and three of our kids, ages 16, 13, and 6 (almost 7).
We arrived relatively late, at about 10pm coming from Universal Studios, which was a very long day as we started with the Super Nintendo land early access at ~7am. Had already checked in via the Disneyland app, and had room key access on both my phone and our 16 year old's phone. We had selected self parking ($35/day in the app, but supposed to be waived if DVC staying on points, the charge never did disappear in the app, but does not appear to have been charged to our Credit Card on file), the bell hop had no issues taking our luggage and having the kids go up with them to the room while I self parked the car.
Overall the early access (30 minutes before rope drop) to the parks, and direct access to DCA were quite useful. My daughter got soaked on the Grisly river rapids, and was able to head back to the room and change quite quickly.
That being said, during the stay we had a few issues...
One of the bedroom phones had the handset plugged into the "data" port instead of the handset port, and thus every time I tried to answer I got nothing. Sales attempted to call 3 or 4 times, and of course woke everyone up who were trying to sleep in after the long day at Universal. I attempted to retrieve messages with the message retrieval button, and it kept asking for a mailbox number, I attempted using our room number, and that was not accepted. I asked at the front desk, and they said it was the first four letters of your lastname, which also did not work. Later when I tried dialing 7000 which was in one of the hand outs in the room it did not request the mailbox number and only required me to press "2" to access messages, and I was able to see that it was sales that had attempted to reach us.
I also stopped by the keydesk to get room keys as a backup to our phones, the room keys worked when I tried them but stopped working the next day. I stopped by again to get another set, and was told by the front desk that they might have been demagnitized. The doors do not use the mag stripe of the key, and are proximity based... The second set also stopped working rather quickly too. Phone app always worked, so not a huge issue by itself.
Went to use the Gas BBQs, two nice grills, higher end 3 burner; I had asked ahead of time, DVC guests need to pickup BBQ tools at the front desk. I went down to pickup the tools, and first they could not find them, then they said house keeping was looking for them, then house keeping could only find ones that had not been cleaned, and it would take a bit until they cleaned them, and then finally when house keeping showed up they could only find a pair of BBQ tongs, no brushes for cleaning the grill, and no burger flipper, etc. It worked, as I like tongs even for burgers, and the grill already appeared to be clean. The cast member offered a resort credit for the time and difficulty with this.
We attempted to use the resort credit several times, by swiping our room keys, which did not work. When I complained about this during checkout I was told that I should have used my phone to charge to the room, no mention of why none of the locations I attempted to charge to the room prompted me to use the phone. I could not find a method to see resort balance/credit in the Disneyland app.
The big issue came during check out. We were running a bit late coming in from Disneyland, I attempted to ask the bell desk for help with our luggage while we went thru the main lobby. The bell hop stated that we needed to call 7373 from the room to request bell desk assistance. I messaged my 16 year old who was already back to the room, and asked him to call for a bell hop and luggage cart.
He called, and was still on the phone when I arrived at the room, and they kept pushing him for a count of the number of bags, well, we did not have an exact count, depending on if I took my laptop backpack with me, or with the luggage, and how many plastic Disney bags combined with each other. Both my son and I tried to tell them the number of bags did not matter, as we were not checking luggage, we just wanted help to the car pull up so that we could load the car. The bell desk refused to help without a count of bags.
I called guest services to complain about this, and they then informed me that someone over the age of 18 must accompany the bags at all times; making getting assistance from the bell desk impossible. I could not both stay with the luggage to get to the car loading area, and get the car from self parking at the same time. I could not leave the car in the loading area to go up for luggage, and I could not leave the luggage with our 16 year old while I went to get the car, if we got assistance from the bell desk, because he was not 18 or older.
In the end we consolidated as much as we could and managed to take all of our luggage down to the breezeway ourselves. By the time we figured out that we could manage the luggage ourselves it was past 11am, and the app would no longer let us check out. I attempted to call guest services, and waited several minutes, without getting through to anyone, and we decided to stop at guest services with all of our luggage and see why we could not check out. We were told that we were auto checked out at 11am, and we also were informed that the parking fee had been removed (though it still shows in the app). Guest services offered to see what the bell desk could do but it was kinda pointless by that point. The kids and I got the luggage to the breezeway to wait while I went to get the car from self parking
Guest Services could not explain to me why it was perfectly OK for the luggage and kids to go up to the room with a bell hop, but not permissible for the kids (even oldest) to come down from the room with a bell hop, and they could not explain why the bell desk was so insistent on a count of the number of bags to just help us to the car pull up. It almost felt like this was "punishment" for using self parking vs valet parking, as there is no way for a single adult traveling party to both use self parking and get luggage assistance with this policy.
Overall this experience left a VERY bad impression of VGC. Some of this could be due to it being our first DVC stay, but many parts seem to be overall issues with the resort.
We have been considering a direct purchase of VDH and that is now on hold until after we have more DVC experiences. We have a VGF and AKL reservation set for our first WDW trip and will see how well that goes. We will have 3 additional adults with us, so that should give additional flexibility.
We also own a relatively large resale WorldMark membership and overall for Disneyland we see far more value in WorldMark vs DVC. We know WDW is a different ball game, and being on property is even more important.
-Harry
First DVC stay since buying our resale AKL contracts. They were purchased for a November trip to WDW, but we had expiring points that had to be used by October, and thus before that trip. I was able to get 4 nights, 1 bedroom at VGC basically right at 7 months using the expiring points for a short Disneyland trip with myself (Dad) and three of our kids, ages 16, 13, and 6 (almost 7).
We arrived relatively late, at about 10pm coming from Universal Studios, which was a very long day as we started with the Super Nintendo land early access at ~7am. Had already checked in via the Disneyland app, and had room key access on both my phone and our 16 year old's phone. We had selected self parking ($35/day in the app, but supposed to be waived if DVC staying on points, the charge never did disappear in the app, but does not appear to have been charged to our Credit Card on file), the bell hop had no issues taking our luggage and having the kids go up with them to the room while I self parked the car.
Overall the early access (30 minutes before rope drop) to the parks, and direct access to DCA were quite useful. My daughter got soaked on the Grisly river rapids, and was able to head back to the room and change quite quickly.
That being said, during the stay we had a few issues...
One of the bedroom phones had the handset plugged into the "data" port instead of the handset port, and thus every time I tried to answer I got nothing. Sales attempted to call 3 or 4 times, and of course woke everyone up who were trying to sleep in after the long day at Universal. I attempted to retrieve messages with the message retrieval button, and it kept asking for a mailbox number, I attempted using our room number, and that was not accepted. I asked at the front desk, and they said it was the first four letters of your lastname, which also did not work. Later when I tried dialing 7000 which was in one of the hand outs in the room it did not request the mailbox number and only required me to press "2" to access messages, and I was able to see that it was sales that had attempted to reach us.
I also stopped by the keydesk to get room keys as a backup to our phones, the room keys worked when I tried them but stopped working the next day. I stopped by again to get another set, and was told by the front desk that they might have been demagnitized. The doors do not use the mag stripe of the key, and are proximity based... The second set also stopped working rather quickly too. Phone app always worked, so not a huge issue by itself.
Went to use the Gas BBQs, two nice grills, higher end 3 burner; I had asked ahead of time, DVC guests need to pickup BBQ tools at the front desk. I went down to pickup the tools, and first they could not find them, then they said house keeping was looking for them, then house keeping could only find ones that had not been cleaned, and it would take a bit until they cleaned them, and then finally when house keeping showed up they could only find a pair of BBQ tongs, no brushes for cleaning the grill, and no burger flipper, etc. It worked, as I like tongs even for burgers, and the grill already appeared to be clean. The cast member offered a resort credit for the time and difficulty with this.
We attempted to use the resort credit several times, by swiping our room keys, which did not work. When I complained about this during checkout I was told that I should have used my phone to charge to the room, no mention of why none of the locations I attempted to charge to the room prompted me to use the phone. I could not find a method to see resort balance/credit in the Disneyland app.
The big issue came during check out. We were running a bit late coming in from Disneyland, I attempted to ask the bell desk for help with our luggage while we went thru the main lobby. The bell hop stated that we needed to call 7373 from the room to request bell desk assistance. I messaged my 16 year old who was already back to the room, and asked him to call for a bell hop and luggage cart.
He called, and was still on the phone when I arrived at the room, and they kept pushing him for a count of the number of bags, well, we did not have an exact count, depending on if I took my laptop backpack with me, or with the luggage, and how many plastic Disney bags combined with each other. Both my son and I tried to tell them the number of bags did not matter, as we were not checking luggage, we just wanted help to the car pull up so that we could load the car. The bell desk refused to help without a count of bags.
I called guest services to complain about this, and they then informed me that someone over the age of 18 must accompany the bags at all times; making getting assistance from the bell desk impossible. I could not both stay with the luggage to get to the car loading area, and get the car from self parking at the same time. I could not leave the car in the loading area to go up for luggage, and I could not leave the luggage with our 16 year old while I went to get the car, if we got assistance from the bell desk, because he was not 18 or older.
In the end we consolidated as much as we could and managed to take all of our luggage down to the breezeway ourselves. By the time we figured out that we could manage the luggage ourselves it was past 11am, and the app would no longer let us check out. I attempted to call guest services, and waited several minutes, without getting through to anyone, and we decided to stop at guest services with all of our luggage and see why we could not check out. We were told that we were auto checked out at 11am, and we also were informed that the parking fee had been removed (though it still shows in the app). Guest services offered to see what the bell desk could do but it was kinda pointless by that point. The kids and I got the luggage to the breezeway to wait while I went to get the car from self parking
Guest Services could not explain to me why it was perfectly OK for the luggage and kids to go up to the room with a bell hop, but not permissible for the kids (even oldest) to come down from the room with a bell hop, and they could not explain why the bell desk was so insistent on a count of the number of bags to just help us to the car pull up. It almost felt like this was "punishment" for using self parking vs valet parking, as there is no way for a single adult traveling party to both use self parking and get luggage assistance with this policy.
Overall this experience left a VERY bad impression of VGC. Some of this could be due to it being our first DVC stay, but many parts seem to be overall issues with the resort.
We have been considering a direct purchase of VDH and that is now on hold until after we have more DVC experiences. We have a VGF and AKL reservation set for our first WDW trip and will see how well that goes. We will have 3 additional adults with us, so that should give additional flexibility.
We also own a relatively large resale WorldMark membership and overall for Disneyland we see far more value in WorldMark vs DVC. We know WDW is a different ball game, and being on property is even more important.
-Harry
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