If you don't want the show, go next door to the trail's end restaurant. Same food, but more variety in a buffet and much cheaper. We consider this to be the best kept secret and usually go there twice on our trip.

If you like to say in the deluxe resorts it's worth it. We bought into the polynesian in resale for $140/point. I think the retail is now $235/point. After 8 trips, you'll break even and then it's just the dues. For our family of 5, it's completely worth it. I wish we'd have done it sooner since we go every year.

We go at the end of august every year with 3 kids. Temps are usually 90-96F, but we make it work.

Food packages aren't worth it. You have to eat a lot for them to be worthwhile. I personally don't like eating a half pound burger for every meal. My wife and I both eat kids meals. They're cheaper and we're fine having a turkey sandwich. A footlong hotdog is bigger than two hotdogs combined and only a couple bucks more.

Depends on the resort. https://www.resalesdvc.com/2020-proposed-annual-dues-disney-vacation-club/

Mine are $1300 for 200 points at the polynesian.

With resale, you don't get the full benefits of having the DVC blue card. However, 95% of restaurants and merch places that would have given you a discount with the blue card, will give it to you anyways if you show them in the app that you're a dvc member.

Buying direct would have cost me an extra 20k. I'll never spend enough on merch and meals for the discount to add up to 20k. I'm not at the point where an annual pass makes sense as we only go once per year. You can get the blue card if you buy 100 points direct and the rest resale.

Personally I'm hating all of the paid events that they keep adding that cut hours out of park time. Halloween parties starting in the third week of august. It stinks when you book a trip and then you find that 3 nights of the trip have magic kingdom closing at 6.

I miss the days of extra morning hours every day for people staying at the resorts.

Which DVC did you buy into? We bought 200 points at the polynesian last year and now it's our annual 9 night August trip. We stayed at Riverside a few years ago. I loved the theming and thought everything was beautiful, but it's just too big. We ended up in one of the furthest houses and it was a half mile round trip walk to get our mugs at the main building. It's an enjoyable walk, just not with 5 full mugs. The same when i'd just want to bring breakfast back to the room. Our last couple stays at the Polynesian have been great. I like how it's more compact with easy access to the TTC and boat/monorail to MK. It'll be really nice once they finish the path from MK to the floridian so you can walk all the way back from MK.

Trader Sam's. I absolutely love going there. Awesome bar behind a nondescript door in a hallway. It's easy to miss, but completely intentional.

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I love how the bar interacts with the drinks that are ordered. I need to make a window like the one that they have there.

Late august and early september. That's really it now. They keep trying to fill it with halloween parties though to bring in more people.

wow, that's unreal. I just spent 2700 on 5, 9 day parkhopper + passes.

We've been booked for the last week in August since late last year. I'm interested in seeing how things are handled when they open. However, if there's a mask requirement, I'm cancelling the trip. A mask in 95º heat is a deal breaker.

Right, but that's at opening. I'm watching to see what changes in the follow months. You never know.

It's really no big deal if we can't go this coming summer. Although it sounds like the crowds would be nice. Southwest is allowing cancellations credits to work through the end of 2022, the park tickets that i have can have their date shifted to next year and my dvc points can just be rolled over to the next year.

If the trip happens, great. If not, we try next year.

I'm still holding out on cancelling my august trip. I was hoping the mess would be over by then, but that's not looking like it's going to happen.

These 3 were huge mistakes.

I just dumped all of my Disney stock. I don't see good things happening there in quite a while. Some of the threads that I've been following are painting some pretty terrible pictures for the future if things don't clear up.

Our trip was planned for 8/21-8/31 at the Polynesian. I'll just be rolling the DVC points over to next year, or renting them out. We have tickets from undercover tourist. We've been told that the tickets can be shifted to a new date with no issue. If things are better next year, we'll go, other wise we try again the following year.

I personally don't believe that they should have ever entered China. That's been an issue in the works for a while.

I'm actually hoping that this process gives the company a swift kick in the ass. I think they've been going down the wrong path for a while now. Cost cutting in areas that need money and spreading themselves too thin.

There's actually a retheme in the rumor bin for the hall of presidents.

I loved doing that as well. Give a kid a fast pass as he notices how long the current line is. That was always fun, but now gone.

I see that as bait for an Apple hostile takeover. The have enough cash on hand. I was fearing that when DIS was in the 70's a few months ago.

I was told that my tickets would be good anytime since they haven't been used yet. However, if i use them at a later date, I would have to go to customer service and pay the difference between the rate at which i bought them and the current rate.

I miss buying the 10 day, no expiration tickets, for every trip.

holy crap. Do you have about 2000 points?

The resale cost of DVC is quite low in comparison. I bought a 200 point contract at the Polynesian for $141 per point and the current direct price is $235 per point for the same resort. We tend to go in late August and 200 points is good for about 9 nights. So, after paying for the contract, the dues are your only expense. Our dues are $6.79 per point, totaling $1358. That ends up being about $150 per night when we go.

One of the reasons that we bought at the Polynesian is that we have a 5 person family, so we need that extra bed in the room and it's still considered a studio room and it's not a higher cost 2 bedroom. The Polynesian also has the largest studio room, with an extra shower in it. And we just generally love the being in the resort. It has a very laid back feeling.

Like many others, I have a spreadsheet that I used to determine if this was a good investment for my family. The key is that you have to go to Disney every year, you have to like staying in the deluxe resorts and you should have the cash up front. If you're borrowing the money, you probably shouldn't do this.

The ROI at current rates is about 8-12 years. Disney makes sure that the contracts hold their value by having the right of first refusal (ROFR) on every aftermarket sale. If the price per point is too low, they buy them back up at the low price and resell them at their current rates.

If anyone wants a copy of this spreadsheet, PM me your email address and I'll send it to you. I built it off of a lot of historical data. On average, rooms go up 5.38% per year, and dues go up 3%. Renting points goes up 5%. All of these are adjustable.
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DVC is a big part of Disney, so that's why it'll come up. Depending on how you travel, it can be a huge savings or a huge waste of money.

Well. Princess and the frog sucks compared to song of the south.

Thought I'd switch to a different controversial topic.

We love Trail's End in fort wilderness. It's a great buffet of bbq type food with plenty of choices. It's not too pricey and we go at least once per trip.

I'll be happy when the buffets open back up.

Newsom is single handedly killing the Disney parks.

There hasn't been a positive case traced back to WDW yet that i've heard of.

But most of the people are not from Florida. They're travelling from all over, just as they would be to Disneyland.

You should care as a fan of WDW. What do you think is driving all of the layoffs that are affecting every Disney park?? If Disneyland can't open, then WDW suffers even more.

Run separately, but all units in the same division. Ever work for a global conglomerate? Unit B lost money, so we have layoffs. Happens all the time.

Winston.

A whole lot of truth here.

Masks required for the rest of this year according to the CEO. So this year's vacation is cancelled. Masks aren't bearable when the temperature is in the mid 90's.

On a side note, I'm saving plenty.

With the current restrictions in place and the lower level of magic, I've officially cancelled the trip for this summer. The monorail station at the polynesian is ripped up, trader sam's is still closed, normal park hopping has yet to return, and the epcot monorail isn't running. Perhaps all of this will be sorted out by next summer.

I've seen people pull loaves of bread, cold cuts, mayo and mustard out of a backpack in the tangled rest area. The best was a family that was eating at casey's corner. The parents had food from caseys and then they pulled a gallon bag out of a backpack that was full of water and hotdogs. Like these hot dogs were sitting in the hot water from their hotel? Buns, ketchup and mustard were brought out and the family ate. Bizarre, but perhaps that was their budget.

I'm fit and i eat like a fat slob there. I usually lose 5# in the week. My vacations are also a vacation from skipping carbs.

Holy.... I think the most I've spent for a family of 5 was $6k. How expensive is airfare?

I figure if they remove the mask mandate at the end of summer, it will be a 9/1 date for that slow week.

It's amazing how much the experience has been reduced since then.

I always go in late august, so we trade crowds for heat. After buying into dvc, we're locked in for years to come.

I usually only make one dining reservation and that's for the biergarten. We will always hit trails end too. Both places are buffets and both are excellent.

I cancelled my august WDW. Maybe next year.

I was born in 77. I went in 80, 83, 89...

I absolutely loved it in the 80's. Epcot had just opened in 83 and in 89, we actually had no idea that MGM was opening the week we were there.

World of motion was better....

The problem is that mission space is so one dimensional. Hop on, get some g-forces and done. Nothing that anyone does has any effect on the outcome. Playing with the switches is more fun than the ride itself.

This is where i'm hoping they start adding benefits of on site stays. The on site deluxe hotels are insanely priced now. The polynesian is about $700/night now for a standard room. They should give a couple of Lightning Lane passes per day at that cost. I say that as a DVC owner though, as I'd never pay $700/night for that room

a pittance.

They'll replace anything. I had hundreds of dollars worth of statues that were broken and they sent new ones. I sold the broken ones off as broken/repaired, on ebay.

yours, or your parents?

Just booked the Polynesian for August 9th-19th, for the third year in a row. Hopefully it works out this time.

I've added up our food costs on a few trips and i don't even come close to the cost of the dining plan for a family of five. I think if half of your vacation is eating for the week it might make sense though.

If we didn't own DVC, we'd probably be done

I was actually wondering that too after all of the changes that have taken place

Mission Space and Test Track are garbage compared to their predecessors. After going throughout the 80's and early 90's, I didn't make it back until 2008. What a letdown Epcot was at that point.

Hey, we just drove all the way to Disney from NY averaging 74 mph including stops. What's the first ride to go on? How about a car, but slower and less comfortable.

That's historically the slowest week of the year. It'll be interesting to see how it is this year.

That's when we normally go, but this year we're doing the 9th to the 19th of August. Plenty of time to hit everything without rushing.

What are the downsides of renting? I've done it as a test run of buying DVC resale and it was fantastic.

350,000 Disney+ cancellations in the last week

When eating yourself into obesity became a disability.

Well, compared to The World of Motion and Horizons, Mission Space and Test Track are both a huge letdown.

I don't know if the entirety of imagineering lost its way, or if accounting ruined it. I do know that Disney seriously needs to clean house from top to bottom and get back on the right path.

I was thinking that Apple was going to buy them and spin off the parks division back when covid first hit and disney was $85/share. Apple had enough cash on hand to get as much media creation as they could ever need.

It would have been $150B for a hostile takeover.

If there was a positive thing to come out of Covid, this is it.

It's proof of what a bad CEO can do to a company.

I'm heading there in august with two other families. I'm dreading the whole Genie + BS

I thought the same thing, construction wise. I was thinking that they'd be able to get so far ahead on the maintenance schedules with no one in the parks. They had the absolute perfect opportunity to polish everything up and they blew it. They could have even maintained all of the social distancing rules and still completed a ton of work.

Yet again, piss poor management.

I was thinking that they would bang out Tron, GOTG and all of the epcot changes for reopening. I couldn't believe that they just did absolutely nothing. They sure didn't act like a company with $17B in cash on hand.