Slakk said:
I don't get why so many people assume SSR people want to stay elsewhere. But even IF they do at 7 months it is fair game. Oh well. But I doubt that out of 100 SSR people looking for reservation 70 want to be elsewhere - of course none of us can prove or disprove this unless DVC is willing to give some statistics.
I don't, and I agree. The point I keep trying to make is that if all owners want to trade out evenly, balance is best acheived by having all the resorts be a similar size. But DVC doesn't seem interested in the balance the system has - and perhaps they don't need to be. From a business standpoint, its your initial purchase they are interested in securing.
There are doubtless many - and probably most - SSR owners who intend to stay primarily at SSR. The problem is that with so many SSR owners, the few who want to switch make a bigger impact than the few BCV owners who want to switch.
The other problem I see is that while I don't doubt that many SSR owners intend to stay primarily at SSR, many were sold based on being able to book other resorts. With BCV resales going for more than Disney is selling points for at SSR - and dues there higher, my guess is that BCV owners aren't intending to trade out often at all. That will lead to disappointment for some folks who think that they won't have problems booking BCVs (or BWV Standard View or VWL around the holidays or whatever). Now, they could get lucky and not have problems, but I think we are seeing the edges of how fast the Epcot area resorts will book for F&W this year - and it will get worse.
Professional landlords throw another monkey wrench into the works - by booking prime times and renting out the reservation. When they accept point transfers in and the transfer loses its original use year and home resort desigination, it makes the system easy to "jimmy" in favor of the folks running DVC as a business over those that just want to switch at seven months.
I don't see any of this as a problem with SSR owners, or with SSR as a resort. And if they had built 700 units at the Contemporary, I would still think the system was out of balance. And there is no reason to say the problem is with SSR - the argument could be made that with OKW as the first resort, and BWVs as the second, all resorts should have been scoped between those two - and that VWL and BCV are as much an abberation and part of the problem as SSR is.
(Oh and read the post more carefully, the example math is 700 SSR owners and 100 VWL owners, 10% both want to switch. 10% of 700 is 70, 10% of 100 is 10. I don't think that 70% of owners want to switch. The point is that 10% of 700 is a bigger number than 10% of 100).