New ‘Pointsgate’ brewing

[meanwoodwhite]

My understanding is that its all to do with Easter and the "base" year.

The "base" year is essentially the year which all point totals are based. And these point totals are not supposed to change apart from a leap year.

What they have done is changed the base year to a year in which Easter is the earliest it can possibly be, so they are charging a premium for Easter in a season that is historically low on the point chart not lowering points in the season that Easter can fall also.

So they seem to be double dipping on Easter and creating points out of thin air. Which in total is not a massive amount of points relatively but if they can do it for Easter then what is stopping them from adjusting the point chart to benefit themselves for any holiday that doesn't have set dates.

[zavandor]

I'll try to explain the problem.

Let's start with the basics.
For a resort, DVC can sell only the points that are required to book all rooms, all days of a year. (minus 2% that they have to keep for maintenance). Point reallocation are allowed, but they alway have to keep the total number of points needed to book the whole resort equal to the number of points sold. So if they increase points needed in the autumn and decrease the points needed in the summer, some owners may need more or fewer points for their usual vacation, but overall across the whole membership the balance is null.

However, from year to year a small amount of fluctuation is allowed to account for calendar changes.

If a year starts with a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, then there will be a total of 10 week end day in January, otherwise there might be as few as 8. January is a low point season, so those extra week ends cost less than if they fell in August, for example. If more week ends fall low costing seasons then the total number of points to book the whole resort is lower than in a year when more week ends fall in higher points seasons.

When calculating the point charts, months are assigned to seasons, then DVC finds the year when applying that point chart takes the minimum number of points to book the whole resort. That is called the Base Year. The total number of points declared for a resort equals the points needed to book the BY.
Since the BY is the best case scenario, other years will probably need a small amount more of points to book the resort. This is in the order of around 0.05% more points. Which is a small number in percentange but can amount to many thousands across all resorts. Those points create some extra availability that Disney rents for cash, which goes into breakage income. Breakage income is capped to 2.5% of a resort budget and the cap is met at all resorts regularly, so that translate as extra income for Disney.

Until now, everything is legal.

Lately DVC has decided to reallocate points and go from 5 seasons to 7 seasons, most notably, most of April is now in a lower season than March. As we know, Easter floats from year to year and it is in its own highest season.
Previously, regardless when Easter fell, the highest Premier season days replaced days that fell in Magic season. With the new charts, when Easter falls in March, it replaces 6th season high point days, when it falls late in April, it replaces lower 5th season days.
To calculate the new charts, Disney took 2035 as the Base Year, which is the earliest that Easter can fall in the calendar while having most week ends in low point seasons. In 2021 we didn't notice much of a difference, because Easter falls on the 4th of April and the lowest point season starts on the 10th. So most of the Easter days replace days in the highest season. But in 2022 Easter falls later (the 17th) so all the highest Easter days replace lower point seasons. This means that compared to the Base Year, many more points are required to book the whole resorts. The amount of extra points varies by resort and by year, you can find all calculations here, by the user I<3riviera, who has the greatest merit of spotting this problem:

dvcinfo.com/forum/threads/2022-point-chart-cross-check.20301

The most hit resort is Poly with 1% extra points, others are as low as 0.35%. Still all those extra point go into breakage inventory and generate a lot of extra income for DVC (we're talking about tens of millions over the life of a resort).
Was this intentional, i.e. illegal and fraudolent?
It is actually true that March, with spring breaks all over the US, are a bit busier than April. So there is some logic behind the 7 seasons. However there are a number of ways they could have built the point charts to avoid all the extra points. When I spoke with them I suggested they could simply incraese the number of days in lower seasons (for example adding a day or two in the September season) to compensate. They've answered to me that it would be "confusing". To which I replied it wouldn't be confused at all, since they publish new charts every year and it's still better than diluting our ownership.
Others have suggested to lenghten the March season up to mid April or start the lowest sason on the 20th of March.
It seems they're now revising the point charts and they're going to publish a new version that fixes the extra points, not sure which solution they've chosen.

[Mr Tom Morrow]

Zavandor. Thank you for explaining this. I watched the DIS video and got all confused - and bored!

Well done on your intervention.

[2point]

Excellent summary, thank you.