Disney Vacation Club has made some behind-the-scenes changes to the manner in which waitlist requests are filled for its members.
Members looking to reserve an accommodation which is not currently available have always had the option of using a waiting list system. Each owner is permitted two active waitlist requests simultaneously. With those two requests, owners can specify dates, resort and accommodation type that they wish to reserve should it become available, presumably due to cancellation by another member.
The process traditionally involved a great deal of manual labor on the part of DVC Member Services. Several times per day, an internal program would check all outstanding waitlist requests against current resort openings, attempting to identify any possible matches. In the event of a match, a Member Services representative would review the waitlist request & hotel vacancy and manually create the new reservation.
The primary drawback to this process relates to the lag time between cancellations and rebooking under the waitlist. Villas freed-up due to a member cancellation would be immediately returned to the pool of available rooms. Over a period of several hours between the cancellation and the next waitlist match, any member could potentially take the room, bypassing the waitlist request entirely.
To eliminate this lag, an element of realtime waitlist matching has been introduced. Now when a cancellation occurs, the waitlist will be immediately queried to see if a request exists for that date / resort / room type. If there is a pending waitlist request, the villa will be placed in an administrative hold pending review by a Member Services representative. Creation of the new reservation is still a manual process managed by Member Services, but there is seemingly no chance of room types which are covered by a pending waitlist request slipping into the general availability pool.
One drawback to this procedural change is that it limits owners ability to recapture their own cancellations in the event of a miscalculation or user error.
In the past, an erroneously-cancelled reservation could be quickly and easily recaptured simply by repeating the booking process. However, now that all cancellations are subject to an immediate waitlist hold, rebooking an inadvertent cancellation may not be possible.
Waitlist requests can be entered using the online tools at DVCMember.com or by calling Member Services directly.
