While The Villas at Disneyland Hotel will ultimately contain up to 344 separate villas, not all of those rooms are initially available for booking using Disney Vacation Club points.
When Disney Vacation Club constructs a new timeshare resort, it embarks on a years-long process of gradually adding rooms to the new condominium association. Even with a facility like Disney's Riviera Resort--which is slated to be a 100% DVC facility--the number of rooms available to book using points is loosely tied to the number of points actually sold to the public.
Riviera launched sales in March 2019 and opened to guests in December of that year. Riviera is the 5th largest DVC resort and after 4 years of pandemic-influenced sales, only about 2/3 of its rooms have been declared into the condominium association. The other 1/3 of Riviera is still owned by Disney, who is able to sell the villas to cash guests like any other hotel room.
The initial declaration for The Villas at Disneyland Hotel includes a total of 61 rooms of the following types:
- Duo Studio: 8
- Dedicated Studio: 48
- Dedicated One Bedroom: 1
- Lockoff Two Bedroom: 1
- Dedicated Two Bedroom: 2
- Grand Villa: 1
In simpler terms, presently DVC is only accepting reservations for 8 Duo Studio rooms--on any given Use Day--using points. There are only 2 One Bedroom villas available to members each night--one of which is a dedicated room and the other part of a lockoff which can be booked as either a Two Bedroom or One Bedroom.
This limited availability means that even new owners of Disneyland Hotel may encounter difficulties with room availability. The resort has a rather modest number of One and Two Bedroom villas, and only a fraction of them are currently open for point reservations.
In all, these 61 villas represent 575,037 vacation points which have been formally added to the timeshare program. Through May 19, 2023, filings with the Orange County recorder reflect sales of approximately 60,000 points. Note that it takes several weeks for sales to be recorded, so this figure does not represent all points which were purchased since sales began 3 weeks ago. Nevertheless, it is likely to take several weeks or months before Disney sells more than 500k points to members.
As sales continue, Disney Vacation Club will gradually declare additional rooms into the Disneyland Hotel condo assocation, making more rooms available for point bookings. Until that happens, the other 265 rooms in the new Discovery Tower are available exclusively for cash reservations.
The 2023 annual dues budget for Disneyland Hotel is based upon 72 vacation homes, indicating that DVC believes it will add at least 11 more rooms of various types before the end of the year. Sales of Disneyland Hotel points are expected to continue for several years to come. Members will not have access to all 326 rooms--or 344 rooms, if countining the lockoffs separately--until the final units are declared into the condo association.
Thanks to Wil for assistance with this story!
