Today I want to talk about the history of the Disney Vacation Club, otherwise known as the DVC. What is it? Well, in short, it’s Disney’s own timeshare program, and its creation was just one more piece of a larger puzzle that made up the Disney Decade.
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By the early 1990s, despite the negative image, the timeshare industry was booming, and as it would turn out, Orlando was the most popular spot for them. In fact, that region alone accounted for an estimated 400 million dollars that were being spent every year. Why? Well similar to places like Hawaii, the weather was ideal for selling weeks in the off-months. There was another reason though: it was close to Disney World.
It was a growing $400 million dollar a year industry right in their backyard, and with plenty of land to spare, there was no reason not to seek out a piece of that pie.
And so in September of 1991, the Disney Vacation Club was born. Now right from the get go, right there, with the “Disney Vacation Club” they were acting on their intention to distance themselves from the negative reputation the industry had. Mark Pacala, senior VP of the DVC said “We’re a vacation club. We’re calling ourselves something different. We are different. We want people to judge by our performance, not in reaction to the word timeshare” and that “the underlying premise of a timeshare is sound. We’ve tried to approach this thing in a manner that avoids problems of the past.”
Sure enough, Disney took efforts to make sure the DVC capitalized on all of the better aspects of the business model without leaning into the unethical practices that plagued it. For one, the DVC is a point-based timeshare program. That means that instead of purchasing a specific or rotating week at one specific resort, you instead invest generally into a “home” resort and in return get annual points that you can use to book at a number of different resorts. You can save up your points for future years or even borrow future points early. Disney wasn’t the first to use such a system, but out of the different timeshare varieties, this was the most flexible.
In terms of selling units of the DVC, Disney initially decided that no gifts would be offered in return for sitting through sales pitches. On top of that the 90 minute sales pitches were also paired with three separate opportunities for guests to leave. In fact, salespeople were even trained to look out for guests who appeared bored or restless so that they could offer them a chance to leave with no questions asked. The process for picking salespeople who fit within Disney’s culture where guest experience came first was extensive, and it took 1,600 applicants before the first 30 salespeople were hired.
Additionally, without specifying how, Pacala said that the feedback guests would give to Disney at the end of their exchange would impact the earnings for those salespeople, disincentivizing them from using uncomfortable high pressure sales tactics.
Disney began selling memberships in September of 1991 and had set aside 51 units of their upcoming Old Key West resort for the program before expanding it to 197 units. By the end of the first year sales of memberships totaled up to almost fifty million dollars. By 1993 another 150 units were under construction with another one hundred and fifty planned after that. By the end of the Disney Decade they had built 2,100 units across seven resorts that included one resort in Vero Beach and one in Hilton Head, South Carolina. In 2011 they opened their furthest standalone DVC resort, Aulani, which as fate would have it, brought them back to where it all began in the US: Hawaii.
The Disney Vacation Club: A Quick History rob plays disney | |
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| Travel & Events | Upload TimePublished on 30 May 2018 |
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