The 12 Milestones in Disney World History part 8; Disney Vacation Club
What is Disney’s best kept secret? Well if you ask them, it is the Disney Vacation Club. But when the doors to the Vacation Club Resort, now called Old Key West, opened on October 1, 1991 few could predict the impact this new timeshare property would have on Walt Disney World. It was a milestone that gets bigger and bigger each year.
Sixteen years later it seems nearly everything that Disney World produces is tied into the Vacation Club in some way, shape or form. Deluxe hotels get their DVC wing, new attractions get a DVC members only preview and you can’t walk twenty yards without seeing a booth manned by salespeople. Two huge resorts, to aforementioned Old Key West and the new Saratoga Springs, have been built by the club and wings filled with vacation villas have been added to four of Disney World’s best resorts all to give more possibilities to sell property.
And if you still think the Disney Vacation Club is a secret and not a milestone, just give it some time. All reports suggest there is a giant new building going up next to the Contemporary Resort dedicated to more villas for the club. When that is complete, for better or for worse, the DVC will become the focus of Walt Disney World again…some secret!
As a member of the club myself, it is also a personal milestone for me and my wife. At the risk of sounding like a cheap commercial, the DVC has made it possible for me to write this blog and has given me more than I could have ever expected, a lifetime of great trips to the Mouse. It makes me laugh when they say “welcome home” upon arrival. I feel like saying, “Home? This is much nice than home!”
Brady Jensen said,
December 31, 2007 @ 7:07 pm
I think we’ll find that DVC is an even more significant milestone as it demonstrated to Disney that it could translate the experience beyond the boundaries of the resorts into other travel experiences: cruises, Adventures, the new Hawaii project… Disney is well on the way to becoming a valuable travel brand.
And on the same personal note, DVC is great fuel for the Disney addiction, and a way to share that with others: we spent a wonderful pre-Christmas week at Wilderness Lodge with my partner’s parents, people who’d never have gone on their own and who ended up having a fantastic time. Count me in on the cheap commercial!
Raidermatt said,
January 5, 2008 @ 2:44 am
Nobody can argue with the success of DVC, though one could ask some interesting questions about what it has done and is doing to WDW’s demographics, and how that impacts the development of WDW’s parks and other entertainment options.
Beyond that though, I think Disney’s ultimate success as a “travel brand” is yet to be decided. Certainly the Cruise Line wasn’t really a by-product of DVC. DVC didn’t really take off until long after the Cruise Line was in full swing. Still, DCL has been a success, though it still is a relatively small piece of the pie, both in terms of Disney and in terms of the cruise industry.
Adventures by Disney is a very small niche, and it remains to be seen whether the idea can succeed on any kind of large scale.
As for DVC itself, yes, Disney is once again attempting to expand beyond WDW, but they have tried this before without much success. Vero Beach and Hilton Head were not the success they had hoped for, and lead directly to the scrapping of the Newport Beach DVC. What Disney failed to grasp at the time was that they couldn’t merely put their name on a property and sell it if it didn’t measure up to the competition. This is not an issue they really face in their WDW bubble.
Certainly they will face it big time in places like Hawaii, so it will be interesting to see if they have learned their lesson or if they are still more infatuated with their brand value than the public.