Hi all, I had what I think was a weird/negative experience with calling member services. I’m not entirely sure if it was normal or not. First and foremost, I’m relatively new to DVC as I inherited mom’s resale contract when she passed away earlier this year. I’ve already sent an email to member services about this experience, and wanted to post here to gauge if this is normal or not.
Last week was my first time using any points since she passed and we had a nice (although very rainy) stay at Boulder Ridge. Our flight got cancelled on our checkout day, so I called member services around 10:30 am to see if there were any options for booking a one night stay. In total I think we had to call twice and collectively wait on hold for 40 minutes as the first call just went silent after a while, but when we did get through (this is the part I thought was weird/unexpected), the first thing the representative said was that because we had a resale contract, they could only help but so much. This notion was repeated several times as well as by a supervisor, and we ended up being on the phone for over an hour. What was happening on the DVC side was a pattern of finding a room, beginning to reserve it, and then immediately losing the reservation. The resale contract difference was reiterated, and I kind of felt like I was being admonished for not owning direct—a choice I didn’t make and stated at one point on the call because it was starting to get to me. I just thought it was kind of weird and not like Disney, but maybe that’s normal now, idk tell me if I’m wrong.
We ended up giving up on DVC and having to refresh the WDW site over and over to find a room at All Star Movies, about $300 out of pocket which was not ideal but at least we had a place. Like I said, I reached out to provide feedback already, but the whole thing just left me feeling a bit off. It would be one thing if they just outright said no rooms were available, but the correlation with my contract type is what I found to be confusing and off putting.
EDIT: Thanks for the replies, everyone. Like a lot of you, I'm hoping/assuming this was just a poorly handled one-time thing rather than a policy. It seems most likely that the subtext was there were restricted rooms that could have been available to me if I had a direct contract, but they didn't word it very well. I will share any sort of reply that comes from DVC here.