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Post by helenabear on May 5, 2024 19:07:11 GMT -5
Plus, leaving aside the financial considerations, I find I'm totally offended by the resale restrictions. I just want no part of them. I am not actually offended by them. They make complete sense from DVC's standpoint, and other TS companies do the same thing. It's hard for me to be offended by such a "duh" action as trying to make your main sale more attractive. With that said, I certainly don't like them. If I did not own grandfathered resale these would disadvantage me, and I'm not in favor of things that disadvantage me, whether or not they are logical things to do. But I'm hard-pressed to be offended by a sound business decision. (And I don't think it's the resale restrictions that are tanking the cabin sales, so I still see this as a wise business decision.) It's much the same as my not being offended by the charge for G+ when FP+ used to be free. It disadvantages me, so I don't pay for it. But it's a smart decision, one that was obvious for some time, so I'm not at all offended.
Cheers. The thing is Disney used to market themself as not just another timeshare place. By doing restrictions they made little distinction. I wouldn't say they are offensive but they sure watered down the product.
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Post by MinnieMom on May 5, 2024 20:50:06 GMT -5
Having a preview cabin probably will help with sales. Still, the issues with the CFW are real. No matter what a DVC exec might say. The biggest single issue for me are the high MFs. And high purchase price, but it's really the annual fees that are the non-starter. Also, I don't love the cabin floorplan. CFW would be better with just a king bed in the bedroom and a small bunk room. I can see lack of W/D in a one bedroom being a problem for current DVC owners. I doubt that's really an issue for perspective first time buyers.
On the other hand, I love the campground and the point chart for the cabins. Still, I am not willing to risk those MFs. So here's hoping 7 month availability will be decent over the years.
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Post by tomandrobin on May 7, 2024 6:44:27 GMT -5
At this point, you have three options for adding Poly. 1. Buy when presales start.....it will be the best pricing over the course of active sales. 1. Or wait until Poly sells out and resale prices drop a gain. 3. Give up and buy a resale at another resort.
Well 1 & 2 are options. 3 isn't really. 1 is looking to be a better option. A 100 pt contract has lasted 2 days for June UY. No 2024 points. $170/point. I can wait ![:P](http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn46/Loubon/Smileys/tongue.gif) Just a FYI, they waitlist for sales of the Poly Tower is huge.
Resales of Poly will be high and ROFR of Poly will be ongoing......you are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
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Post by tomandrobin on May 7, 2024 6:47:57 GMT -5
I feel that Cabins were at the end of life and needed to be replaced. Management was sold the idea of making the new cabins DVC, so that Disney would not have to pay the cost for the cabins and related work. As a bonus, DVC will be now sharing the costs for upkeep, maintenance, amenities and staff.
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Post by helenabear on May 7, 2024 6:58:39 GMT -5
Well 1 & 2 are options. 3 isn't really. 1 is looking to be a better option. A 100 pt contract has lasted 2 days for June UY. No 2024 points. $170/point. I can wait ![:P](http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn46/Loubon/Smileys/tongue.gif) Just a FYI, they waitlist for sales of the Poly Tower is huge.
Resales of Poly will be high and ROFR of Poly will be ongoing......you are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The day after it was announced I had a call from my guide. I told him to add me that day. He's been great and never bugged me about other resorts knowing. I am not as bad as some. I already own at PVB. This is just to get me from 1 bedrooms to 2 every other year. Nothing is a need. A new June UY came up this morning but it's Bee Thaxton's business. I cannot stand her. Still pondering though.
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Post by helenabear on May 7, 2024 7:00:10 GMT -5
I feel that Cabins were at the end of life and needed to be replaced. Management was sold the idea of making the new cabins DVC, so that Disney would not have to pay the cost for the cabins and related work. As a bonus, DVC will be now sharing the costs for upkeep, maintenance, amenities and staff. I still wonder who in DVD thought that was smart. Or maybe the had no choice and will be stuck with it.
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Post by dlwdwdvc on May 7, 2024 7:09:53 GMT -5
Sorry there is so much negative comments . I am getting ready to check in today and am so excited about everything the Fort has to offer. Including the golf carts. If you stay there just once you will understand firsthand why the maintenance fees are going to be high . That location is not easy to keep rustic apparently. I guarantee there will be a day when we all wish we had bought a piece of the Wilderness that Walt Disney personally wanted for his guests to experience ! Just add it to the long list of vacations that you are not going to experience any where else.
I do agree they made a mistake with the Cabin design.
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Post by helenabear on May 7, 2024 7:20:12 GMT -5
Sorry there is so much negative comments . I am getting ready to check in today and am so excited about everything the Fort has to offer. Including the golf carts. If you stay there just once you will understand firsthand why the maintenance fees are going to be high . That location is not easy to keep rustic apparently. I guarantee there will be a day when we all wish we had bought a piece of the Wilderness that Walt Disney personally wanted for his guests to experience ! Just add it to the long list of vacations that you are not going to experience any where else. I do hope you enjoy! My first WDW trip was at the campgrounds though in a pop up camper more than a couple of decades ago. I actually understand why the fees will be high. Single modular buildings with a defined shelf life. I get why some will like it. Me? My camping days are done. I've done it and I prefer visits for a few hours. The disdain is for the selling price et al and how it fits with DVC. Nothing else. I know many will enjoy their stays but not the same as sales ![:)](//storage.proboards.com/7235170/images/S0OjRwk0LKkNgGTnftUu.gif)
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Post by dlwdwdvc on May 7, 2024 7:51:13 GMT -5
I do understand and have been all over the place with similar thoughts and can be quite negative about Disney frequently. I just hope my grandchildren will enjoy it someday … They are already traveling around the World with parents Perhaps they will scoff at the cabins especially since they stayed in an AirStream at a National Park! Oh well . I just have to believe the renovation and modern aesthetic will create a love for Nature and the responsibility for a Future . Hopefully it is not too late .
Sounds crazy but I wish it would rain this trip in the Cabins for something different . And we need rain ..
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Post by tomandrobin on May 7, 2024 8:20:28 GMT -5
I saw on DVC News that DVC has declared 33 more cabins. This makes sense because DVC is seeing demand to rent or use the cabins, but not buy. By making more inventory available to existing DVC owners, they are hoping this will help sales.
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Post by tomandrobin on May 7, 2024 8:23:52 GMT -5
Sorry there is so much negative comments . I am getting ready to check in today and am so excited about everything the Fort has to offer. Including the golf carts. If you stay there just once you will understand firsthand why the maintenance fees are going to be high . That location is not easy to keep rustic apparently. I guarantee there will be a day when we all wish we had bought a piece of the Wilderness that Walt Disney personally wanted for his guests to experience ! Just add it to the long list of vacations that you are not going to experience any where else. I do agree they made a mistake with the Cabin design. I have fun on your Ft Wilderness stay.
There will never be a day that I had wished to buy into the Cabins at Ft Wilderness.....never!
If Reflections comes back out of hibernation, and they go with the original plans, I might add-on that resort. For the record, Reflections is not 100% gone and can still be built.
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Post by jawfish on May 7, 2024 8:52:27 GMT -5
Not surprising. Too expensive for what you get. Poly expansion will sell a ton of points I would think. Time will tell. Prices are starting to get high enough in this economy they are really shutting out a lot of people.
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Post by MinnieMom on May 7, 2024 9:02:36 GMT -5
I feel that Cabins were at the end of life and needed to be replaced. Management was sold the idea of making the new cabins DVC, so that Disney would not have to pay the cost for the cabins and related work. As a bonus, DVC will be now sharing the costs for upkeep, maintenance, amenities and staff. The old cabins are for sale on the open market. I've looked at them several times, as the nostalgia of having authentic former Disney Fort Wilderness Cabins at Standing Pines tugs at me. But these used cabins are going for $50,000 each. That's a lot for something that may well have been considered at end of life for a Disney property. For more or less the same cost as an used FW cabin after shipping costs are added, we could buy a brand new, two-bedroom actual log cabin. Here's my current favorite vendor. If you want to play with simple yet very effective floorplan ideas for these cabins, they have several to explore. Back to the used FW cabins - based on a number of conversations, I think Disney sold off the used cabins to essentially wholesalers who are then marking up the price. So I very much doubt Disney sold them for the $50k each. I suspect WDW was much more interested in working with a company large enough to remove these on the Disney timeline. And that brings me back to the dealbreaker for me for buying CFW. I would love to own at the campground. But when basic napkin math suggests that the MFs for one cabin equate to buying a brand new cabin every single year, I just can't get there. I very much suspect Fort Wilderness has been a cash cow for Disney for decades. Just for the sake of illustration, let's suppose that FW has 800 campsites plus 400 cabins, with 350 of the cabins transitioning to DVC. Just to keep the math simple, let's suppose the cabins used to go for an average of $400 per night and the campsites an average of $100 per night. So rental income alone for the campground at say 80% average occupancy would be: (($400 * 400)+($100 * 800)*365)/(365*80%) = $70,080,000, excluding any additional revenue such as merch sales, activity fees, etc. Converting 350 of those nice revenue producing cabins drops the rental revenue for the campground to roughly $30 million per year for the remaining 50 cabins and 800 campsites. If ancillary revenue (merch, activities, etc.) is at least 50% of revenue, that's still $45 million per year for Fort Wilderness even with all 350 DVC cabins taken out of the equation. Finding employment data on the Disney resorts is a challenge. So I pulled staffing numbers from Ocean Lakes campground in Myrtle Beach, the largest campground on the East Coast. It has 859 campsites plus 2,569 rental houses. At the height of the summer camping season, Ocean Lakes employees a total of 550 employees for more than 3x the total number of rentals as Fort Wilderness. So let's further assume that FW maintains 400 employees all year at an average of $100,000 per year per employee. That's $40 million per year in staffing costs. Other large expenses for the campground will be utilities and whatever fees they pick up as part of general WDW services (boats, roads, other infrastructure, overhead, etc). For giggles, let's assume all in, the costs for operating Fort Wilderness is in the neighborhood of $60 million per year. So prior to DVC, Fort Wilderness profit may have been somewhere around $15 million per year if the long chain of assumptions above are anywhere near the right estimate. After DVC, the campground will need those 350 cabins to generate just over $40 million per year to bring in the same revenue as they did prior to DVC. At roughly $50,000 per year in MFs per cabin times 350 cabins, that's $17.5 million per year in MFs. That's a shortfall of over $23 million per year. Sure, I would expect Disney accountants using actual real numbers of revenue and cost factored all of this into pricing the purchase price and MFs for CFW. So together I would suspect that it offsets whatever the actual numbers have been. Perhaps slow sales at CFW don't matter to Disney overall. Perhaps those unsold points / undeclared inventory of points wind up being essentially used by Disney as cash rentals pulling in approximately the same profit they did prior to DVC. Because this whole analysis is based on high average annual occupancy. If the cabins were not at the 80% I'm assuming, then the whole analysis changes in favor of the DVC model for the cabins. Then, it makes much more financial sense as a business decision to move these to DVC to drive occupancy higher due to the sunk cost nature of DVC ownership. Here's my opinion: inflation will continue to be an issue. Once the cabins are converted to DVC, the only easy way to deal with inflation is to increase MFs. Therefore I suspect that owners at CFW will see escalating increases in MFs over time. That's the bottom line reason I will not buy CFW points. All the rest of this extra long post is simply entertainment. MFs are too high and I see far too great a risk they continue rising over time.
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Post by helenabear on May 7, 2024 9:04:18 GMT -5
I do understand and have been all over the place with similar thoughts and can be quite negative about Disney frequently. I just hope my grandchildren will enjoy it someday … They are already traveling around the World with parents Perhaps they will scoff at the cabins especially since they stayed in an AirStream at a National Park! Oh well . I just have to believe the renovation and modern aesthetic will create a love for Nature and the responsibility for a Future . Hopefully it is not too late . Sounds crazy but I wish it would rain this trip in the Cabins for something different . And we need rain .. I hope it does rain! I could see a rainy cabin stay being fun! We actually added on at CCV because we liked being able to walk to Ft. Wilderness (darn it please finish repaving the path and let us get it back!!!). I love nature in general and I think the campground is a special place. It will always hold a special place in my heart. If they had added a washer and dryer I'd consider it more. We don't love sharing a queen, but no big, I could roll over to a bunk bed LOL but lack of laundry makes this impractical for us. Golf carts are fun. I nearly bought a street legal one for my area but went a different direction. I used to drive them in college all the time while helping to install expensive racks & switches during summer months as we upgraded the entire university's internet infrastructure.
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Post by MinnieMom on May 7, 2024 9:31:48 GMT -5
dlwdwdvc and helenabear - Fort Wilderness is great! It is not a fit for many DVC / MO owners, but that's nothing against the campground. Instead, I see it as a compliment to WDW for having such a strong array of options for guests to enjoy.
And yet, I still don't think the math makes buying CFW a good choice. I could be wrong. Time will tell, either way. And either way, I'll still happily continue camping at the Fort!
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