The 11-Month Home Resort Advantage: When It's Worth Paying For

Home resort priority at the 11-month booking window is DVC's most valuable benefit. Here's when it's essential and when it's wasted.

What Home Resort Priority Means

Eleven months before check-in, your home resort opens for booking exclusively to members who own there. The 7-month window — when all DVC members can compete — comes four months later. Those four months are the difference between "guaranteed booking" and "hope and waitlist" for high-demand rooms.

Resorts Where 11 Months Is Essential

Polynesian Bungalows, Beach Club Studios, Boulder Ridge Cabins, Bay Lake Tower Theme Park View Studios, Animal Kingdom Value Studios, Grand Floridian Resort Studios, BoardWalk Standard View Studios, and Riviera Tower Studios all routinely sell out at the 11-month window. If your heart is set on any of these, buying that home resort is the only reliable way to book them year after year.

Resorts Where 11 Months Doesn't Matter Much

Saratoga Springs and Old Key West have so much inventory that even 7-month booking is almost always successful. Buying these as your home resort gives you 11-month priority that you almost never need. The upside is they're also the cheapest resale resorts — perfect for members who want low-cost points without caring about priority.

Holiday Week Reality

Christmas week, Easter week, Marathon Weekend, and Food & Wine peak weekends fill at the 11-month window across most DVC resorts. If you specifically need a holiday week, home resort priority becomes critical at every resort, not just the famously hard ones.

Buying Multiple Home Resorts

Many serious members own at 2–3 resorts to lock in priority at each. A common combo: a small contract at Beach Club for Food & Wine trips plus a larger contract at Saratoga Springs for general use. Multiple small contracts can be split across use years intentionally to create quarterly point deposits.

When Direct Helps with Home Resort

Buying direct at a new resort like Riviera or Cabins at Fort Wilderness is sometimes the only way to get any contract there — resale supply at brand-new resorts is thin for the first few years. Pay the premium only if 11-month priority at that specific resort is genuinely valuable to your travel pattern.