I am renting DVC points to get a savanna view room at Animal Kingdom lodge-Kidani village. I was told that some of the rooms are really far from the lobby. Is it possible to have a good savanna view and be close to the lobby?
With renting DVC points can I use the room request feature or do I still need to go through the member I’m renting from?
Check out the TouringPlans room finder tool:
This is a bit of a grey area, as the official line is that you can only do this through Member Services but I have heard that the room request tool has worked for people. I would do both, but making sure that the wording of the request is the same for both methods.
All the savanna view rooms at Kidani have great views. The hallways are long, so ask to be near the lobby it’s that’s a priority for you. Room requests don’t have to be made through Member Services - they just input them into the same system as all the ‘normal’ Disney agents, which is what the room assigner sees when he/she allocates the rooms. They couldn’t care less how the request was made. 
Not strictly accurate.
DVC has it’s own reservation system. The only people who can input info into it are the DVC CMs at Member Services.
The room assignments may be done by the same team at resorts like the Poly, and they can see the requests, and obviously input a room number. Resorts like Bay Lake have their own room assigners.
However a non-DVC CM will not be able to enter a room request into the system. The faxes will still reach the resort and room assigners, but they may not be read, and cannot be added to the reservation.
I disagree. All room assignments are done at the resorts, and are not associated with DVC in any way. This is according to someone I know someone who used to do that job at SSR. Our last trip we did a split stay, AKV the first week and BCV the second. Before leaving AKV I popped down to the front desk and had them add a room request for BCV for us since I hadn’t done it beforehand. The CM added it, no problem.
We used my friend’s points last April to stay at Kidani in a non-savanna view studio. There are a handful of non-savanna studios with views that give you a partial savanna view, which we requested through TP fax service. For what it’s worth, we got our first choice. I didn’t ask if they got our fax so it could be a coincidence.
That CM is at a front desk of a resort with DVC rooms. They could add it for you, as they have to have access to the DVC reservation system because people are checking in.
If you phone the Disney Booking line and ask them to do it, they cannot.
If you rent points, you cannot phone the Disney helpline to do anything with your reservation. Because they don’t have access to do so.