DVC Newbie here, I bought resale points late last year, but my first trip isn’t until this coming September.
Understandably, much of the discussion on member benefits here is about what you DO NOT get as as a resale buyer vs direct. While those bennies would be nice, I’m very happy with the savings I got vs direct.
My question is: are there any bennies you DO get as a DVC resale buyer over regular hotel room buyers? Disney’s website certainly doesn’t make it easy. If not, I’m very OK with that, but as I’m planning my first DVC-based trip, don’t want to miss out on anything.
Thanks in advance. At T-minus 140 days I’m starting to work on trip details.
I’ve always been a bit curious about how DVC works and find it difficult to digest the Disney Web site. Beyond the obvious difference in a per booking cost, here’s an AI answer (I can’t vouch for the accuracy):
A Disney Vacation Club (DVC) resale owner generally receives more resort-specific and long-term financial benefits than a cash guest, but they miss out on “Membership Extras” reserved for those who purchase directly from Disney. [1, 2, 3]
I will note that although as a recent resale owner you do not get merchandise discounts, there are many, many reports of the discount being applied IF you mobile order in store. I believe you may also need to have MagicMobile set up in your wallet. It seems to be a glitch in the system. There are also some isolated reports of associate members also getting that discount.
Officially speaking, this is true…and yet, almost 100% of the time, I’ve been able to get discounts as a resale DVC owner. I suspect this will likely tighten up more and more as CMs are trained on this.
I never thought of asking AI (and yea, caveats with it are important! ). Given that, it does look like nothing more than the room–again which is perfectly fine with me! What I am getting though is try out Mobile Order with MagicMobile, play dumb, and I may get lucky!
While not an expert, I’ve seen several posts saying that is not the case. You have to have a valid drivers license or something like that. Would be cool if it were though!
In my “what is the maximum discount” circles I run in, this is apparently not allowed.
@ryan1 I have been rejected for the in-person discount about 40% of the time.
I was just at Villas Grand Californian and the parking is super expensive. It was nice to get free parking as a DVC owner. Same at Aulani. Luckily Disney stopped charging for parking in FL, but I don’t take it for granted!
Well, after “assuming nothing”, I found a small discount! I’m not sure if it is on purpose or another mistake.
I got online to get my MNSSHP tickets this morning for our upcoming trip and on the booking page there was an option for “regular” hotel guests and DVC members with the latter being just a tad cheaper, $5 if I recall. I figured what the heck and went along with it and did indeed get the discount.
For the time being, it seems for any “event” type tickets, it will automatically apply the DVC discount even for resale guests. It is, again, something that isn’t TECHNICALLY supposed to be the case, but they haven’t, yet, updated their systems. So, take advantage of it while you can, I suppose!
I was poking around a couple days ago, curious about pricing for tours such as Keys the Kingdom, and it was going to apply a DVC discount there as well as a resale owner.
@ryan1 : Yep, not going to complain! BTW, Keys to the Kingdom is a great tour. I did it a long time ago with my daughter (who became a cast member later), then again just last year with my wife. I enjoyed it a lot. Given it takes most of a park day, you have to be mostly done with all the other stuff you want to do, but it is cool. I do especially enjoy knowing how things work, not just that they work.
I had to check because of course the price is only listed as one of those “starting at” numbers so I tried in an incognito browser and it was more money. But it said “DVC Discount applied.”
). Given that, it does look like nothing more than the room–again which is perfectly fine with me! What I am getting though is try out Mobile Order with MagicMobile, play dumb, and I may get lucky! 
