We are considering a week at Club Wyndham Bonnet Creek which I gather is a timeshare property, as opposed to the Wyndham Grand Bonnet Creek, which is a traditional hotel but does not have a good room layout for the family. We are not in the ‘club’ but it looks like you can get a room through VRBO. The prices are all over the place and I’m not understanding why. Anyone have experience with a 2-bedroom that can explaining where costs should be?
I’m guessing because each unit is rented by different owners, with different contracts, prices can vary, but I’d think 250-300 would be in range. We rented a two bedroom at WBC from my sister who owns the timeshare, so she gave us a great deal. But it is a gorgeous resort and the two bedroom is huge with a full kitchen and well laid out. We absolutely loved the pools and there are so many to choose from, including a lazy river and pirate ship slide.
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That passes the gut-check. There are some listed at $350/night with no cancellation allowed. Some at $130/night with full refunds up till a month ahead of arrival. Seems too good to be true.
I’ve never VRBOed at WBC, nor do I own there, but we own at Sheraton Vistana. Our taxes/maintenance/fees end up being about $1200 a year, which would be less than $200 a night, and that’s the week between Christmas and New Years. Someone might really just want to offload their week/points and not care about making a profit.
Shared more details in the thread below, but I paid $100/night for a 2-BR direct from owner using a last-minute rental. One possible factor: the more parties there are in the middle, the more costs there are for the owner? E.g. are the VRBO listings by the owner themselves, or did the owner rent to a broker or agent, who then advertises on VRBO on their behalf?
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For WBC, another thing I learnt while doing the research, is that some owners who have higher tiers of membership (?) are also eligible for free upgrades. Thus, if they watch the inventory and are quick to jump on reservations, they could get a 2 BR for the points cost of a 1 BR for example, and so can offer that to their renters at a lower cost.
Thank you. That is helpful. A couple of the ones I’m seeing are new listings/new-ish owners. They could be trying to establish a history on the platform. Or they could be scammers 
. It looks like the resort manages everything, unlike other VRBO properties, and as long as you have a room, it should meet the standard quality level of all the others.
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Yes, once your name/reservation is in the system.
Once the owner puts your name on the reservation, he/she should forward a confirmation e-mail with your name on it (from Wyndham - don’t think having a confirmation from VRBO would really give you any recourse with WBC).
You can (should?) also call WBC directly to confirm they see your reservation as well. (though I suppose if the owner was truly a scammer, they could always remove you after that, but you could also call WBC again closer to your check-in date to verify).
Just curious, what dates are you looking at? Doing a quick scan of the TugBBS last-minute rentals, I see rates even cheaper than what I paid (e.g. $600/week for a 2 BR; no additional taxes/fees); maybe now is considered the off-season.
Looking November 6-13 this year…half-way off season, maybe.
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Soooo, where is the best place to look into buying one of these?
Oh, that might be a bit far out to get the really good deals right now - apparently within 60 days of check-in is the so-called “discount window” for Wyndham. My recommendation would be to book it somewhere refundable (e.g. Wyndham’s own rental arm ExtraHolidays.com), then check back closer to the dates.
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Not sure, as I never even looked at owning, but just like I found this site when researching WDW trips 
, there are probably equivalent online communities dedicated to timeshares. E.g. https://tug2.net/, https://tugbbs.com/ etc. (in fact, I picked up my last-minute rental from an owner’s listing in the “rental section” on TugBBS, but that’s just a small part of the forum)
Done. Refundable pair of rooms at Pop Century. Will look at this as we get closer to the fall. Thanks!
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I was totally unclear. I meant buy points-or-whatever from an owner. Not buy a contract.
eta: There are some amazing deals in the Last-Minute section of tugbbs site. Like $600/week. My guess is that when we go to Disney in January, everything will be 100% occupancy, and hotel room reservations will be sold by scalpers at a premium.
You can rent directly from Wyndham as well but on there website you can see how many points each week costs for the owner. They take that into consideration when they rent out one of their weeks. A lot of prices are lower right now because people aren’t traveling.
I’ve mentioned this on here a couple of times before but we have rented at WBC twice from vacationupgrades.com which is a private owner who rents out. They worked out well for us both times. It’s about $200/night. No connection to them whatsoever, just a happy customer.
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Yes, amazing value if you can make it work for you! I looked back at the various actual reservations I had for our trip (i.e. same exact dates during Thanksgiving week last year):
| Refundable? | Room Description | Rate | Taxes | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yes | CBR - Water or Pool View - 5th Sleeper | $3,510 | $438 | $3,948 |
| Yes | AoA - Little Mermaid Standard Room | $2,558 | $320 | $2,598 |
| Yes | WBC 2BR - ExtraHolidays.com | $2,400 | $300 | $2,700 |
| No | WBC 2BR - last-minute TugBBS rental | $1,100 | - | $1,100 |
(Note: for the Disney rooms, this was likely the rack rate - we didn’t receive any PIN codes, we don’t have APs, so no 40% discounts etc.). I even cursorily browsed some DVC rentals, but did not see any comparable deals - possibly because it was Thanksgiving week, plus there’s always the Disney premium for being “in the bubble” vs. WBC.
That’s the big question that no one can really know the answer to definitively - factors like when will vaccinations reach critical mass, easing of travel bans/quarantines, international travel - and what will happen with all the pent-up demand. Disney Tourist Blog even talked about the concept “revenge travel”:
That said, one thing you can keep an eye out for is the fact that Disney hasn’t even opened up all of their resorts at the moment, so the demand isn’t there (yet?).
IF the availability is there, the nice thing about the TugBBS last-minute rental forum is that their rules instituted a price ceiling.
Regarding availability, another observation from my experience - just like there might be WDW visitors who casually plan for a WDW trip by checking availability for ADRs or FastPasses once or twice and moving on if they don’t find what they want, vs. Liners who use Reservation Finder, know about same day FP drops etc. 
- it seems like some of the TugBBS points owners know their systems, and how to maximize value from it, more so than other points owners elsewhere.
For my trip, before finding out about TugBBS, I contacted a few of the large owners who rented points (some have have their own websites, or list on eBay). They all told me that Thanksgiving was a peak season booked up months in advance, and that there was no availability. However, I did notice a pattern on the TugBBS listings - there were a few people offering cheap rentals whose listings would expire within 24-48 hours.
My understanding of what’s happening is:
- Reservations for check-in within 15 days or less are not refundable (i.e. owners can’t get back their points from Wyndham), so last-minute availability might pop-up around this window from owners who made tentative bookings.
- Even within the 15-day window, Wyndham allows new reservations to be cancelled within 24 (?) hours with no penalty.
So, the savvier owners would watch the Wyndham site looking for the last-minute rooms to pop-up, grab them and offer them for rent. If they manage to rent them, great, otherwise, they would cancel if there are no takers.
Separately, some of the larger brokers would also post deals for reservations which have already been locked in, but the original renters can’t or no longer wish to travel, so the broker would try to re-rent them at a discount (I think there are similar sites doing the same for DVC rentals):
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Normally I just hit the heart button. But, that was so helpful I had to actually say something.
That price table was amazing - inspiring.
For our next trip, I’m in love with our hotels at Universal. The trip after that this summer is for a convention, so we’ll want to stay at the same hotel. But, for future trip I’ll definitely keep that in mind. We are homeschoolers and taking last minute trips isn’t a problem (outside of 4th quarter)
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Haha, thanks! I had to Google the syntax to do table formatting in Discourse (the forum software).
Regarding the price table, the other thing I forgot to note for the benefit of those who aren’t familiar with the Disney hotels, is that the CBR price was for a single room in the moderate category, and the AoA was a value, so it wasn’t even a “fair” comparison.
Aside from the bubble factor (theming, DME, transportation / walkability to parks, FPPs [though not applicable now]), room-wise, to be comparable to the WBC 2BR with full kitchen, one would have to be looking at the Disney 2 BR deluxe villas (which we did swoon at, looking at the various room walkthroughs on YouTube… but then stopped when we saw the prices).
As they say, different strokes for different folks. Which is a good thing, because if everyone flocked to the same option, then there might not be as many opportunities for offsite deals
Disney is also tweaking things around, e.g. how will the upcoming “Resort Guest Early Entry” negatively affect offsite rope droppers.
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You guys have inspired me. Current plan for our Jan 2022 trip is to get someplace refundable that we’d be OK with and then try for one of those last-minute deals. I figuratively drooled looking at the prices and reviews.
Previous plan had been had to tent camp next to the RV site of some friends that were going with us, but they cancelled. I’m sad DD won’t have friends with to burn off her energy. But, I was getting stressed about getting a campsite reservation.
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