DVC Member Cruise: Is It Worth It?

Two questions that I have been asked frequently about my Disney Vacation Member Cruise are:

1. Should you pay cash or use points?
2. Is it worth the extra cost?

Here’s some of my thoughts on that issue so that you can decide for yourself.

Should you pay cash or use points?

First things first, there are restrictions about who can go on a DVC Member Cruise. The cruise has to be booked by a DVC Member (and a DVC Member can book a maximum of four staterooms). Also, Members who do not purchase their Ownership interests directly from Disney will not be able to use those vacation points for the Member Cruise, if they purchased resale after March 21, 2011.

For 2015, there were two Member Cruises offered—one on the Wonder to Alaska and one on the Dream to the Bahamas (or, rather, a double dip at Castaway Cay). For the Wonder, prices ranged from $1693 or 242 points to $7981 or 1140 points per person. For the Dream, prices ranged from $1169 or 167 points per person to $4494 or 642 points per person.

My family of three (two adults, one child age 5) stayed in a category 8B Deluxe Oceanview stateroom for the Bahamas DVC Member Cruise. For our four-night cruise, the cost came to $3710, or would have cost us 530 points. To make that work, we would have had to bank some from one year, use a full year’s worth of points, and borrow some from the next year for the amount of points we hold. Because we live in Florida, we use our points often—it is very rare that we have enough to bank for a year, and so we opted to pay cash.

But let’s suppose the points fairy was kind and we had the 530 points at the ready. Would that have been the best use of our money? There are many privately owned companies out there that rent out DVC points to non-members. At a quick glance at the going rates, the average rental price per point for DVC is around $11 per point. If we rented the amount of points it would take for our cruise, we would make $5,830. When you compare that “point cost” with what we paid in cash, paying cash saved us $2,120!

(And yes, I realize that most people paying cash will take those DVC points that are burning a hole in their pocket and spend them on a vacation instead of renting them out. So in some respects, you are paying for the cruise and then have “free” vacation time with your DVC points. But rental prices are one standard that can be used to figure out how much each DVC point “costs”.)

Mentally, it is nice to use points because you don’t see the cash going away, and so it almost feels like the cruise is “free”. In reality, using points can cost you more, and will deplete your point stash very quickly.

Is it worth the extra cost?

I’ll be the first to admit, when we were reading the credit card number to the representative on the phone (as you have to pay the full amount at the time of booking), I could hear the Mickey on my Disney Visa screaming in pain. As Florida residents, we rarely pay rack rate for anything related to Disney lodging or cruising, and so it is a bit of a shock to the system for that price. To put it in perspective, for the same category of stateroom with the same number of people, in 2016 for the same week, if I booked one year out, the price for a four-night non-Member Cruise on the Dream would be $2975.

So what did we get for that extra $735 going with the DVC Member Cruise?

First, on a DVC Member Cruise, the gratuities (for your stateroom attendant, server, assistant server, and head server) are already included. I know there are some people who say that they don’t like having the gratuities already included because they want to see if the people “earn” those gratuities. Knowing how hard these people work for long hours and lengthy terms of service, I cannot imagine anything that would prevent me from giving them at least the automatic gratuity amount, and generally I add some extra money on the last day as well. But let’s assume that you are doing the standard gratuity. Currently, for a four-night cruise, that is $48 per person for the length of the cruise. That brings the difference between the non-DVC Member and DVC Member Cruise down to $591. To make the math easier, let’s make it an even $600.

Dividing that by three people, it ends up being an extra $200 per person for the four nights, or $50 per person per night.

At this point, you have to ask yourself, do you feel that you get an extra $50 per night of value from the experience of a DVC Member Cruise?

If the ship were willing to stay at Castaway Cay for the entire cruise, I’d be willing to pay $50 for that alone—far better in my view than a day at Nassau. There were also the member gifts, some of which I would have paid cash for outright. (I’m looking at you Disney Vacation Club Clue game!) I don’t know whether it was because there were two DVC Member Cruises offered this year or not, but the ship appeared to be only 2/3 full. Our servers only had our table to wait on during our dinner seating. (That’s right, we had our own private servers for our table.) And above all else, the special member-only activities were worth at least $50 per person per day, in my view. (You can read about the ones I attended in my previous article here.)

In the end, a DVC Member Cruise is akin to a hard-ticket event at Walt Disney World (Mickey’s Not So Scary, Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, and so on). You’re paying a little extra for some things that you can’t do or experience in a typical day. If you are only going to go on one Disney cruise in your entire life, I wouldn’t suggest the Member Cruise, because there are so many wonderful things that Disney Cruise Line provides on a typical cruise. You wouldn’t want to pay extra for the special events and then do the “normal” cruise things any more than you would pay to go to Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party and skip the special shows, parade, fireworks, and trick or treating and just ride the rides all night.

Going on a DVC Member Cruise was a bucket list item for me, and I figured that we’d be “one and done” with the experience. But now that I’ve experienced it, I’m waiting (not so patiently) for the information to come out about next year’s Member Cruise. I can’t guarantee it—but if the fates are kind, you’ll see me on board next year. In my view, the additional cost is more than made up for by the unique offerings of this type of cruise.