IMHO, what you write applies to DVC in general.
IMHO, the conversion of WL hotel rooms to DVC (i.e. what started this thread) equally has to do with repurposing unused capacity in order to make it productive.
Once we move past the notion that Disney intends to do nothing to actually fill those empty hotel rooms with
cash customers, converting the hotel rooms to DVC is exactly the right move to make.
WL runs at roughly 75% occupancy throughout the year, including rooms offered at discounted rates. Assuming half the rooms are converted to DVC, demand at current prices will exceed supply, allowing Disney to offer fewer discounts for the Wilderness Lodge. With fewer rooms available to cash customers, the hotel portion of the WL will run at a higher occupancy rate
and at a higher Per Room Guest Spending (PRGS).
Total revenue from the remaining hotel rooms will decline but revenue per available room (RevPAR) will increase, making the remaining hotel rooms better revenue generators on a per-square-foot basis.
Meanwhile the half of the rooms converted to DVC, rather than run at an equivalent of a 50% occupancy rate (again, assuming occupancy was at 75% before the conversion), will run at well over 95% as DVC units.
Although the half of these rooms that were occupied will generate less revenue on a per-square-foot basis, the other half (i.e. the empty rooms) will generate significantly more. Even better, unlike regular hotel rooms, DVC units are counted as two-bedroom equivalents, again improving PRGS. (Essentially, 3 'old' hotel rooms will be counted as 1 DVC unit.)
Simultaneously, Disney will be able to sell the resulting DVC points to extract equity from those converted rooms. The conversion to DVC units might cost roughly $20M but Disney will be able to sell well over 1 million points at ~$150/point, probably realizing something north of $200M in sales, a tidy little profit.
If Disney intended to adapt Universal's strategy and make their theme parks more appealing, they'd want to add hotel room capacity, like Universal. By repurposing these rooms, Disney is signaling that they have no intention of following in Universal's footsteps.
