Disney Vacation Club Timeshare Closing Doors on its Mall Locations
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Since August of 2007, Disney Vacation Club has maintained a storefront at the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Illinois. Known as Disney Doorway to Dreams, this storefront provided a portal to the Disney timeshare ownership experience for shoppers at one of the largest malls in the Chicago area. But last week the Disney Vacation Club timeshare store at the mall closed its doors for the last time. Officially closed on September 14, even the giant statue of Pluto running into the store is now gone; he’s headed for Orlando where he will appear at a DVC kiosk at the Downtown Disney entertainment area.
In November, the only other DVC mall location in the US, the Doorway to Dreams store at Roosevelt Field in Garden City, New York, will also close. This Long Island location first opened in October, 2009.
While these two mall DVC outposts were operational, Disney timeshare owners were able to preview a full scale model of a two-bedroom Disney timeshare villa. In both locations, the storefront space was so big, at 6,300 square feet in the Chicago location and 6,900 square feet at the Long Island location, that the spacious Disney timeshare model occupied less than a quarter of the Disney Doorway to Dreams total floor space.
When Doorway to Dreams first opened, the 2-bedroom, 3-bath model was an exact replica of Kidani Village at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Villas. In 2008, the model was refurbished to replicate a villa at Bay Lake Tower at Disney’s Contemporary Resort. In both cases the replications were identical to actual DVC timeshares down to the bed linens, appliances, and even the toiletries. The only deviance occurred when it came time to represent a timeshare at Bay Lake Tower, as the rectangular model couldn’t replicate the curved walls that are distinctively part of the Bay Lakes Tower design.
The Role of Disney Vacation Club Timeshare Outposts
Disney Vacation Club “stores” were more than regional outposts for selling DVC timeshare points. Rich with Disney’s engaging design, consummate customer service, and sometimes, even Disney entertainment, these centers offered an oasis for Disney fans who needed to feel a little magic.
Only the timeshare vacation experts at Disney know how successful these locations were for selling DVC timeshare. Apparently whatever level of sales the centers achieved it wasn’t sufficient to justify keeping the locations open. Disney timeshare is not undergoing hard times.
Closing these two locations is bound to be a simple matter of dollars and cents. Yet there is no doubt, that thousands of people have walked through the doors on snowy days in New York and Chicago and felt the need to escape to the sunny skies of a Disney vacation. Maybe they didn’t become Disney Vacation Club members that day, maybe they never did but chose to vacation at a Disney resort. Sometimes tracking the moment a buying decision begins is difficult to do. But one thing is for sure, the slice of Disney magic created by the Disney Doorway to Dreams locations is certain to be missed by mall goers in the future.
Past news from The Timeshare Authority blog:
