Well the holidays are definitely coming, even if we haven't spotted a convoy of Coke lorries on the horizon yet! Not long now until we go to the Animal Kingdom Lodge (44 days to be precise), and the even better news is that we've booked out next trip already.
Well, perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration, but we've booked flights. We will be heading back to Orlando for the February 2009 half term, flying from Sunday to Sunday. Ordinarily we wouldn't be able to do this without Jake missing a day of school, as we won't land back here until the Monday morning, but Nicky has managed to get some inside information that the Monday after the February half term is going to be a training day at Jake's school.
Looking on the Virgin Atlantic site on Friday, the difference in price between flying on Saturday and Sunday was huge. If we went on Saturday, the flights for the three of us would be over £2,700, but flying on the Sunday we've managed to get flights for the bargain price of £1,050!
I tried calling the Virgin Flying Club yesterday to see whether we could use our points to upgrade our flights to Premium Economy, but it turns out that we don't have the right ticket type for that, and that to change to the right type would cost us an extra £700. Then we would be able to trade in 60,000 points for the upgrade. Seems a bit disappointing to me. Nowhere in the booking process was it made clear that these flights were non qualifying. In fact the booking screen had the option to upgrade to Premium Economy by paying about £1,000 for the three of us, so to then be told that we'd need to spend £700 before being allowed to use a large number of points to achieve the same thing does seem a little bit cheeky. Definitely one of those "I must write a letter" moments!
We haven't booked our accommodation for February yet. My preference would be to try out the Old Key West resort, as it's just down the river from Port Orleans which we like so much, and it was after all the original DVC location. Looking at the charts we could have a studio for the week for only just over 100 points.
Talking of DVC points we're trying to decide what to do with our "developer points" - the incentive ones that we were given when we joined. They gave us 160, and so far we've used 75 for 3 nights at the Newport Bay Club in Paris, leaving us 85 still to spend, and they will expire at the end of the year. Unfortunately it doesn't look easy to use them for some of our October trip. We've already used our regular points for that, and to swap over we would have to cancel part of our current booking, and then rebook with the developer points. The risk is that if there is a waiting list for our current booking, if we cancel we would go to the back of the line, and possibly end up with nothing.
Not fancying taking that risk, we are considering using 85 developer points and adding 75 of the regular points to book a week next summer in one of the Interval International locations. I think that we are allowed to do that - for the DVC properties I think we have to book and use points by the end of the year, but for Interval International we are OK provided we have booked by the end of the year.
We must call Nicky, our DVC advisor, soon (especially as she did promise to sort out some Fastpasses for us earlier in the year due to some problems we had with the DVC member website, and the related (lack of) customer service). It would be great if Nicky was around in October as we could pop in and see her, and I'm sure she would give us some good advice on getting value out of our developer points.
In other news, work is looking interesting at the moment, following discussions this week about a possible new role for me which might give me some new opportunities. We've got a meeting with the regional boss next Wednesday to discuss further, so we'll see what happens.
Finally, particularly good news from Bec, who got the results of her exams on Friday, and the great news is that she passed, and that there are no more written exams left to do. The graduation date has officially now gone into the diary!! Well done Bec !!