Disney Vacation Club members love being able to sift through data regarding their favorite resorts and DVCNews has a couple of expanded features to whet your appetite.
Following our major site upgrade earlier this year, we've quietly been working on building up a few other areas of DVCNews.com. The first is our resort information pages. For many years they contained basic details like resort addresses, contract end dates and summary of amenities. Now we have added many new pieces of information to those pages, including:
- Links to legal documents in PDF format
- Total vacation homes
- Expanded details on the number of villas avaialble of each size, type and category / view
- Total number of owners
- Links to restaurant menus
- Links to self-service laundry status
- Details on resort amenities
And much more. To access each of the pages, select a resort from the menu above and click on "Resort Information."
Additionally, for many years DVCNews.com maintained a database cataloguing villas by number for most of the resorts. The database included photos from many villa balconies and commentary from past guests. A series of technical hurdles kept us from replicating this feature following the site update, so we decided to go in a different direction.
The new ViewFinder feature combines 2D and 3D resort images with custom map points, showcasing the view from a number of select villas. The map points are color coded by room size. Clicking on a map point opens a pop-up window containing a balcony photo, description and guest comments for the room.
Note that the map points are not actually rendered in 3 dimensions. In situations where we had photos for overlapping rooms on mutiple floors, we tried to select the highest quality image. Using tools on the map sidebar, the image can be flattened from 3 dimensions to 2 dimensions, rotated and zoomed in and out. You can even scroll to other areas away from the resort to get a better feel for its surroundings.
Beneath the map are some general tips which may help in composing room requests before arrival.
To access the ViewFinder, select a resort above and click on "Maps & ViewFinder."
