Is it too late to sign up? Is it ever too early to sign up?
The short answer to both of those questions is “no.”
A lot of people ask us how far in advance they need to sign up. Maybe they assume that there is some sort of 30 day deadline or something like that. That if they leave it until the last minute, they won’t be able to sign up for Owner’s Locker. Not true.
It won’t surprise you to learn that we want to make it easy for people to become Members of Owner’s Locker. If someone is on vacation, sees our van or someone carrying a Locker and thinks, “Gee, I need one of those,” we don’t want them to have to wait until their next trip to WDW.
So you can sign up for Owner’s Locker anytime---even if you’re already at your resort in Orlando and we’ll have your Locker to your resort the next day at the latest. We get a lot of calls from people while they are on vacation and I love signing people up over the phone from their room. My favorite story, though is the day I saw Brian flying out the door with an empty Locker saying he would explain later. He'd gotten a call from a Member who was in the parking lot of their resort about to head for the airport when they realized they needed another Locker pronto. Brian to the rescue.
It’s not just a quest for Members that’s involved here, though. The whole point behind Owner’s Locker is convenience and treating people the way WE would like to be treated.
When we were building our systems, Brian and I discussed the issue of deadlines and decided that we just wouldn’t have any. After all, we are dealing with people’s vacations. And we both hate that “gotcha” feeling you get when you wind up paying a penalty because a deadline was missed.
The issue really came up as we discussed what the cutoff time would be for scheduling and changing Visits. Should Members have to tell us ___ days in advance for us to have their Locker waiting for them? Well, we looked at each other and both said, “no.” That’s one of the reasons we use bar codes and have a highly sophisticated scheduling and tracking system. We think you should be able to tell us about a Visit any time—even if you’re already at your resort. And we feel that you should be able to modify your Visit at any time as well. Plans change, waitlists come through, people change resorts. And we didn’t think it was fair to charge people extra for last minute changes. We just pushed the developers to come up with a system to handle all of these possibilities.
And once we had this capability built for Visits, it was easy to use it for signing up as well. So sign up any time you want!
But are we sure that new Members don’t have to give us 30 days notice? Yes we are sure…..but I’ll tell you where that 30 days comes in…..and it will help me answer the second question about signing up. And that is that it is never too early to sign up.
While we want to be as convenient as possible to our Members, we also like to know as far in advance about when people are coming and, in particular, when people want to join. The first Visit is a lot of work for us as we have to build a new Locker and get it ready for the new Member’s first Visit. So we would prefer that new Members sign up as soon as they decide they want to use Owner’s Locker rather than waiting until the last minute.
But while we want to encourage people to sign up as early as possible, we don’t want to penalize you by making you pay for something months before you’ll see it. Again, we wanted to be fair. So, when you sign up, you will not be charged your Membership Fee until 30 days before you arrive for your first Visit. This way you can go ahead and sign up when you make your reservations or even before and not get charged. You can also use the site and use the online inventory function to list the things you are going to put in your Locker.
We think that’s a fair way to treat people. This is not a short term relationship we want to build! Just ask that family in the parking lot. Boy were they releived when Brian showed up with another Locker.
JDVM
www.ownerslocker.com
