We all paid a ridiculous amount of money to be Presidential Reserve in addition to being Platinum owners. It helps to understand the benefits if you think of PR as an enhanced Platinum level. Wyndham is in business to make money and they make the rules; all they are interested in is getting people to buy directly from them and to keep people buying more. If you look in the directory online you will see the benefits of the different levels listed. It is like any Wyndham program, if you want the benefits of that program you have to spend the money to purchase it directly from Wyndham or you do not get it. That is the reason resale is so cheap. Small contracts when purchased directly from Wyndham are basically just a teaser to get you to buy more so you get the benefits. You don't get to whine and say it isn't fair that you don't get something you didn't pay for. If Wyndham hasn't yet they will come up with something above Presidential Reserve and anyone who wants the benefits of that level will have to spend more money to have the "latest and greatest". Let me tell you that won't be us!
The amount of Presidential Reserve inventory available to for PR owners to book before it is opened to all owners isn't nearly what you think it is. First of all the number of resorts that have Presidential Reserve inventory is quite limited, only a small percentage of the total number of Wyndham resorts are Presidential Reserve resorts. Next only a certain percentage of the presidential inventory at those resorts is held for the PR owners. If you are still thinking that it doesn't sound like such a bad deal, well here is the rest of the story. Wyndham decides how much of the presidential inventory gets held as presidential reserve. The percentage of good inventory is much more limited than what most of us realize because what they don't tell you is that a large percentage of what is actually held for PR owners is undesirable off season inventory. You'd think that the percentage would be evenly spread among all the presidential units at all the PR resorts all year round but that isn't the case as I learned when I questioned why I wasn't able to find reservations. To achieve the required percentage the program specifies, they hold a limited amount of the "good" inventory that anyone actually wants to book and virtually all of the undesirable inventory at the resorts that have a definite seasonal appeal. Want to go to Panama City Beach or Myrtle Beach in January or early February? Probably not as that is when a lot of the restaurants and businesses close because it is so slow due to the cold weather. How about the last couple weeks of August at some of the ski resorts that have very little to offer outside of skiing season? Even the staff will tell you it is hot, miserable and there is nothing to do. So again, no. Oh and don't forget that those PR units are a huge number of points to book! So if you use your ARP to book a good reservation and have to have those dates, have flights booked, etc. you aren't likely to risk cancelling and re-booking the reservation to get your discount benefit because there is so much competition for those good reservations that you run a very, very high risk of losing the reservation. As another PR owner said, he could rent from another owner cheaper than the maintenance fees on the points he uses to book his stays and he wouldn't have spent a single penny to buy anything. While this isn't always the case it is unfortunately becoming more and more common.
The best way I can compare it is to think of it as a roll of bills that is supposed to contain a large amount of money that you are owed. But when you take the rubber band off the roll and actually see what is in it, on the outside are a few hundreds and fifties, then a few twenties followed by a few tens and fives but by the time you are 35-40% of the way through the roll there is nothing left but a few ones mixed in with a lot of cut up pieces of paper. You just got had and there isn't a darn thing you can do about it.
Yeah, I admit it, I'm whining. Nobody held a gun to my head and forced me to buy. Wish I had known about TUG sooner.
I might have some sympathy for your way of thinking if ALL the presidential inventory at all of the presidential resorts was held for only PR owners to within 30-45 days of check in but that isn't how it works. Every owner of every level has access to the available inventory at 10 months and there are even presidential units included in what is available because not all of the presidential units at the presidential resorts are held for PR owners. So you as a regular owner have access to what we PR owners could think of as "our inventory" if we thought like you do. Funny but I haven't seen a single PR owner blaming regular owners for our problems.