Phyllis,
As someone who seems to have a ton of Mayan knowledge do you think that those residence weeks are going to a problem for members not as flexible as you? I just don't get the sense that many people know how restricted it "could" be. As the OP mentioned there is no consideration given that's what scared me, not having a registration number.
I'm in the cheap seats (MP) but I've met a bunch of people with over 100k into it and in 5, 6 years they'll have a bunch of what we refer to as VF weeks.
But I guess if they keep em upgrading, that day will never come
I don't know. Last year when we upgraded, I did not think too much about it because our Senior Certificates and other benefits went with the Residence weeks. I did not catch it right away myself because when we were upgrading, the guy kept saying they were just like our regular weeks, we just lost some weeks after 10 years. Since we have 2 Registered weeks and 8 Residence weeks (4 per Registered), we still had the same number of weeks available as we did before when you count VF weeks in both scenarios. I did not think about it at the time. At 10 years, we have just 4 Residence weeks and our Sr. Certs only apply to 2 weeks. (Like Registered & VF - the Senior Certs did not apply to VF weeks.) I also read that the Residence weeks are not transferable to anyone but heirs (like VF weeks in our GM contracts.) BTW - I just checked on the My Reservations site and my Residence weeks are listed as Vacation Fair Weeks!
Someone mentioned the Residence weeks on TUG some time ago and I started trying to figure it out and it sort of clicked. We did do the update last month and the guy told me about the Residence weeks generally not being available for January - March. Our contract does say that we have Red time and can use them in Red time, including January - March, but cannot make reservations as far out as we can with Registered weeks.
So, to answer your question, I think owners will be able to get a week in Prime January - March Time, but it will be similar to the call the first day of the month that is allowed and take your chances. Our family has taken vacation together at Thanksgiving since 1998 and most of those have been at a Mayan Palace or Grand Mayan. We now have Sheraton Buganvilias locked in for week 47 which is usually Thanksgiving, so we can use the Grand Luxxe just before or after so that we have more than one week in PV.
The big push now is to get people to upgrade to more units so that they can be "guaranteed the prime rooms". The more you have invested, the better unit you get. We did not want to upgrade to 3 bedroom Spa units that would be in buildings 4-5-6-7. We do not need a unit that large and loved the location of building 2. We also did not want to spend that much more money! We had a great unit and the guy said that we might not always get 7th floor ocean view. We are OK with that. While we loved our unit on the 7th floor, but would have preferred one on the 5th or 6th because those had the rollup door so that both balconies connected into one extra large one. The unit we had had one really nice large one and the a large square one, but you had to go inside and walk around to the other one if you wanted to visit. We are generally easy going and happy with what we get. All of the units are nice.