Presentation at Grande Vista
We attended a presentation at Grande Vista today and asked lots and lots of questions. IMO the personnel who are "selling" the new program do not really understand it and clearly they have not read the documents that we are being asked to sign. They have only read the sales training documents Marriott has provided them.
We had spoke with a salesperson who does owner presentations and has been with Marriott for many years and a sales manager.
First -
there is no answer regarding why Marriott "short changed" its owners when it kept a piece of the pie for itself in determining the point values we will receive if we enroll. Once they understood my level of knowledge on this issue they stopped trying to say but you get more "flexibility" (clearly the buzz word that came through during the training) acknowledged that the deficit exists in most cases and basically said that it is what it is and they have not control over that decision. We had a lengthy conversation on this topic and of course they said that we didn't need points to make a week reservation at our home resort.
Based on everything they said (and didn't say) IMO effectively the answer seems to be that because we are being given all these additional options we didn't have before - the conversion rate for week to points reflects that added cost to Marriott.
We were told by the sales manager that
the reason the roll out of this program was kept totally quiet was because of the resale weeks. Marriott did not want anyone to know that if they bought resale weeks those weeks could be included and would get the right to exchange for MR in the event that the original property had that right. Now that the program is "out" the theory is that no resale week will be included going forward (unless bought from enrolled owner and new enrollment fee paid).
On the subject of
Marriott's ability to change the Points on the Points Chart -
each MVC Property has a fixed number of Points that are deeded and that number will not change however the allocation of the points between different weeks on the chart may change but if they increase one week they must decrease another week. When I said that there were only 11-12 MVC Properties currently in the Land Trust they objected. They contented that all the MVC Properties are in the Land Trust - though they backed off this statement again after I asked how the sold out properties could be in the land trust and said that what they meant was that eventually they will all be in the land trust.
Regarding
our voting rights being curtailed by the documents neither the sales guy nor the manager had any idea what I was talking about and the sales guy owns three Marriott weeks. They basically said that "legal" stuff is not their job - their job is to sell the program. I asked them how they can sell a program the details of which they don't understand and they said (I'm paraphrasing) they understand the benefits, the flexibility, etc., and that is all they need to understand. I told them I need to understand what I am paying to enroll in before enrolling let alone buying base Points.
On the subject of
inventory and whether there is one pool or two - the sales guy said that it was all one pool and that he believed that after awhile the II Marriott inventory would dry up except for cancellations of previously reserved weeks. When the manager got into the picture and I asked him the question he said that he wasn't sure he thought it was two pools and promised to email the ex-DVC guy who designed the program and get back to us (I'm not holding my breath but I'll let you know if I get the email). The ex-DVC guy apparently was in the building earlier in the day but he had left. The sales manager didn't seem to think that if we enrolled our weeks and then chose to use them as weeks v. points that we'd have a hard time trading them as weeks in Marriott's new system in the same we'd always done. When I pointed out that Marriott had the right to use deposited weeks as it saw fit he was clueless. He said it only has that right if we chose to exchange our weeks for Points. In the end he wound up advising us to enroll only our developer weeks and not our two Bronze resale weeks even though that advice makes no sense monetarily a fact the sales guy gently mentioned.
For all you
EOY owners - we were told by the sales guy that because our points total just over 6500 on an EOY basis we would get Premier status at least EOY. I told him that I'd been told that I would not because the EOY points are divided for the purpose of determining your total points for Premier status, which I didn't think was fair as it was my understanding that I couldn't divide my points. The sales manager called "corporate" and they told him that the reason the EOY points are averaged is that you can borrow or bank only those points that you need you do not need to borrow or bank the total points associated with anyone week. Initially they told me that my Club dues would be $199 but with this answer it was revised to $165.
With regard to the
purchase of Beneficial Interests - 1000 points (4 Beneficial Interests) is the initial minimum that legacy weeks owners can purchase and they will waive up to $695 but not my entire enrollment fee of $1995 (I did not negotiate hard on this subject because I didn't intend to purchase points but they were trying to sell me to get us to Premier status). The cost is 9.20 per point though the manager told us that up until 3 days prior to roll out it was 9.85 per point so he was sure it would go up like DVC point cost has risen. If you purchase 1000 points now you can purchase a minimum of one Beneficial Interest which equals 250 points in the future. I'm told you will never be able to purchase less that one Beneficial Interest because that is how the Land Trust was set up.
Plus Points - the sales guy didn't know about the 800 Plus Points for enrolling. The sales manager knew about it but tried to sell us 1000 Points saying that we'd get 1100 Plus Points when I said that would be in addition to the 800 Plus Points for enrolling right he kept side stepping the question. Again I didn't push because we aren't purchasing points though despite all the "nonsense" we probably will enroll.
The told us this
new program was developed in response to all the complaints of the owners especially complaints about II. They referenced the survey that Marriott sent out as a piece of the information used to develop the system. They said that II did not always give Marriott weeks the 24 day priority and sometimes kept the "good weeks" for itself. Marriott wanted to stop that by creating its own internal exchange company so that Marriott and Marriott only controlled the exchanges between Marriott owners to ensure that non-Marriott owners who paid small sums of money for their timeshares could not exchange into Marriott resorts in front of Marriott owners. When we told them that we had not had any problems dealing with II and were able to use the system for good exchanges they said that we were in the minority.
With regard to the
Explorer program, we love to cruise but usually share a cabin with our children so we asked what happened if we wanted to have 4 in a cabin rather than 2 (the website tells you to call in this scenario) and neither the sales guy or the manager could answer but again I was promised an email answer. When I inquired as to how they can sell a program that they have all the details on they tried to say but they didn't develop this program and these options were a surprise.
I was quite frustrated with this answer and they were frustrated with my questions and the sales office was closing so we all called it a day. They know we are here until Sunday and assured us they would get us answers to our questions.
One of the biggest amusements to me in this discussion was when we explained to the sales guy (who owns weeks himself) that we knew about the new program and had read the documents involved in enrolling and he said "how can that be no one is supposed to know"!! I said it was all on Marriott's website for its owners!!:rofl:
I also told him that I knew the new program was coming from my membership on TUG and he didn't know about TUG. He was an older gentlemen who may not have been so computer savvy. He was nice and tried to give us honest answers but he didn't have them. Clearly Marriott should have trained their staff for more than 3 days.
We did get two 7 day passes to Universal at a greatly reduced price as our gift - which thrills my teenagers.
Off to the pool and park!!
