I don't think most folks are blaming the megarenters per se, but as you pointed out, Wyndham owns the system, Wyndham makes the rules, and we're all playing on Wyndham's field in Wyndham's game. When those advantages that you're referring to that legacy owners learned about and used man years ago now, are subsequently removed or curtailed because Wyndham chose to change the rules of the game, and a very small subset of legacy owners that ran commercial businesses were targeted with cease and desist letters and then experienced suspended accounts resulting from rental activities, despite any outrage we can muster, there's really nothing anyone can do about it here on TUG or anywhere else, short of filing lawsuits to fight back. A few brave souls have actually filed suits that were categorized in that "megarenter" class - and they lost those lawsuits or settled with Wyndham under NDAs and cannot discuss any aspects of their settlements.
I agree wholeheartedly that Wyndham upsold many VIP owners using points rentals as a reason to do so. Heck, some sales reps still do this today! We all know that Wyndham practices quite a bit of cognitive dissonance, duplicity, and plausible deniability with respect to their legendarily bad sales practices (daze and confuse type approach). None of this is good. The bottom line to me is, at the end of the day, Wyndham is going to do whatever Wyndham decides to do. It's useful to make observations and to connect dots and openly discuss what we're seeing. Please let's do that.
Bigger picture, with respect to the whole commercial rental topic, I would much rather have the TUG Wyndham forum talking about topics that actually impact the vast majority of owners - that is what I've always tried to encourage. In turn, I'd like to see us not continue to discuss topics that represent an extremely small subset of the ownership base. In a way, I think this is what
@rickandcindy23 is addressing. The TUG Wyndham forum isn't what it used to be, at least in some ways. That's likely true - and I'd argue - it's actually a good thing. I want this forum to focus on topics that impact the vast majority of owners, such as the crappy website user experience, the problems experienced when calling into the vacation hotlines, the stories people are told when attending sales updates, and education about how best to use the system within the rules for the system - by and large for personal vacations. This likely means that some may yearn for the "good old days" and I can certainly more than understand this desire, but if we want more net new Wyndham owners coming here on a regular basis for good advice, what we don't want is to have this forum overly represent topics surrounding commercial timeshare business aspirations like in times past. I think this is the change we've seen play out here on the TUG Wyndham forum since I've joined and subsequently became this forum moderator. I think this makes a lot of sense when we all know that Wyndham itself has done a lot to discourage commercial rentals over the past few years.
Change is the only constant in this world - let's do whatever we can to encourage new Wyndham owners to come to the TUG Wyndham forum and share their ownership experiences taking vacations and dealing with Wyndham corporate in the process. I hope this makes at least some sense.
