# A common South Africa t/s practice that hurts trading power



## Carolinian (Jan 28, 2010)

Those who have followed TUG for a while remember Bootleg, the very helpful and knowledgable RCI Guide (or VC or whatever) who used to be very active on these boards and then suddenly left soon after the RCI class action was filed.  One of the points he made repeatedly was that when a resort bulkbanked, it substantially degraded the trading power of its owners.  That is because trading power is based on supply and demand and calculated at the time of deposit.  In bulkbanking, the resort dumps a lot of inventory into the exchange system all at once, creating a massive artifical bulge of supply and thereby skewing trade power downward.  He gave the example huge loss of trade power of Manhattan Club owners after that resort started bulkbanking.  At it was only after they started bulkbanking that many SA weeks started to regularly see MC weeks for exchange.

The SA t/s practice that mimmics the impact of bulkbanking is not allowing the levy to be paid until a certain date.  What happens is that many exchangers try to pay right at the date to get their deposits made, and lots of inventory gets shot into the system in a short time.  That has to have a similar impact on trading power that bulkbanking does, and this is resort policy, not RCI policy that brings it about.  Exchangers would be much better off if we could pay levies whenever we wanted ahead of time and our weeks thus be deposited more gradually over time rather than so many at once.  

This of course does not explain the recent trashing of SA trading power, which appears to be something artificial from RCI.  This policy has in fact probably been holding SA trade power back for quite a while.  We need to work with resorts to try to change this poorly thought out policy.


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## DanM (Jan 29, 2010)

I agree. I sold my SA unit, but always found this policy frustrating. The "answer" I always got from the resort was that the weeks calendar couldn't be set until the school calendar was set. This made no sense as 1) I had a fixed week that always started on the correct Friday per any timeshare calendar, 2) if they were concerned about floaters being able to choose holiday weeks then there couldn't be more than one or two weeks a year "in play" and those would be easy to figure out anyway...like President's week being mostly week 7, but not always; or Labor day being mostly week 34.

On top of everything else, I could usually find the SA school calendars on line months before they allowed maintenance payments.


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## Carolinian (Feb 4, 2010)

At Dik, there are a couple of Americans on the board as I recall, and they have connections to a reseller who sells for trading.  Why don't they rattle some cages on this issue?


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## Carolinian (Feb 5, 2010)

I emailed Scott Riddle to suggest that he raise this issue with the Dik board


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