No, I am referring to the fact that you can buy some points to meet a short term objective of booking a certain room, etc, but you can't buy Options unless you want to own them and pay maintenance fees forever on them. The point is Points are not Options., and their values are quite different. My problem with this thread is people are using them interchangeably, and they are not the same thing.
Actually I would agree that there is a lot of sloppy use of terminology going on, but then I’d sort of disagree with the way that you‘re using them too (respectfully.)
StarOptions are the points that you get, every year (or every other year, depending on what you own) in the Vistana network. StarOptions are specific to a given year, normally... you get 2020 StarOptions and they expire at the end of 2020 if not used. But they can also be banked — or sometimes reissued as Restricted StarOptions — with different expirations dates and conditions of use, sometimes, than what they had originally. So you can end up with multiple caches of StarOptions, with varying expirations dates; and some of them are likely to be “full StarOptions” which can be used for reservations during your Home Resort Reservation Period, and others might be “restricted StarOptions” which can only be used (IIRC) within 9 months of your arrival date.
I do think that you can buy StarOptions if you need a few more to allow you to reserve the room you want at a particular resort, but I assume those expire at the end of that year just like regular StarOptions do. I’m not sure if those purchased StarOptions can be banked or rolled over. I’ve never bought “extra” StarOptions so I’m pretty ignorant on the specifics of how that works.
Those annual allotments of StarOptions come to you because you either bought deeded weeks in the Vistana program from the developer (or you managed to get resale weeks that you purchased in the secondary market re-designated as SVN weeks) or you bought in the Flex program, where you get a certain number of StarOption points every year (or EOY) which, I think, are just the same as the StarOption points you‘d get from owning deeded weeks, except that there are a group of bundled resorts that will be considered your “Home Resort” instead of just one resort.
As I’m typing this I’m realizing how complicated all of this is, so it’s no wonder that people get confused and that that terminology gets misused. I’m not 100% sure that I haven’t gotten something wrong, but I don’t think so. I’m sure somebody will correct me if I have.
Anyway, this is all diverging somewhat from the original topic. I think it’s great that Vistana is providing new ways to get some value out of StarOptions, especially smaller amounts of them. I’m sure I’m not the only one who often ends up with a few thousand unusable StarOptions at the end of the year, for one reason or another — not enough to book anything with. But if I can proactively use those extra StarOptions for some value (maybe during my last Vistana stay of the year), that is a lot better than just throwing them away.
