[MERGED] Recent email announcement: Your Club Wyndham Website Update Is Coming

[paxsarah]

But is the plan now to not release any new or canceled inventory until after the mid-October changeover? To me it really looks like that is happening. So if you are looking to book something in the next month, too bad so sad for you.

What are you seeing that makes you think this is already happening - that is, that cancellations aren't coming back into inventory at all? And what do you mean by "new" inventory?

 

[Cyrus24]

What are you seeing that makes you think this is already happening - that is, that cancellations aren't coming back into inventory at all? And what do you mean by "new" inventory?

It's impossible to know on cancellations coming back. Unless you check every minute for days on end. In regard to upgrades, other than instant upgrades, I have a lot of data to suggest that post reservation upgrades are not happening right now.

 

[HitchHiker71]

I wonder if the wait list will be valid for both developer points and resale points?

From what I've gathered, the Waitlist function will not be limited based on how points were purchased, but once the match is made all normal booking rules will apply as they do today. As we all know, rules are subject to change in the future.

 

[HitchHiker71]

I hope Hitchhiker is able to get us some answers about which takes precedence in regards to the waitlist and the automatic upgrades.

Does anyone believe that the block on adding guest names to reservations in the owner priory lists if the owner has used their two exceptions is going to work accurately and reliably? Some owners are already saying they think the system is going so screw this up big time if you've had guest names on reservations while you were also staying at the resort. There are some owners who already keep a notebook or spreadsheet of all their reservations. I think that's something more of us should start doing. It might come in handy if you have to call Owner Care when the system tells you you've already used your two exceptions. It's going to be a nightmare for Owner Care to go back through all the reservations when there is an issue so I strongly suspect we'll get a scripted b.s. answer from them. Just like we do when we call in about the automatic upgrade not working for a reservation. It would be a very good idea to add a guest name to anything on the owner priority lists well before the check in date just in case the system does screw up like we can expect that it will.

The ask has been made - we'll see what if anything I can get back. Please keep in mind that everything we're discussing here is for an as yet to be released feature - so there will be limited information available prior to the actual feature release. Based upon my real world experience with product management and agile sprint based software development, this is because the code for the new feature has yet to be finalized and has not yet been through final unit testing and UAT, and is therefore subject to change until the code has been finalized shortly before official feature release. Point being, there will be some questions that Wyndham won't be able to answer until we get closer to the actual feature release -after which I would expect a subsequent email announcement, hopefully with some links to online videos/training for the new features.

 

[r4rab]

The ask has been made - we'll see what if anything I can get back. Please keep in mind that everything we're discussing here is for an as yet to be released feature - so there will be limited information available prior to the actual feature release. Based upon my real world experience with product management and agile sprint based software development, this is because the code for the new feature has yet to be finalized and has not yet been through final unit testing and UAT, and is therefore subject to change until the code has been finalized shortly before official feature release. Point being, there will be some questions that Wyndham won't be able to answer until we get closer to the actual feature release -after which I would expect a subsequent email announcement, hopefully with some links to online videos/training for the new features.

I'm not sure Wyndham IT utilizes unit testing, CIT, UAT or anything else with the word "test" in it.

 

[Sandy VDH]

I'm not sure Wyndham IT utilizes unit testing, CIT, UAT or anything else with the word "test" in it.

I'm in UAT this week for my day job. I am sure if they are doing any of those testings cycles, they are not doing it well.

 

[chapjim]

Yes, four waitlists at a time, no other limit. Find a better option you want to waitlist? Cancel one of the four and enter the new waitlist. There is currently no way to check active waitlist requests other than calling in, so I maintain a super simple spreadsheet with the date the waitlist is entered and the timeframe and unit type(s) waitlisted. Much easier than calling in from time to time.

Waitlist dates may be duplicated. Statistically, it is easier to match a waitlist for 3 or 4 dates than all 7 at once, so I enter one waitlist for all 7 (a couple times I got lucky), and one waitlist for the first 3 dates and one waitlist for the second 4 nights. Most of the time I am looking for Sun. or Mon. through Thursday, so one waitlist for all 4 or 5 nights, then two waitlists for the split.

When entering a waitlist by phone, a likelihood of success from 1-3 is quoted. 1 "Likely", 2 "50-50" chance, 3 "Possible" but have an alternate reserved. Owners may cancel an existing reservation to reacquire credits to book the waitlist match. Only a couple of times have I been at a "2" level instead of "1", but I enter waitlists as soon as possible for the tough to book resorts.


There is currently no waitlist request confirmation -- only waitlist matches by email or phone, which is set up when the request is placed. Waitlist requests are entered manually, so errors get made. I usually call a couple of days after a request to confirm the waitlist request was entered correctly. There are some reports of waitlist requests "dropping"; I make a fair number of waitlist requests and have never experienced this.



My waitlist success rate must be better than 90%. Part of this is due to the fact that about 30% of WorldMark reservations are cancelled at some point. Quite a few waitlist matches were near the 30 day cancellation deadline. I have entered waitlist request and received an email about a match within a week.

Owners love, love, love the waitlist, because it works so well. Club Wyndham owners who spend a lot of time searching for the same reservation over, and over, and over will be amazed at the convenience.

To paraphrase a former President, "Never underestimate Wyndham's ability to eff things up."

Great post! I hope things turn out to work as well as at WorldMark.

 

[geerlijd]

Whatever they have done over the last few days, I cannot see my second account with my log-in, but our daughter can see it with her log-in. I don't know how to fix that. It was not a good time for them to ask me to take a survey. I was beyond frustrated, and the payment system doesn't work for me either. The paymentus website remembers me as a Shell owner and will not log me into the Wyndham site.

I was trying to see my point balances. This is ridiculous.

We have two logins for our account. My wife's original login still works, but I need to use my full email address to login. I got an email explaining this a couple days after my login stopped working earlier this week. Try your email address with the password you have setup, that is working on my account. At some point, I assume my wife's login will be converted to her email address as well (a couple days before they notify us of the change)

 

[frankf3]

Don't mean to hijack this thread, but I wonder why Wyndham focuses on so called enhancements rather than fixing significant bugs. Today, I was looking at a couple of potential reservations. Happened to look at Clearwater, see there is availability this coming week. Try to book and get "OOPS...something unexpected just happened". Try different dates same week, same result. Jump ahead to July 2023 and try to make a reservation for arrival 18th. Shows availability. Same error when trying to book. The reservation system that faces off to us is both a timeshare and an IT atrocity. Like so many others here, I also work in IT. If the systems I'm accountable for were this unreliable and had this many public facing failures, I'd be looking for another job. @HitchHiker71 - any chance you can get the Wyndham IT team to prioritize permanently resolving these nonsense errors?

 

[Sandi Bo]

 

[amycurl]

How many vacation/rest breaks does the Wyndham website get? I mean, it barely functions when it's fully "on duty", based on reports from TUGgers.

 

[Sandi Bo]

Seems to be more issues with ghost availability - nights that show up as available but when you try to book 'something unexpected just happened'. Has me concerned that it's related to the new changes. One would to like to think it'll get better, not worse with the release tomorrow. But then again, historically wishful thinking hasn't served us well.

 

[HitchHiker71]

How many vacation/rest breaks does the Wyndham website get? I mean, it barely functions when it's fully "on duty", based on reports from TUGgers.

When utilizing an agile sprint development approach - you can of course postpone sprint releases - but as a general rule - the entire concept of agile sprints is to iteratively and persistently update the cloud environments (CI/CD = Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery). Wyndham currently utilizes bi-weekly or twice monthly sprint releases (not entirely sure which), and generally one sprint is dedicated to bug fixes, and the second sprint is dedicated to product enhancement feature releases/updates. The back office team, which is largely disparate from the front office DT (digital transformation) website team, maintains their own release schedule - which I believe is once a month in comparison.

 

[HitchHiker71]

Seems to be more issues with ghost availability - nights that show up as available but when you try to book 'something unexpected just happened'. Has me concerned that it's related to the new changes. One would to like to think it'll get better, not worse with the release tomorrow. But then again, historically wishful thinking hasn't served us well.
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Based upon my past investigations on ghost inventory like this, these issues are primarily back office related and don't have anything to do with the actual front office website team/code itself. The website is attempting to do something with inventory that the back end is showing as available - but then when the website system attempts to actually reserve that inventory - the back office system says "no - go away" and therefore the front office system comes back with the legendary "Ooops - something unexpected just happened."

 

[Rolltydr]

Based upon my past investigations on ghost inventory like this, these issues are primarily back office related and don't have anything to do with the actual front office website team/code itself. The website is attempting to do something with inventory that the back end is showing as available - but then when the website system attempts to actually reserve that inventory - the back office system says "no - go away" and therefore the front office system comes back with the legendary "Ooops - something unexpected just happened."

I’m having this problem now. Trying to book Bonnet Creek next October. Plenty of availability for most room types is showing available but when I select anything other than a 1 bedroom deluxe, I get the “Oops” error.

 

[Sandy VDH]

How many vacation/rest breaks does the Wyndham website get? I mean, it barely functions when it's fully "on duty", based on reports from TUGgers.

They are likely doing weekly deployments to the website, or maybe every other week. But that is the development world for most customer facing apps and websites.

 

[Sandi Bo]

Based upon my past investigations on ghost inventory like this, these issues are primarily back office related and don't have anything to do with the actual front office website team/code itself. The website is attempting to do something with inventory that the back end is showing as available - but then when the website system attempts to actually reserve that inventory - the back office system says "no - go away" and therefore the front office system comes back with the legendary "Ooops - something unexpected just happened."

I’m having this problem now. Trying to book Bonnet Creek next October. Plenty of availability for most room types is showing available but when I select anything other than a 1 bedroom deluxe, I get the “Oops” error.

I'd say it pretty key the back end and front end be communicating with each other, now more than ever? How are they going to hold a wait listed reservation while someone has 48 hours to decide if they want it?

I think it is far worse in recent days (week or so maybe than it has been. Getting to the point where it's not usable. Why bother looking for something if more often than not, you get the oops?

 

[Snippy]

Wyndham says they are responding to owners. I'm sure not feeling heard. What can we do that will get Wyndham's attention?

- I booked a unit a week ago that was 2 days prior to check in. Got a call from the resort stating that the system allowed many owners to book a 3br when none existed. Seriously! This is inexcusable.
- I spent 1.5 hours this week on hold getting Paymentus team to answer the phone. I then could see that the August autopay was not charged correctly, and I was assessed 2 late fees. As Oct was now 2 months late. The rep said she was only allowed to credit one late fee. I've been on accurate autopay for years.
- This month I received a payment confirmation for someone I've never heard of.
- last week I received 11 emails letting me know that the movie theatre at Indio was going to be closed during the day on Oct 6. (I stayed at Indio one time for 1 night about 5 years ago)
- the next day I received 3 emails letting me know that Karaoke was cancelled at Ocean Boulevard. (I've never stayed at Ocean Boulevard)
- Oh - reduced qty guest certificates
- I dread checking email and my mailbox as I've stayed for 3 large point stays this year, but shared 14 short stays with extended family. I'm waiting for a "commercial use" letter. My personal use has been 70% of my points.
- I'm so frustrating with the spinning, spinning, and clicking, clicking to progress through the pages and pages of big pictures, but little data.
- and yes, the "oops" message is oh - so - frustrating.
.
What is the best method to be heard? I've used the feedback link on a regular basis. Is there an address where we can send a written letter? Any other ideas? I love our Wyndham stays, but I hate the new management choices.

 

[rickandcindy23]

Paymentus sucks. They sent emails to us with the wrong name attached as the billing name for the account. No such person on our account, not even a similar name to any of the 7 of us on the account. Stupid Wyndham!

 

[troy12n]

Paymentus sucks. They sent emails to us with the wrong name attached as the billing name for the account. No such person on our account, not even a similar name to any of the 7 of us on the account. Stupid Wyndham!

Count me as one of the people who had zero problems with the cutover... but then again, I don't have 30 contracts with dozens of "people" on the contract. I can just imagine what an absolute horror show some of your accounts are... on so many levels.

Mine never stopped working, the first month of the cutover, the payment occurred a few days later than it normally did, but has happened on time ever since. I never had to log in to change or enter my credit card info, it just copied over just fine. The only thing I needed to do was call to have my password reset, which was a very quick process. But after logging in, I found I didn't have to do anything.

I'm sure the fact that my account is not complicated contributed to that. It isn't a cobbled together mess of contracts passed around like hot potatoes.

 

[HitchHiker71]

I’m having this problem now. Trying to book Bonnet Creek next October. Plenty of availability for most room types is showing available but when I select anything other than a 1 bedroom deluxe, I get the “Oops” error.

Hmmm. You're attempting to book in the ARP window then - see if you can reproduce the issue within the SRP window vs the ARP window. We have seen issues in the past when booking in ARP becomes a problem under certain scenarios - this jogged my memory so wanted to ensure we're not seeing a regression bug in this respect.

 

[HitchHiker71]

Paymentus sucks. They sent emails to us with the wrong name attached as the billing name for the account. No such person on our account, not even a similar name to any of the 7 of us on the account. Stupid Wyndham!

It doesn't really have anything to do with PaymentUS itself - it has to do with Wyndham's back office database/data integrity issues. The reality is that these same discrepancies existed all along behind the scenes within your account - you just had no idea about them prior to the PaymentUS third party implementation because you could never see them before. At least now we know - and can then call into the finance hotline and get these issues reported and corrected for our accounts. Agree that it is not good - but at least now we know about it and can do something about it when we see the bad data.

For my part - so far so good in the billing dept at least with respect to my account. My wife’s CC was closed due to fraud charges sometime last month, which was the card number that we had always been using for the Wyndham MF autopay. So I ended up having to use the PaymentUS portal to reconfigure our autopay settings. Our MF typically hits on the 12th of each month - and I did receive the payment email confirmation - which shows the correct last four digits of my updated CC - but I don’t see the charge on my actual card yet - nor any temporary authorized transaction just yet - so I will have to check again each day to ensure that the payment actually hit the new CC before I will be able to say that using the portal to update the Autopay settings actually worked. I do also still see discrepancies in my list of contracts on the portal - and to date I’ve seen these discrepancies in what the portal displays vary over time whenever I login periodically to view the portal. These discrepancies don’t appear to have any material impact on my billing - but it’s definitely confusing for owners to see these data integrity issues front and center in the new portal - so I will keep reporting these discrepancies to my contacts in the finance team for review until I see this new UI properly reflect what it should.

 

[Sandi Bo]

Mine never stopped working, the first month of the cutover, the payment occurred a few days later than it normally did, but has happened on time ever since.

All two times?

Mine has always worked correctly (if I ignore the 4 cent difference, which I do, gives me a good laugh), does that make me even better than you?

 

[paxsarah]

Just a reminder for everyone to screenshot anything you think is important, because you just never know!

 

[rickandcindy23]

Count me as one of the people who had zero problems with the cutover... but then again, I don't have 30 contracts with dozens of "people" on the contract. I can just imagine what an absolute horror show some of your accounts are... on so many levels.

Mine never stopped working, the first month of the cutover, the payment occurred a few days later than it normally did, but has happened on time ever since. I never had to log in to change or enter my credit card info, it just copied over just fine. The only thing I needed to do was call to have my password reset, which was a very quick process. But after logging in, I found I didn't have to do anything.

I'm sure the fact that my account is not complicated contributed to that. It isn't a cobbled together mess of contracts passed around like hot potatoes.

I should be allowed to tell people the problem I have with Paymentus without you attacking me personally.