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Diamond now taking over Sunrise Ridge Resort in Pigeon Forge

Kozman

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As an owner at this resort I was shocked to receive a letter from the association announcing that Diamond has introduced itself as the management company. The letter included a request to return a proxy for a special election where 3 new board members were running. There was no customary biography on the candidates. I suspect they are all Diamond employees which might pack the board and place the resort squarely under their control. They even offered to give a $50 gift card to the first 400 who returned the proxy. They also agreed to take over the foreclosed and bad debt units which would give them even more votes on issues. I just got rid of two Diamond resorts in Williamsburg. After Diamond took over there the maintenance fees and management fees skyrocketed. Here I thought I was divorced from their clutches but here we go again.
 

T-Dot-Traveller

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Taranova
Agree - that becoming the management company is the trojan horse .
 
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Egret1986

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As an owner at this resort I was shocked to receive a letter from the association announcing that Diamond has introduced itself as the management company.

You have my condolences. Wicked bad news. The only thing worse than Diamond for me is their ability to come in and acquire resorts, along with their unsuspecting owners. It happened to me and I, unfortunately, didn't see it coming. Now to extricate myself from their clutches. :rolleyes:
 

pedro47

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Thanks for sharing this information; when will Diamond become the management company?
Are there other resorts involved in this management movement?
 

Kozman

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According to my conversation with employees at Sunrise it's already a done deal. The rec building is being cleared out for sales. Employees are fearful of their job. I'm not aware of any other resorts involved.
 
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Kozman

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Thanks for the bio. I do not recall getting it in the mail. They are all Diamond employees so what is the use sending in the proxy other than getting the $50. I don't recall getting anything asking for interested parties who might have wanted to run for these positions. I've been out of town a lot and it's a chore reading and catching up on the stacks of mail when I get home so I might have missed the notices. Same result. Diamond is in.
 

moonstone

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77,000 RCI points (Sunrise Ridge Resort, TN)
We are away for the winter so not getting any mail. Our DD, who is checking our mail, advised us earlier this week that there are 2 letters (1 is a thicker large size envelope) from Amber there for us. We own 77K EOY Points associated with Sunrise Ridge Resort in TN. Last evening she said now there are 3 messages from them on our answering machine asking if we received the mail and stating it was urgent that we open and read what they contain. I guess that is what is in the 'important mail'. We wont be home until Easter so I don't know if that will be in time to vote -not that we can do anything about the takeover!


~Diane
 

Talent312

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lindaswain

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I’m a Diamond owner, too, two (!) timeshares in Sedona, but once you’ve bought in, you hate to “get rid of” your units. I’m curious how you made the decision to dispose of your DRI timeshares.
 

overthehill

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pedro47

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Thanks for providing the information and link to the USPS service. This is a terific link for anyone who travels away from home for weeks at a time.

I also must agree this is an excellent link to a USPS service. Now we can kept track of our mail while we are away from home.
 

avad88

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I agree that it is not good for owners. Diamond bought one of our resorts 3 years ago and we were hit with a high special assessment and our yearly maintenance continues to rise. In their defense, they did improve the resort, but we paid dearly for it.
 

DanZale2000

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After poking around the Internet, it appears that Diamond has acquired Amber Vacation Club. "Amber Vacation Club and Amber Resort Management provide central reservations, owner services and resort management to 15,000 owners at three resort locations as well as two additional affiliate sites." The five combined resorts are:

Sunrise Ridge Resort, Pigeon Forge, TN
Tree Tops Resort, Gatlinburg, TN
Oakmont Resort, Pigeon Forge, TN
Casa del Mar Resort, Ormond Beach, FL
Alhambra Villas, Kissimmee, FL

Sunrise Ridge Resort is Amber managed and will become DRI managed.

Alhambra Villas is also now controlled by DRI. A slate of DRI employees are candidates for HOA board. All are running unopposed.

Casa del Mar is managed be Bluegreen and the Bluegreen Vacation Club owns 56% of the intervals.

Amber Vacation Club guidelines suggest all members own deeded intervals, there is no trust fund for pooled points. It seems likely the vacation club will be dissolved. Diamond might substitute a version of their mini-club system, as they did after acquiring Island One Resorts and its Club Navigo in 2013.

https://www.ambervacations.com/
 
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CPTKellyG56

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Hyatt Ziva Los Cabos, Mexico????
As an owner at this resort I was shocked to receive a letter from the association announcing that Diamond has introduced itself as the management company. The letter included a request to return a proxy for a special election where 3 new board members were running. There was no customary biography on the candidates. I suspect they are all Diamond employees which might pack the board and place the resort squarely under their control. They even offered to give a $50 gift card to the first 400 who returned the proxy. They also agreed to take over the foreclosed and bad debt units which would give them even more votes on issues. I just got rid of two Diamond resorts in Williamsburg. After Diamond took over there the maintenance fees and management fees skyrocketed. Here I thought I was divorced from their clutches but here we go again.

It happened to us, too. Diamond snapped up our resort which was actually a "collection of resorts" (5 or 6), took control of the board, raised maintenance fees, etc. They DID improve the resorts. Wanted us to ALSO join THEIR "Owners Club", but we declined. It would have been an extra $300-$400 a year (I think) so that we could then trade (use their points) internally into their OTHER resorts.

We were an every other year owner of a week, but Diamond changed everyone to a points based system. If you don't join THEIR Diamond Owners Club (name?), we could only trade into Interval or the other resorts that were in the original collection. The points system did allow us some flexibility. We were able to get a great "Presidential" suite in Mexico because we used our points less than 30 days before the check-in and got a significant discount.

Unfortunately, my wife had a severe stroke a couple of years ago and is unable to travel. I asked Diamond to release us from our "deeded week" because of her inability to travel. They agreed to it. For a small fee (<$250), they did a deed transfer of our unit from us to them and let us go our way.
 

CPTKellyG56

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One other point...I'm pretty sure they will change your timeshare to Diamond Points. If you don't also join their Diamond Owners Club, you will probably only be able to use your points at the resort (or the collection of resorts if more than one) you previously owned. You should also be able to "bank" your unit with Interval if you don't want to use your points.
 

pedro47

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After poking around the Internet, it appears that Diamond has acquired Amber Vacation Club. "Amber Vacation Club and Amber Resort Management provide central reservations, owner services and resort management to 15,000 owners at three resort locations as well as two additional affiliate sites." The five combined resorts are:

Sunrise Ridge Resort, Pigeon Forge, TN
Tree Tops Resort, Gatlinburg, TN
Oakmont Resort, Pigeon Forge, TN
Casa del Mar Resort, Ormond Beach, FL
Alhambra Villas, Kissimmee, FL

Sunrise Ridge Resort is Amber managed and will become DRI managed.

Alhambra Villas is also now controlled by DRI. A slate of DRI employees are candidates for HOA board. All are running unopposed.

Casa del Mar is an affiliate. It is managed be Bluegreen and the Bluegreen Vacation Club owns 56% of the intervals.

Amber Vacation Club guidelines suggest all members own deeded intervals, there is no trust fund for pooled points. It seems likely the vacation club will be dissolved. Diamond might substitute a version of their mini-club system, as they did after acquiring Island One Resorts and its Club Navigo in 2013.

https://www.ambervacations.com/
Thanks for answering my question.
 

bluehende

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We just stayed there last summer. A very nice resort and the people there were amazing.
 

dgganott

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I’m a Diamond owner, too, two (!) timeshares in Sedona, but once you’ve bought in, you hate to “get rid of” your units. I’m curious how you made the decision to dispose of your DRI timeshares.
We got rid of ours by "giving" it back to DRI and it cost us $250 to do so, but we had to meet their requirements, which are to have it paid off, and be up to date with the Maintenance fees. Our worst investment ever. We only had it for less than 3 years, and put way more money into it, than we got in usage. We also own Beachwoods, in NC, and now they are owned by DRI. Our maintenance fees have skyrocketed to more than $1000 per year, so that'll probably be next for us. There's a point where the M. fees, exchange fees, special assessments, etc. cost way more than you'd pay to just rent a place, for vacation, and go. We have a timeshare with Wyndham, in Bali Hai, Hawaii, and the maintenance fees haven't moved much at all, since 2010. There are no HVAC systems there and none needed, so it's cheaper. We can vacation anywhere with our points from Wyndham and exchange points from Beachwoods. We certainly don't need a 3rd timeshare, and DRI cost us the most, so we "gave" it back.
 

JeffDH

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Another poster suggested that your ownership is a deeded week; if that is the case I'm not convinced that they could force you to switch to points.

If you have a choice, my suggestion would be to stick with your deeded week ownership rather than converting to points. The developer and management company for our TS (Monarch Grand Vacations) went bankrupt and assets were acquired by Diamond, placing them as the mgmt company for our points system. They offered to convert us into the Diamond points system, but insisted that we'd have to double our ownership stake at substantial cost, of course. We declined, but the policies have gradually gotten less and less favorable and we are thinking about dumping it. The last straw for me is that they switched from deposit first to request first with II, which means I can't bank the unused points I have. Too make it worse, I had reserved a week using my points and had a nice exchange set up through SFX for Park City later this year which fell through because Diamond wouldn't confirm the reservation to SFX. If I'd owned a fixed week that reportedly wouldn't have been a problem.

Not sure exactly how the finances actually work, but there seems to be layers of mgmt fees... My MGV ownership association still has substantial ownership percentages in several resorts and the 2017 budget (latest available to me) indicates that only about 65% of the MF's actually go towards MF's at the underlying resorts. The other 35% goes to bad debt (unpaid association MF's?), management fees, and 'general and admin' expenses. It would be interesting to look at an individual resort HOA budget and see what percentage of that budget also goes to Diamond in return for them managing the property and running the reservation/exchange system.

I also learned just yesterday that Diamond has a separate private exchange program of their own for weeks owners called Destination Exchange, with its own membership and exchange fees of course. The available inventory in that program does NOT appear to be identical to the Diamond Points inventory I can access, although there is some overlap in availability and a lot of overlap in the resort list. My guess is that many of those resorts have ownership split between weeks and points, and that there is at least some isolation between the pools of inventory.

Good luck!
 

moonstone

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77,000 RCI points (Sunrise Ridge Resort, TN)
For those of you who, when away from home, want to know what mail you're missing:
USPS has a service that will email you a scan of each day's regular-sized envelopes.
Check-out: https://informeddelivery.usps.com/box/pages/intro/start.action

.

Yes, we have friends who use this service. We live in Canada so no USPS, our Canada Post doesn't offer any such or similar service. Heck we don't even get home delivery! For well over a year we and all our neighbours (+100 people) had to drive to the next town (~10 miles) to get our mail when CP took our mailboxes that were located in a closing corner store away.

We are lucky enough to have our DD check on our mail (& scan & email important stuff to us) while we are away for the winter. Now if we could just get her to pay some of the bills! Haha! (just kidding, they're all set up with auto pay from our bank account or credit card)


~Diane
 

moonstone

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77,000 RCI points (Sunrise Ridge Resort, TN)
We are confused about this whole situation. We purchased (resale) 77K EOY RCI points from Vacation Village many years ago. We have a 2/2 unit for week 26 at Sunrise Ridge Resort on our deed. We have a special Vacation Village RCI tel number to use when/if we need to call RCI. We also have special rates and a bonus week (similar to a Last Call) each year that allows us to stay at any Vacation Village resort (that has a vacancy) when booked less than 90 (or maybe 45?) days in advance. We pay our maintenance fees to Amber, but that's about all we have to do with them.

So if Diamond is taking over - what will that do, or how will it affect, our association with VV?


~Diane
 
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