Thanks for the link. Great information such as rebranding of Sheraton, Westin/ Sheraton Sales, Westin Buyback Program, Westin Flex Program, etc. Very interesting.
Yes, they are going to push Westin Flex into Hyper Drive. Currently since you have SOs for internal trading, you buy a home resort and trade in.
The problem is they are non mandatory but have high MF. I truly wonder why they decided to not make the CA locations non mandatory.
It has nothing to do with CA locations or not. It was a matter of timing. Starwood rolled out mandatory designation on new resorts for a short period of time before they pulled it for later built resorts when they realized that mandatory resorts would cause them to lose new business to resale mandatory ownership. They never did retrofit the older CA resorts when they developed the mandatory program.
And they should have corrected it. Marriott Deserts do very well in the area but Westin is like a step child. I envision eventual changes.
I would think they would be more aggressive to try to get back mandatory weeks, only because once the dump them in the Flex trust they become voluntary. They could dry up the supply of resale mandatory weeks over time.
Correct. Meant to say repositioning. Repositioning to me means they are looking how to revitalize the Brand.
On the contrary. Starwood - Vistana, now Marriott will find all ways to get rid of the mandatory program if they could but they cannot do so legally.
The only legal way is to reacquire as many weeks at mandatory resorts as possible and add them to the Flex trusts.
Marriotts still has a better resale value than both Westin’s and Marriott has 4 properties.
True. Which means they most likely will aggressively go after WKV and SDO.
SDO is voluntary.
The only way they can is to try to get people to trade their weeks in and have them buy Flex in the transaction. You may think it is far fetched, but people have been known to turn in WKORV and buy Nanea HomeOptions. This may be easy for lower seasons but not so much for the Plat+ weeks.