Interesting Retro Offer for SDO

[teddyo333]

I recently took a tour of the Nanea Resort while staying at the WKORVN. Long story short; they wanted $33K for an ocean view 1BR Premium WKORV but I had to trade in 1 SDO & 1 VV Bella. This "deal" included retroing (2) SDO's (an additional 296200 points & 5* status). Of course I declined but accepted 30K MR points they gave me for attending.

The interesting part is that received a call today from sales stating that they will Retro each of my SDO units for $10K each. He stated that it is usually $20K of new money to Retro but they are running a special that is making it only 10K.

None of the units that I own are platinum, which I thought was a requirement to Retro an SDO unit.

I am not interested but am curious to know what the community thinks of this offer.

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[vacationtime1]

I wouldn't pay $10K to retro an SDO 2bd true platinum. It would yield 148100 StarOptions. But it would cost $10K and have zero value upon resale.

Instead, I would buy a 2bd platinum plus Kierland for about $15K. I would get the same 148100 StarOptions and have a reasonable chance of recovering my cost on resale. The MF's are couple hundred higher, but otoh, the Kierland can be rented for a $2K profit. Try that with an SDO.

 

[teddyo333]

I agree with you 100%. I think they may be fishing for people that want to Retro before the merged program is announced. I am concentrating on picking up additional mandatory properties where I plan to vacation. I don't want to compete with potentially a significant number of new Marriott owners for a resort, that is not my home Resort, at the 8 month mark. And I don't think sales knows what Marriott may offer existing Vistana owners to get them into the Vistana Network. They may offer the ability to Retro resale units for $1K per property (pure speculation but you never know)

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[DannyTS]

My tea leaves are telling me this is another sign we are getting closer to mass enrollment in the integrated MVC- Vistana program. Of course, i am rooting for it so i may see signs where there are none.

In the last 9 months I sat through 2 presentations and spoke on the phone with a Vistana rep and the story was the same until recently: I was supposed to spend a minimum of 20k to re-qualify a contract, more for more. There were other proposals that included giving back some contracts and acquiring one of the flex programs for usually even more money and an increase of MF.
Their argument kind of made sense: because Vistana was now part of MVC, grandfathering contracts was only gonna be more expensive really soon because grandfathering MVC contracts was also much more expensive.

The fact that they are offering to re-qualify weeks for a much lower price is telling me that this a last attempt to make some money before everybody gets a chance to enroll for a minimum amount of money that would be a win-win IMO both for MVC and the Vistana owners.

 

[4Sunsets]

Help, lost me in the terms I dont understand. "Retro"??? What exactly was the offer: to buy back your unit or enroll it in the MVC points program?

 

[vacationtime1]

Help, lost me in the terms I dont understand. "Retro"??? What exactly was the offer: to buy back your unit or enroll it in the MVC points program?

"Retro" or "requalify" (in Vistana/Starwood -speak) means that by spending money on another unit ($10k+, apparently), Vistana will treat your week as if it were a developer purchase. So you would get StarOptions for the requalified week and have the ability to turn in that week for Bonvoy points (the latter seldom being a good deal economically). You also may qualify for various status levels which are also of questionable value given the ambiguities of the Starwood/Marriott merger.

So far, this has nothing to do with Marriott's Destinations Club.

 

[dioxide45]

Help, lost me in the terms I dont understand. "Retro"??? What exactly was the offer: to buy back your unit or enroll it in the MVC points program?

Retro usually refers to buying (now) Westin or Sheraton Flex points and they make your resale unit as good as developer. You don't trade it in, you just add the ability to start using the associated StarOpions in VSN.

 

[4Sunsets]

Thank you both... vacationtime1 and dioxide45.