I’m not a Wyndham sales person so I cannot help you directly. I still talk to my rep who is no longer with the company. I can ask her who you should call.
HitchHiker71 is correct that resale points do not count towards status. The resale comes in with the fixed week that you enroll into PIC Plus (with a purchase of developer points of course). HitchHiker71 and I both bought qualifying fixed weeks on eBay (float weeks work too), and enrolled them into PIC Plus. Every year, we deposit our week into RCI (assuming we don’t want to use it). Once we get confirmation of the deposit, we call Wyndham to do the exchange. They will ask the room number, type, resort name, check in date, etc. All that info is on the deposit confirmation (sent via email). Then you pay $89 for each fixed week deposit (you are allowed up to two), and in exchange, Wyndham gives you points. These points count towards VIP status and can be used for bookings. If you don’t do the exchange, the points count towards VIP but are merely symbolic. You won’t be able to use them for booking until you do the exchange. This is the ONLY way anything resale counts towards VIP and even then it requires a minimum purchase of 49,000 points per PIC week. At last check, a 105,000 points was selling for $16,000 through telesales. That is before any haggling. You can get bonus points as well. Or, if you have existing retail contracts, you can do an equity trade like I did. I bought National Harbor points and exchanged my Patriots place for National Harbor. You cannot do that with resale contracts.
As far as VIP benefits, I would take the suggested advice and read through the directory. If you mainly travel during prime season (summer vacation, major travel Holidays, Hawaii which is mostly prime season all year), you are going to have a tough time getting discounts. Not impossible, but difficult. You would have to work for it by checking every day for new inventory and even then, if you find it, you’ll want to book it immediately before canceling your original reservation because it will be gone within minutes. I’ve had better luck getting discounts and upgrades in high and low seasons. If that works for you, then you can probably do well with that benefit.
I personally like the extended time to deposit points into a future year. I got a new resale contract that hit my account In August. It was 308,000 points. I could have rented them out, sure, but we have a large family vacation in 2020 and it would serve me better to move them to 2020. I wouldn’t have been able to do that without VIP. I also like the unlimited reservation transaction credits. I use that a lot. I cancel and rebook often to get the discount. Book discounted reservation first, before canceling old one. I also like unlimited housekeeping credits because it’s one less thing to keep track of. Eventually we will have the opportunity to use Margaritaville but right now we have 2019 and 2020 already planned. There are a few others that work for me. I was an owner for 10 years before going Gold. I knew by then what benefits I would realistically be able to use. That is something you will want to seriously consider. If you could never get discounts and upgrades, would you still go VIP?
As far as ROI, I consider my lodging savings as part of that. My first purchase was in 2008 for $15k. I made up for that upfront costs three times over, in lodging savings compared to cash. Sure, I could rent from an owner but we often get more then one room. I’d have to find someone willing to book two or three rooms or find multi owners willing to book me a room at the same resort at the same time. Then, they often charge $6 to $8 per 1,000. Since I travel mainly during prime, I likely won’t get any discounts. So for example, we booked three rooms in Orlando last year for 270,000 points each. Total 810,000 points. I got a resale contract for $1 and credit pooled the points. At $8 per 1,000, that’s $6480. My maintenance fees for that amount of points would be $3,823. I saved $2,657 by not renting from someone else. We take about three vacations a year. That was the big one. Normally we only get one big room. We save at least another $1,000 there each. So In one year, we saved almost $5,000. It will take me four years to make up for the upfront cost of my second purchase, in the form of lodging savings. That doesn’t include the $1,200 in maintenance fees I saved from the changes I made. After that I still have Gold VIP.
As far as the changes, when I made my purchase, I added a PIC, traded in old contract for National Harbor and I’m going to dump my higher maintenance fee contract. So I’l have the same amount of points but paying $1,200 a year less because the maintenance fees on the fixed weeks are cheaper then points and National Harbor is cheaper then Patriots place.
Yes, I could put that money into an IRA and continue making money on it, but the same can be said for other optional things. Like vacations in general. Lets throw out vacations altogether. When you add on travel expensive, attraction tickets, food, souvenirs, etc, it can get pretty expensive. Instead, stay at home and go to some local cheaper places. We can take the money we save and put it in an IRA. We can cut out going out to eat, going to the movies, etc and put all that money into an IRA. Also, let’s buy a decent used car for $10,000 instead of the $25,000 new car and put that money into an IRA. There are a lot of optional things we could cut out to save money, but we chose not to because we want vacations. We want that new car. What you chose to do with your money is your choice. Everyone has their own opinion but at the end of the day, you do what you feel is right for you and your family. A timeshare is an entertainment expense. My family enjoys it and have a lot of fond memories that are worth their weight in gold. Plus I wiII make very good use of it and the purchase gave me the opportunity to reduce my over all costs and go VIP gold.
If you are going to buy retail to get VIP through PIC Plus, make very sure you can use enough of the benefits to make it worth it, to you. If you cannot use the benefits, you might as well go resale and save a ton of money.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
