Well, thanks for your response, timeos2, which is exactly what the resort told us. But it would have been polite to have some warning this may happen, which never came, and has never been a problem for 14 years. How could we have anticipated that? And no one answered our repeated question: So what happened to our week? And after the assessment and maintenance fees, we paid over $3200 in the past three years. A very rotten situation for people who work very hard for their money and find it was wasted.
I do feel for your situation but, it highlights the reasons for understanding every little aspect about your ownership.
Years ago we learned a lesson the hard way as well, although not to the extent your experiencing. We had purchased a fixed week/fixed unit ownership in Vegas. At the time of purchase (it was our first purchase), they assigned us a random week and told us it would be no problem, the developer was allowing fixed wee/fixed unit owners to "float" their usage weeks.
Well this worked fine up until the resort sold out. Some owners actually wanted to use the fixed week they had purchased. Since there were no more developer owned weeks or, since there were no longer enough developer owned weeks, floating our usage week was no longer an option offered by the developer. There was no written notice of this change in policy except for our ownership documents, which clearly stated we only had the right to use the fixed week/fixed unit we had been assigned.
Remember, they didn't ask us which week we wanted and we weren't smart enough to know which week would have worked best for us. They just assigned us a week and told us not to worry about it. Needless to say, this put a big dent in our travel plans as the week assigned didn't always work well for our plans.
Unlike you we were fortunate enough that we still had our fixed week and it could be deposited with I.I. for exchange. It was unfortunate that we now had to pay an exchange fee to get usage from that particular week as we had been using it to stay at our home resort, just not during the week we owned.
At this point I would consider paying the MF's early rather than waiting until they're due on Jan. 1st. All the resorts we own offer this option and about half of them require advance payment of the MF's before they'll allow us to reserve/deposit a unit. The advance MF payment has been based on the previous years MF. At the end of the year, we're billed the difference between what we've paid in advance and any inrease in the MF for the next year. I usually have most of the MF's at resorts requiring advance payment made by the end of June or, at the very least, one year in advance of when I think we might want to take vacation. If it's a resort week I know we'll exchange, I select a week that I believe will be a strong exchane week and pay the MF that week, one year in advance, and just go ahead and reserve/deposit that week. By doing this I believe I'm locking in the highest possible exchange power, it gives me a three year window to work with and it locks in a week for vacation.
I know this doesn't help your situation as it stands now but, maybe it can help you avoid this nasty situation in the future. I hope you can work something out with your resort so that you're able to get at least some value from your ownership week.