How does Westin St. John inventory end up in II for exchanging more than 8 months out? Whatever the answer is, the same should apply to WSJ inventory that ends up in the Abound Exchange Company.
Two things:
1. One source of the available WSJ inventory could be II. From the DC/Abound start Marriott has been able to pull inventory from II to satisfy requests using DC/Abound Points. Below is copied from the TUG FAQ (that's linked below in my signature:
>>MVCI Weeks and MVCD Points inventory is kept separate according to the terms of each system's governing documents in order to protect Owners/Members ownership and usage rights. Inventory available through the DC Exchange Company is sourced from Marriott-controlled deposits as well as (according to a no-longer-available FAQ that had been posted to the owners' website during the early DC years,) "... other Marriott Vacation Club Owners who enroll their weeks and elect Vacation Club Points, and non-enrolled Owners who trade their usage for Marriott Rewards points or exchange their week through membership in Interval International."
Technically, in compliance with the governing documents, DC Trust Members have direct access to inventory in the DC Trust as well as inventory available through the DC Exchange Company; and, DC Exchange Members have direct access to only the inventory that's available through the DC Exchange Company. Functionally, it appears that Marriott is managing inventory such that a few select high-demand intervals are available only from the Trust at the 13-months Reservation Window, then at the 12-months Reservation Window most intervals are made available through the Exchange Company. Effectively, it appears that inventory is currently being managed by Marriott such that the technical v. functional legal aspects are practically nullified with respect to the overwhelming majority of available intervals.<<
2. We've never been told the machinations that Marriott uses to manipulate inventory through the Weeks, Points, II, and Other sources. It's not a given that Marriott pre-books inventory that's made available via the Abound Exchange Company. Not that my opinion is worth more than anybody else's but I don't believe that they pre-book anything. I think available intervals are coded into the system as to their origin and how they can be used/by whom, then in realtime as a request is made the system searches across all sources of inventory to fulfill the request. So basically, instead of picturing separate buckets I picture a single bucket from which inventory can be pulled depending on both the requestor's eligibility AND the source of the inventory, with built-in stops that prevent an interval being used in such a way that either owners' or Marriott's rights are violated. Using the example above, if a resort has 100 sold like intervals and 35 owners select other-than-home usage, a stopgap exists that prevents more than 35 intervals from being pulled away from owners, and, stopgaps exist to prevent the DC/Abound from pulling unfair multiples of the highest-demand intervals across a floating season.
Of course I could be wrong about all of this but it's what makes the most sense to me considering that once the back-end coding program is written it basically runs itself, and over the years we haven't seen anything to suggest that Marriott manipulates inventory for its own benefit to the detriment of Weeks/Points owners.
