We are currently at Oceana Palms, enjoying a trade from the bulk deposit made earlier this year. We had the best luck ever in villa assignment: we got the penthouse OF unit! Earlier in the week, we had strong winds, both on the beach and on our balcony, but now it is just breezy and very pleasant indeed. While on the balcony during the windy period, my sunglasses fell off the table, onto the tile deck, and out into the great unknown. For all I know they landed at Ocean Pointe or in Miami. Lesson learned!
We went to a presentation today, probably our last, ever. For the most part, we heard the same old stuff others have reported; no surprise there. But a couple of things surfaced during the discussions that were “new to us”…they may have been discussed here on the boards, but we missed them. One thing concerned the redemption of weeks for MRPs: when that occurs (and we were told on average 30% of weeks are redeemed for MRPs annually), the weeks go into the trust inventory bucket, not the exchange pool. We were also told that weeks turned over to Marriott for rental go into the trust inventory bucket. Neither of these points seemed right to us, but we’ve got it wrong before.
When we had a minor disagreement with the sales rep about the ability to combine trust and legacy points to make a single reservation, the sales manager was brought in. He said for weeks owners like us, the purchase of a minimum number of trust points would give us an advantage of sorts, once a year, in making a prime-time (i.e., high demand) trust reservation (like President’s week or July 4th). I’m not sure how well I can recount what we were told, but I’ll try by providing a generic example: say we own 2k trust points and have 3500 “legacy” points available. We want to make a trust inventory reservation costing 2700 points, with the nightly rates as follows: Fr/Sa 600 pts each, M-F 300 pts each. We were told they would make the reservation (assuming availability) taking the 2k trust points first, then 700 of our legacy points. We would NOT be able to use X number of legacy points first, then use trust points for the remainder. The manager further advised this approach should be used ONLY on the really hard to get reservations. He also showed us where this was included in the public offering documentation (???, I’m not sure what it was called).
Our take on this, when all was said and done, was that legacy week owners who purchase trust points have direct access to trust inventory beyond the actual point value of their trust ownership on a limited basis…they can use their legacy points to supplement their trust points to directly access purely trust inventory once a year. Did we just miss this in all the earlier TUG discussions?
Now that I think about this, we would never know where the inventory is pulled from, so I'm not sure this is anything but theoretical. There is no accountability.
Anyway, we did not buy, feeling we can achieve what we want with the weeks we have, without spending another $20K plus. We bought where we wanted to go, so even if II dries up at some point (which is what we were told would happen), we will be content to go to our home resorts. Our sales rep was obviously displeased with our decision (remarking that we must not understand what we’d been told or we’d be buying, i.e., what was wrong with us?), and was surprisingly irritated when we knew what the cost would be for 2k points and associated MFs, without outlining them for us. Oh well.
We went to a presentation today, probably our last, ever. For the most part, we heard the same old stuff others have reported; no surprise there. But a couple of things surfaced during the discussions that were “new to us”…they may have been discussed here on the boards, but we missed them. One thing concerned the redemption of weeks for MRPs: when that occurs (and we were told on average 30% of weeks are redeemed for MRPs annually), the weeks go into the trust inventory bucket, not the exchange pool. We were also told that weeks turned over to Marriott for rental go into the trust inventory bucket. Neither of these points seemed right to us, but we’ve got it wrong before.
When we had a minor disagreement with the sales rep about the ability to combine trust and legacy points to make a single reservation, the sales manager was brought in. He said for weeks owners like us, the purchase of a minimum number of trust points would give us an advantage of sorts, once a year, in making a prime-time (i.e., high demand) trust reservation (like President’s week or July 4th). I’m not sure how well I can recount what we were told, but I’ll try by providing a generic example: say we own 2k trust points and have 3500 “legacy” points available. We want to make a trust inventory reservation costing 2700 points, with the nightly rates as follows: Fr/Sa 600 pts each, M-F 300 pts each. We were told they would make the reservation (assuming availability) taking the 2k trust points first, then 700 of our legacy points. We would NOT be able to use X number of legacy points first, then use trust points for the remainder. The manager further advised this approach should be used ONLY on the really hard to get reservations. He also showed us where this was included in the public offering documentation (???, I’m not sure what it was called).
Our take on this, when all was said and done, was that legacy week owners who purchase trust points have direct access to trust inventory beyond the actual point value of their trust ownership on a limited basis…they can use their legacy points to supplement their trust points to directly access purely trust inventory once a year. Did we just miss this in all the earlier TUG discussions?
Now that I think about this, we would never know where the inventory is pulled from, so I'm not sure this is anything but theoretical. There is no accountability.
Anyway, we did not buy, feeling we can achieve what we want with the weeks we have, without spending another $20K plus. We bought where we wanted to go, so even if II dries up at some point (which is what we were told would happen), we will be content to go to our home resorts. Our sales rep was obviously displeased with our decision (remarking that we must not understand what we’d been told or we’d be buying, i.e., what was wrong with us?), and was surprisingly irritated when we knew what the cost would be for 2k points and associated MFs, without outlining them for us. Oh well.
When we get home, I may try to find the reference. All I truly remember for sure at this point is, it was in book form (paperback size), roughly a half-inch thick. And it had a glossy white cover with the Marriott logo stuff on the front. Helpful, eh? Sorry. Wish I could remember better, but, I'm afraid I may be beyond that now!
