YYJMSP, ... "Add me to the list"
Why in the TUG world would you want to be on any list with me on it? ROFL!
Got some major dental work done yesterday, so perhaps it's the pain killers talking...
Our story:
We looked at a bunch of smaller timeshare companies, and they just didn't have enough variety in their in-house properties. I flicked through the RCI and II books each pushed as being part of their family of properties, but didn't really see much that appealed to me personally, and was unclear on just how available these properties really were. But what I found most disconcerting was the price stability. The salesperson started at (what felt like at the time) a large number for a specific ownership, then dropped it 25%, then dropped it another 25%, and then finally asked how much I'd be willing to spend. I told him (by my calculations) that it was worth about 10% of what he was originally asking, and even then I wasn't sure if I would buy it...
We went and looked at one or two of the big players during holidays over the next few years, and weren't particularly impressed with the home properties we were shown for the amount of money they were asking (about double what the little guys were looking for). And once again, each pushed RCI/II to strengthen their offering.
We were in Hawaii in 2005 on our way to Australia, and took a look at WKORV. The property was very nice, and ability to convert to SPG points and make the other ~700 hotels essentially in-house properties (with very good presence in places we were planning on going anyways) was the key selling point, and worth their price being 25% more than what we'd looked at before SVO.
So we bought, and a few months later bought a WKROVN over the phone sight unseen, and picked up all of the other SVO properties we own over the last couple of years. We've never actually seen SVR, WLR, or WDW (heading there for the first time this spring).
Our motivation each time was 1) a good resort in a good location (with the exception of WLR, which we likely won't actually visit), and 2) value for SPG conversion (finally tying this back to the original discussion
).
And in hind-sight, it turns out that the first hotel my wife and I stayed at (on our wedding night) was a multi-story penthouse suite at a Sheraton (it's no longer a Starwood hotel).