Those marketing mails are usually prescreened offers and the result of the credit bureaus providing contact information on thousands of people based on a set of criteria. Companies pay the credit bureaus for the leads, but there is no credit pull behind them. Per your last link, soft pulls do appear on your credit report. Credit cards that you do business with regularly will do soft pulls to see if they want to extend additional credit to you in the form of a higher credit limit.
It’s not just leads. Company’s can contract with the credit bureau company’s and have access to pull individual’s credit score instantly with just your name and address (sometimes a date of birth). This is a soft pull and does not affect a person’s score or show on credit report to other companies (only on some reports you can see yourself
I know these things because I use some of these tools in my line of work.
I know for a fact that timeshare companies have been using these tools and technology since at least 2009.
Not to get way off topic, but some timeshare companies have been doing this since 2009-2010 because of fallout from the financial markets crash around those years related to faulty mortgage paper.
Timeshare companies have always bundled and sold the paper on timeshare loans.
Believe it or not timeshare paper has preformed consistently well over the years, but the banks and investment companies (Wall Street) who buy the timeshare paper/receivables (timeshare loans made to you and me if you ever purchased and financed a timeshare through a developer) have gotten more picky about the type of paper they buy (meaning they only want to buy timeshare loans from people with good credit) so they have forced the hand of larger timeshare developers to me more picky with who they finance timeshare sales to (meaning timeshare companies have had to tighten up credit criteria for potential customers) therefore not wanting to market to or sell to customers with bad / lower credit scores.
So moral of the story, if a time share company is turning you away from doing a presentation or “update” it’s most likely because of this (or some other pre-qualification issue like not having your spouse with you or being under their income threshold) they just don’t like to tell you this when it happens because they don’t want to confront you directly about it and have to explain why it is what they do.
Imagine if the marketing rep told you “sorry you don’t qualify because your credit score is to low” most people would react (like some posters on here are reacting) and start to question and confront the marketing agent saying things like “how do you know my credit score?” Or “you can’t pull my credit without my permission or social security number” and then the marketing agent would have to waste time trying to explain to the person or people who have no idea about this type of thing on how all this works (like I am having to do now).