We did our owner's update today. The person we were assigned seemed relatively new, going thru a somewhat standard spiel. A few questions he couldn't answer or didn't know, such as Marriott to Marriott trade priority in II, or Marriott owners renting their DC points to other owners. There were some things he said which were different than what others had reported earlier, so take it with a grain of salt based on my interpretation of his knowledge level. The rep didn't seem to know much about current Marriott usage.
1. Estimate for go-live of Abound program is still end of the month or early August. Still waiting on IT.
Strangely our sales rep indicated that Abound might not be the final name.
2. All eligible network owners, direct purchases or retro'ed into network, will be automatically enrolled in new program.
No manual enrollment by Vistana owners. Resales of mandatory resorts will not be offered any fee type of enrollment. Nothing new here.
3a. I asked about election deadlines for "Abound" points, and gave example of Marriott enrolled weeks owners need to do this each year for DC points.
This is where the rep had a different answer. He said no deadlines and no manual election required for Vistana owners in Abound.
He said there would be 2 tabs in the reservation system, one for Vistana options reservations and another for Marriott Abound reservations.
So if we wanted to use Abound DC points, we would just make a DC based reservation from available inventory.
That would automatically release in the background my home unit(s) for the needed DC points.
The rep didn't hesitate to answer this. We asked a couple of times. But he wasn't aware that Marriott owners have election deadlines.
3b. I asked about some Marriott owners having 13 month booking priority, and how that would affect home resort owner priority at 12 months.
He was fuzzy about this, and said what we probably wanted to hear, that home resort owners would have their 12-8 months priority preference.
But I can see in theory, if a Vistana owner who has 13 month's booking priority in Marriott, could opt to reserve a Marriott unit at 13 months, thereby relinquishing a unit at their home resort. So Marrriott could take a Vistana unit week to put into the Abound program at 13 months.
4a. The main selling point the rep emphasized for converting to Westin flex is that with Abound, it will become much much more difficult to make options reservations at 8 months. Because at 8 months, we'll be competing with the Marriott Abound members for Vistana units. I'm not sure if that will occur, but it's what sales and maybe Marriott leadership think. The website woes are sure conditioning current owners towards this; whether it is artificial or not. The message was buy flex so we can reserve at 12 months.
4b. They'll stop selling Westin flex when Abound goes live. Westin flex is currently static, no new deeds to the trust. The manager couldn't/wouldn't tell us the composition of the trust deeds, e.g. what percentage or numbers of each resort in the trust. Or which seasons they covered.
5. Vistana elite levels will be grandfathered to MVC levels, e.g. 3* to Executive etc. The rep barely mentioned all the new benefits of the MVC which Vistana network owners will get. Nor the new club fee.
6. We were pleasantly surprised to find out our units will convert to more DC points than we thought. I was expecting a very low conversion value.
Our ratios were 31:1 and 33:1. Westin flex is at 28.8:1.
That's about all. We'll see in a few weeks if #3a comes to pass.
). The sales person joked (to me) that probably meant the middle of August.
