In Vistana there is zero skim in the sense that owners get exactly what it takes to book the weeks in their season. Point In = Points Out. It takes 176K SO to book every unit/week in your season and that's what you get when you elect points. That is not the case with Marriott - owners get 6%-9% less. I refer to it as "skim" but just think of it as a transaction fee when electing points. It is a cost that owners who elect points pay in an indirect manner.
Is it a big deal? That's in the eye of the beholder. Clearly many owners are converting to points and are willing to pay it. I too have converted some of my Newport Coast weeks in the past, but I'm not always inclined to do it because the week rental value is higher than the point rental value.
It should not be a concern because you can't book the high demand weeks at your home resort. You can always use your week to book those. But the points you get would not allow you to book the high demand weeks at the resort "across the street". Per my prior post, that's not necessarily because of "skim", but because of how the system is set up where weeks are aligned with demand.
Agree the main Vistana-side confusion is that we're familiar with point levels matching from the week you bought to other weeks in that season to the points you receive to travel to other network resorts...even to generally having similar "worth" across resorts. 81k is 81k is 81k and that gets you into a 1BR anywhere and low demand 2BRs (I think, without looking at the charts). With MVC you may own a week that costs 6k to book, in a season where points fluctuate by 3k points, average out to 4.5k weekly, and MVC gives you 4.1k to actually use in the system.
I think most of us get it though, it would have sucked but if near the beginning of the VSN, they said "you can travel to your resort in your season but if you convert to SOs, we rake 8% of the points as a convenience/network fee" - it would have been hard to swallow but people would have made it work in different ways, just like MVC owners do.
This soft launch is making it so much more difficult since most Vistana owners don't know what their weeks are worth in DP - no one knows if you don't trust a couple sales sheets. So that makes it hard to visualize how/if to use your unit in the DP system. It would be easier to communicate about the systems if we could all look at formal points charts and week values.
Lastly I think the MVC DP tables are poorly formatted. They look like they are at least 50% more complicated than Vistana when in reality there's maybe only 10-20% more complexity. Most resorts look like they have maybe 1-2 more true "seasons" (i.e., point levels) than typical Vistana and 1-2 weeks or selected days of peak pricing around holidays (somewhere between a true season and just a day or two of "these nights are gonna cost ya") - which generally Vistana doesn't do. But in the end they really follow chunks of weeks just like Vistana's system. In both charts it's hard to find your dates in different ways. Anyway my point is it's hard to look at when you're used to looking at Vistana's charts. And if I were in charge I would lay out the points summary differently.
