Our salesman was a friendly 60ish guynamed Peter, and then a younger guy, Conrad, came in with the deal. (Side note, I thought Conrad disrespected Peter several times—“Where you going with that Peter?”) Anyhow, the pitch to us was that Vistana owners (we bought directly from Vistana) are getting a great deal with the new program, and that now was the time to buy Vistana because in June they would no longer be selling any Vistana points, just Marriott, and we wouldn’t get nearly as good a deal
But they said regardless of whether we bought anything or not, we will be able to convert our Vistana options to the Marriott points. Our 67,100 Vistana flex options converts to 1960 points in the Marriott system. They showed us several examples of what we could do with that many points. It’s hard to compare exactly because the Marriott system seemed much more fine grained—the same room can cost lots of different amounts depending on the specific week.
They said we were good to go, whether we purchased anything or not. We can continue to use our star options on Vistana properties, just as we always have, or, beginning in 23 reserve the Marriott properties.
They first tried to get us to basically double what we had, and gain elite status, which would let us reserve 13 months out. That was a hard no. A lot of money, a lot of maintenance fee. The least the could sell us was 20,000 Star options and it was going to cost us about 10K. Again, that was a no.
That’s from memory. I was I had taken a picture of the sheet they always do with their figures jotted down. There were some other incentives—Bonvoy points, “promos” that let us purchase 330000 Bonvoy points for $2295.
One last humorous note. At one point they commented how great it was that they now knew for sure when the program began and they had a “hard date” they could absolutely count on. I said, “You have an exact hard date when the program starts?” Pause. “ We’ll,no, but it’s definitely going to be in June.”