Went to an owner update today at SVV. Ended up in the Sheraton Flex.
I know how the TUG regulars feel about the value of it and I've actually avoided doing this the last several updates. Even even did this and rescinded two years ago at Steamboat. (Thanks to the TUG team for that one).
But... now there are some factors that seem to make this a better fit for us even if I am not thrilled by doing it.
From the Sales Team, the major push items were two things:
1. As the OP noted, they won't take upgrades from the legacy Vistana stuff after 12/31/19
(Everyone I talked to today had come over from Marriott and were kind of salty on the whole upgrading thing)
2. The absolute Major selling point was that we'd be getting access to the resorts in the Marriott Vacation Club portfolio but only in flex. Not through deeded weeks.
More on these two later...
Long story short--Owned a 2BR annual at WPORV and even year 1BR at Sheraton Mountain Vista.
These were done back in the day before we knew what we were doing, so we've gotten a lot of good travel out of them. But they were/are expensive.
Got the SMV to get to 3* as we were converting to points more back before the Marriott takeover.
Have really hung onto the Princeville because we love it there. But living in Florida, so it's pretty far; we still have a bunch of pay off, the maintenance is murder ($3300 for 2020), we only get to Hawaii every 3-4 years now. Our son just started kindergarten so our travel pattern is about to get much tigheter. Also, I only book most stuff 8 months out anyway. With the SMV, our annual maintenance is almost $4K.
So with the Flex we took 220K options and will end up overpaying a bit for what nets us around 40K more a year in options. But it works for us because we really needed to work with our existing equity and the value for us is in our usage. Not really in the position to be shopping on the resale market right now. Side note: They did take back the SMV, even after saying they wouldn't.
Saving some $$ by not starting until 2021, so skip 4 months of payments into 2020 and the $4K maintenance for 2020. Rebating maintenance for SMV for 2019 on the 2021, bill, which will push that down below $3K for year one. And then kicked us comp 250K in Bonvoy points for 2020 travel in the meantime.
Interestingly enough--we did get the Westin Flex presentation in Nov. in Steamboat. The pitch was for Princeville only and even so, there was basically no discount (10% off $75K for 185K options). I probably would have preferred WFlex, but they have not much incentive to discount at this point.
OK, back to Marriott Vacation Club
Basically, the story was this:
1. Back to the OP's point, the Vistana properties won't be used any longer to upgrade ownerships with no money down. So you would have to put new money going forward in some ways because, well, Marriott wants to get paid. Will be very curious to see if they stick to this.
2. Key item would be that you'd specifically have to buy new options to access the Marriott Vacation Club properties, which you will apparently get with the Flex. Starting in 2020 the pitch is that you'll be able to use these flex options to book into the existing MVC resorts. Of course, no one could explain exactly how this would work. MVCs valuations are significantly different...
3. They had some interesting sheets (I missed photographing one of them, so will see if I can snag it tomorrow.) that essentially showed that these resorts would be standardized for 2BR, 1 week in the top season at 110,000 points. They make reference to Interval Points. This was on the OPs document as well (posted my copy, which might be more legible). And the secondary sheet that looked like the Vistana option charts almost, but with these Interval points. When pressed, basically they said that until the program is combined officially, the MVC access will be through Interval at those rates. So bottom line--the 220K options was done because it's 2-2BR weeks a year cross the MVC resorts as well.
They had kind of an interesting graphic that showed they'd also acquired Hyatt, so this would include the Hyatt Vacation resorts as well--all rolled into the new MVC.
Still not exactly clear on how all of this is going to work, but the discussion was that next month the ILG transition completes, allowing for the relaunch of the newly re-branded MVC. Interval will be launching an MVC specific portal to do this. I'll believe it when I see it, but take that for what it's worth, I guess.
