I'm going to post some thoughts for what it's worth. These are admittedly anecdotal. The summary is:
I think that Interval is making a conscious effort to improve the exchange experience for the casual exchanger. Is this a bad thing? Well, if you've been arbitraging for years like many people have (myself included), yes. However, if you happen to have bought a Marriott week a decade ago and want to use it for a trade, it's a great thing.
Here are a few anecdotes:
RCI a while back moved to both a points / TPU model. This gave a lot more transparency into what was available for exchange. However, it is rigid. If you happen to have something that gets 30 TPU's and you want to make an exchange to get to 45 TPUs, you gotta pay fees to combine them, and it makes for a pretty poor experience.
I think what Interval has probably seen is that a small percentage of their customers ended up getting a disproportionate amount of "quality" exchanges without providing a commensurate level of value back in exchange. A few examples:
- Before Hyatt changed their points requirements, I sent my parents to Hawaii for multiple weeks in a row. Just one Hyatt week got me 5 weeks in Westin studios. I think somewhere along the line Interval decided that Hyatt wasn't returning enough value into the system and changed the rules (I think they swung a bit too far, but that's off topic for this).
- There's a woman on Facebook that charges hundreds of dollars for a webinar that recommends buying weeks with cheap maintenance fees (I think there's a resort in cocoa beach with studios) and using those within flexchange. She has had tremendous success, and I'm sure many people that have taken her advice to heart have seen great results.
- It was super common to trade in 1 bedroom SDO Gold+ weeks for weeks at Nanea.
In all of those examples, the person performing the trade is receiving SIGNIFICANTLY more value than what was given up. I loved it -- I took advantage of it all the time, but all of these great trades do come at the expense of people who don't know how to maximize their value.
While it does impact me, tons of tuggers, and it impacts a half dozen of my good friends and family that I got interested in timeshares / exchanging, I think overall it will create a more healthy balance. The people that understand how things work will always receive more value than what they put in.
However, I do think this will make it a lot easier for an owner that owns a gold week at Barony Beach club that signs into interval every few months to trade into a fall week at Ko Olina. I may dare say that we could see an increase in the quality deposits that interval receives.
I think we've already seen this play out. Previously when we'd see bulk 2 Bedroom deposits for Marriott resorts in Hawaii, they would sometimes be gone in a matter of hours or minutes.
There are 2 bedroom units at Marriott Maui Ocean Club (in the newer towers) that are STILL available more than a week after they were first deposited. I do realize that a lot of that does have to do with the situation in Lahaina -- but I do think a major factor is the adjustments that have been made to trade power.
