• A few of the most common links here on the forums for newbies and guests!
  • The TUGBBS forums are completely free and open to the public and exist as the absolute best place for owners to get help and advice about their timeshares for more than 30 years!

    Join Tens of Thousands of other Owners just like you here to get any and all Timeshare questions answered 24 hours a day!
  • TUG started 31 years ago in October 1993 as a group of regular Timeshare owners just like you!

    Read about our 31st anniversary: Happy 31st Birthday TUG!
  • TUG has a YouTube Channel to produce weekly short informative videos on popular Timeshare topics!

    Free memberships for every 50 subscribers!

    Visit TUG on Youtube!
  • TUG has now saved timeshare owners more than $24,000,000 dollars just by finding us in time to rescind a new Timeshare purchase! A truly incredible milestone!

    Read more here: TUG saves owners more than $24 Million dollars
  • Sign up to get the TUG Newsletter for free!

    Tens of thousands of subscribing owners! A weekly recap of the best Timeshare resort reviews and the most popular topics discussed by owners!
  • Our official "end my sales presentation early" T-shirts are available again! Also come with the option for a free membership extension with purchase to offset the cost!

    All T-shirt options here!
  • A few of the most common links here on the forums for newbies and guests!
  • The TUGBBS forums are completely free and open to the public and exist as the absolute best place for owners to get help and advice about their timeshares for more than 30 years!

    Join Tens of Thousands of other Owners just like you here to get any and all Timeshare questions answered 24 hours a day!

FYI Encore Package Cruise Certificate Value/Not so much value

catbro

TUG Member
Joined
Apr 7, 2017
Messages
89
Reaction score
7
Resorts Owned
marriott Vail
We recently completed an Encore Package presentation and got our cruise certificate from Privileges Redemption Center which is booked on the OVS cruise website. My experience is that this MVC cruise website is ~50% more expensive than booking with a real travel agent or directly, so that is my bias going in. Full disclosure.

I hope this information will be useful to other TUG Marriott members offered similar packages to understand the real value of the cruise offer to decide if it worth the money and time you are spending in spite of the highly inflated claims by sales people.

First of all, MY encore salesperson "guaranteed" the cruise certificate would completely cover the cost of a basic 7 N Seattle round trip Alaska cruise in an inside cabin during main season. AND she showed it to us on her laptop... they are obviously learning from the Mexico timeshare liars.. PLUS she claimed SHE personally booked the cruise with the exact same promotion and upgraded at a small cost to a balcony cabin.

We were sooo stupid to ever believe her. We didn't want to book Alaska but thought we could use the certificate on a nice cruise destination we had't planned for.

But please believe me the certificate will NEVER come close to the cost of a cruise anywhere in any cabin and has pretty much ZERO to marginal value (maximum about $400).

I checked out numerous dates/itineraries/cruise lines and the fares are either exactly the same as the cruise website, sometimes even higher sometimes offers a savings of $300 to $400 for itineraries I don't want to take.

My advise is to NOT trust the Marriott VC sales people anymore. Since Marriott International divested of the time share company there is little interest in truth anymore.

Another disappointment in our Marriott (lack of) real invesment. Sigh.
 
Based on our experience back in 2014 when we got a similar cruise certificate, I would concur with your assessment that the value is limited. We wound up not even being able to use it since at the time we still had a daughter in high school and couldn't find a time to take a cruise vacation before it expired. Thankfully, we didn't put a lot of value onto the cruise certificate to begin with and got the cost of the Encore credited to us when we purchased our week/points hybrid bundle.

What we did find, however, was the "value" of the cruise certificate varied greatly from sailing-to-sailing and between cruise lines. The greatest value appeared to usually be on Carnival. When shopping the system, we actually found several Carnival 4-5 day cruises where we could get a balcony cabin for basically free (would have to pay taxes and port charges). Also found a very few Norwegian sailings with similar benefits. They were there, but you had to look for them, your schedule had to line up with those cruises, and you had to be willing to sail on the cruise lines offering the best discounts. Carnival didn't appeal to us, so we didn't consider those, and when we focused on the cruise lines we wanted to sail on, we found as you did that the benefit was generally less than about $500, at best, when compared to a site like cruise.com
 
We had a cruise certificate for an encore package several years ago that we never used. In part, we didn't find value with it when we were trying to plan 6-12 months ahead. The rates offered for what we were interested in simply didn't make sense. BUT, we did find that when we looked for cruises closer to departure date, there was great value. We just weren't able to go on the shorter notice cruises at the time. So I think value can be found with these certificates, but it takes some effort, and you have to be flexible. By the way, even though we didn't use the certificate, we felt we got good value from the encore package. Ymmv.
 
Received a "travel card" from Privileges Redemption Center with a nominal value of $500 from an annual Welk owner update. We were mostly curious about what the come-on was about, didn't expect much value. Subsequent research suggests it has marginal or no value for anything other than discounted cruises on a few cruise lines and few sailings. We can probably do better with last-minute deals. Happily, the Welk sales reps were overbooked for an early afternoon appointment, couldn't make the scheduled update meeting on time, so we received the "reward package" without having to sit down with a rep. They were probably going to push conversion from deed to points again, if so we are not interested and only 10 minutes wasted.
 
Top