I posted this in another thread for someone who is looking to buy.
If you don't have a developer purchase you don't get Plus Partners but not having any developer points saves you two cents per thousand points for the program fees that are part of the maintenance fees. The only real advantage to having Plus Partners is that you can book Worldmark resorts with your points but you can't do it online and you pay a $99 fee for each reservation. Other people will tell you that if you want to be able to book the Worldmark resorts you would be better off just buying some resale Worldmark points/credits than spending the money to make a Wyndham developer purchase just so you can book the Worldmark resorts. If you have Plus Partners you can use your points for rental cars, flights, etc. but doing that is a horrible value and waste of your points. Resale points also don't count towards VIP benefits which are being renamed Privileges later this year. Wyndham hasn't announced what the changes will be to the VIP program so to spend the money to buy enough developer points to be any tier of the Privileges program at this point is like buying a pig in a poke. Meaning you don't know what you're getting.
You will pay the program fee on any points in your account. However you wouldn't be paying the minimum program fee on each. Owning more points even though they are in different contracts would put you over the minimum. If any of your points were purchased directly from Wyndham, not resale, then you will pay the Plus Partners rate on all the points in your account.
Program fees for 2020
- Members with Plus Partners - $0.64 per thousand or a minimum of $180. You would need to own a total of 282,000 points to be over the minimum program fee.
- Members without Plus Partners - $0.62 per thousand or a minimum of $160. You would need to own a total of 259,000 points to be over the minimum program fee.
Bali Hai has the lowest maintenance fees but you will pay a higher price to buy any resale points at Bali Hai because of that. Some other resorts with the lowest maintenance fees are Panama City Beach, National Harbor, South Shore, Canterbury, Desert Blue. When you are looking at maintenance fee numbers in something someone is selling make sure you know whether or not the seller is including the program fee in the amount they are listing as the maintenance fees. You can look through the stickies at the top of the Wyndham forum and see threads for Maintenance Fees, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. You won't find the info on all of the resorts or not current info and no one has posted a comprehensive list so you won't see one. When you look at old numbers keep in mind that the maintenance fees typically go up at least a little every year.
Maintenance fees, including the program fee under $5.25 would be excellent and under $5.75 very good. I personally wouldn't recommend deliberately going for anything with maintenance fees over $6.25-$6.50. The one exception is CWA, Club Wyndham Access, points.
The maintenance fees on CWA points for resale with the program fee are $6.90. You can usually pick up some good deals on CWA points because there are so many listings for them. If you aren't owning a huge number of points the higher maintenance fees on them probably isn't a deal breaker. CWA are not deeded points; what you have is a contract with Wyndham for the use of x number of points a year. There are a lot of resorts in CWA but not every resort is in it and some of those resorts have a limited amount of inventory in CWA. The advantage of owning CWA points is that it gives you ARP, Advance Reservation Priority at all the resorts in the program which gives you the farthest out booking window, 10-13 months. If you are booking at 10 months or less you don't need the ARP that owing CWA points gives you at a large number of resorts.
What I typically recommend to new owners is watching the listings here, on eBay, Sumday Vacations, etc. for points at Grand Desert. The maintenance fees plus the resale program fee for points in building 3 at Grand Desert are $5.58 for 2020. I think points in buildings 1 and 2 would be $5.49. Last year the maintenance fees for buildings 1 and 2 were nine cents less than building 3 so that's what I'm going on. You can usually find listings for 308,000 or 224,000 points at Grand Desert for a decent price and both are a good number of points to have to be able to book the stays you will likely want. I personally would go for 308,000 but for some people the extra $460 in maintenance fees to get the extra 84,000 points may put them over their budget. You will see lots of listings for 154,000 points but you will be pretty limited to what and when you can book with only that many points. Yes you can always buy more points later but you will spend less in the end if you buy a larger number of points to start with.
