hello. i'm very new to timesharing so please pardon the ignorance. i just backed out of a direct hgvc purchase because i found that it cost about 3x resale. anyway, i'm looking again but i'm confused with the different price ranges for the same number of points. i thought that a point deeded in hawaii is worth as much as a point in las vegas. as i understand it, hgvc points are much like currency - a buck is a buck. sure, it may buy more in vegas than in hawaii but it's still worth a buck. so why would 7000 points in hawaii be priced about 2x as much as 7000 points in vegas?
thanks!
My best guess would be because if you own in Hawaii, you have the home resort window for preference in booking a unit in Hawaii.
In the past getting a unit in any HGVC built resort wasn't tough. People would routinely buy in Vegas or Orlando strictly to exchange into Hawaii. We'll I guess Hilton finally built and sold so many units in Orlando and Vegas that's it's getting tough to find inventory in Hawaii. This past year if you weren't online right when inventory for the Hawaiian resorts were released it was pretty tough sleding to get any room.
Last year we decided that we'd like to go to HHV using our Vegas points. I had planned to use our 7,000 points plus borrow enough from the next year to upgrade us to a 2 bedroom ocean front unit. The best I could do was an ocean view 1 bedroom unit or a 2 bedroom standard unit.
Then I thought I'd watch and wait for what I wanted to become available. I figured I would eventually be able to upgrade my room request to ocean front. Not only has that not happened but there has literally no inventory for the week we're traveling available at all. I was extremely glad I reserved what I did when it was available.
So, at this point in time, my opinion is that, if you really want to travel to Hawaii you'll need to bite the bullet and buy in Hawaii. If Hawaii isn't in your plans as a vacation destination every year, I'd save the money and buy in either Vegas or Orlando. There's no sense in paying big bucks for one particular location if you don't plan to travel there the lions share of the time.
As you mentioned, in the HGVC system points are points. Hawaiian points spend the same as Vegas and Orlando points.