How to efficiently search on RCI.com [RCI Points]

[rounderjd]

This is an embarassingly dumb question, but...

I recently got set up with my RCI points account, and I'm having a tough time running searches (or maybe there's really just *nothing* available, anywhere, at any time I'm interested in.)

The RCI points standard vacation search seems simple enough. It's a bit annoying that I seem to have to search by region, though. I thought there used to be a nice map-based search feature (like the one they let you use for the last minute vacations searches, except that it limited to two months).

What really frustrates me is the Weeks reservation search feature. Do I really have to select a region AND a sub-region for every search? I just want to know what's available, anywhere, over the next 90 days (how else can I make an instant vacations booking?) I have tried searching random regions/sub-regions, and I never find anything. Am I doing this wrong or is that simply how they've set up the search system?

 

[siesta]

re-read post and figured it out. i dont have rci points sorry

 

[rickandcindy23]

RCI Points is annoying. I can only search 30 days in the Standard Reservation side. I have always been frustrated with it, but then again, I have always known exactly what resort I wanted for the time I wanted it, so I don't spend much time on RCI Points. I avoid it like the plague.

 

[MichaelColey]

The interface is nowhere near as flexible as RCI Weeks to me. You have to know exactly what you want to search for, and you can't do an ongoing search. The selection for almost everything I've looked at is nowhere near as good. One of the benefits is supposed to be for bookings of less than 7 days, but I find very few that allow it. I'm sure I'll find some use out of my RCI Points, but I'm not that enthralled about it.

 

[Jennie]

The RCI Points website is so full of glitches, it's disgraceful. I don't know if RCI has set it up that way by design to result in so few reservations being made that it gives them a phony excuse to rent the most desirable weeks to the public with impunity, using the excuse that no RCI members wanted it

According to the terms of the RCI class action lawsuit settlement, they are supposed to make weeks they have placed in the rental inventory simultaneously available to RCI members for exchange. But then who in their right mind would believe that RCI will follow any fair play rules, man-made or otherwise

It is also quite possible that they have a totally incompetent IT team. They have a long history of this.

Either way, it's a huge hassle to use the website. I hope they lose so much business because of it that they will make the necessary improvements. Unless, of course, they do not care about member business. They can probably make larger profits short-term by focusing on rentals but is due time no owners will deposit their prime units and RCI will wind up with nothing worthwhile to rent.

Unfortunately they will be learning this hard lesson at the expense of their previously loyal membership base.

 

[Pit]

According to the terms of the RCI class action lawsuit settlement, they are supposed to make weeks they have placed in the rental inventory simultaneously available to RCI members for exchange.

Is this true for Points "deposits" and Weeks deposits?

 

[Piscesqueen]

I love my RCI pts

I'm still new to timesharing so please don't listen to me but I must be missing something....

I LOVE my RCI points account and am now looking to purchase ALOT more points.

Maybe its just the places I look for but I live in the NW and constantly see availability for many resorts within driving distance to my home. I give myself a 15 hour drive-to radius and so far have been impressed with the results.

Maybe the other places I look into are just overbuilt but we plan to go to Orlando EOY, Cali Coast EOY, Vegas EY, Hawaii EOY, and more. We expect only 2 fly-to weeks a year and the rest drive-to. ALL of the places I've mentioned have had availability for when we've wanted to travel (hypothetical times of the year, as we haven't booked yet, only searched).

I know Orlando is overbuilt but we'll be there for 3 weeks in Dec. and we have 2 stays. 7 nts 3bd Silver Lake and remaining nights in a 3bd at HGVC Seaworld. We were extremely happy with these bookings. But, I'm very easy to please to be honest .

I do search at exactly the time when the deposits are made and see a huge difference in whats available and let me tell ya, it can disappear fast if your not quick with the mouse sometimes. My work has insanely fast internet connections so when I'm really serious I'll search from there because I know it's WAY faster than my home (and I have pretty quick net at home).

I don't know if this helped at all but I thought I'd just give my 2 cents .

Thanks,
Piscesqueen

 

[rounderjd]

As it turns out, there actually was something wrong with my RCI points account. I was talking to an RCI rep when asking about the Platinum program and mentioned that I couldn't get ANY search results when searching for weeks reservations. Someone in web support looked into it and found out that, because my account had been set up with a US instead of Canadian service code (or something), there wa a glitch. Once he fixed that, I actually started to *see* search results!

 

[tlguinn_2000]

Deposits

I do search at exactly the time when the deposits are made and see a huge difference in whats available and let me tell ya, it can disappear fast if your not quick with the mouse sometimes.

How do you know when the deposits are made?

<

 

[glypnirsgirl]

How do you know when the deposits are made?

<

Experience!

 

[tlguinn_2000]

HAHA

Experience!

Sometimes we have to pay for our education

 

[tlguinn_2000]

Seriously

Experience!

I have read that they deposit some (a lot) after midnight, but it also appears that they have moved away from that based on what some others have been saying. True?

<

 

[Bigrob]

Points reservations with flexible dates?

Hi... new here, and wondering is there any way to search RCI points vacation/inventory without specifying a date? We are flexible and can change our travel timeframe to sit availability, rather than just taking what is available at a specific time, but it doesn't seem like it's set up to allow you to do that.

Thanks!
Eric

 

[ampaholic]

RCI Points adds an extra layer of "abstraction" to the search criteria. This means that each deposit is divided into days instead of being kept as a week (as it is in RCI Weeks).

It is this feature that enables the database to search for a 2 day stay at resort 1909 - or a 16 day stay anywhere in Florida from the same database.

It is the nature of databases that each time you add a layer of abstraction you must also add a control to be able to search that layer.

If you can settle on one dimension of what you want to find (either when, or what region, or what resort you want) then the search has a chance.

Also remember you are in a 10 month window with points not the 24 month of weeks.

The widest window you can search is 30 days (for example March 1 2012 - March 31 2012 Resort 1909).

 

[Bigrob]

Thanks!

RCI Points adds an extra layer of "abstraction" to the search criteria. This means that each deposit is divided into days instead of being kept as a week (as it is in RCI Weeks).

It is this feature that enables the database to search for a 2 day stay at resort 1909 - or a 16 day stay anywhere in Florida from the same database.

It is the nature of databases that each time you add a layer of abstraction you must also add a control to be able to search that layer.

If you can settle on one dimension of what you want to find (either when, or what region, or what resort you want) then the search has a chance.

Also remember you are in a 10 month window with points not the 24 month of weeks.

The widest window you can search is 30 days (for example March 1 2012 - March 31 2012 Resort 1909).

Thanks Rick... I think you're saying you have to narrow your window down to 30 days. So If I know I want to stay at resort XYZ, but I can go anytime in the 10-month points booking window, I have to slice and dice 10 times to see each 30-day period in the 10 month window. I was hoping to be able to find availability at XYZ for the entire 10-month booking window, but I think you're saying there's no way to view it that way.

 

[ampaholic]

Thanks Rick... I think you're saying you have to narrow your window down to 30 days. So If I know I want to stay at resort XYZ, but I can go anytime in the 10-month points booking window, I have to slice and dice 10 times to see each 30-day period in the 10 month window. I was hoping to be able to find availability at XYZ for the entire 10-month booking window, but I think you're saying there's no way to view it that way.

Yes, that is the way the DB controls are built now - they could be built so you could search the entire 10 month widow at once - but I think it would slow the already slow search engine to a dismal crawl.

With weeks that window is about 24 months - but really that is just 104 units (weeks) to the abstraction layer.

If you control that layer in points you have at least 303 units since an RCI Point vacation can start on any day and another 303 since it can also end on any day.

The weeks layer "knows" each week ends 7 days after it starts.

With points having at least 606 stops on it's "bus" line it would be much too slow to search them all for each and every search - thus the division into 10 sections (each 30.3 or so days long).

This said - I really do think RCI Programmers could do a lot of things more user friendly in the points interface. Perhaps eventually they will.

 

[ronparise]

The widest window you can search is 30 days (for example March 1 2012 - March 31 2012 Resort 1909).

Well that explains a lot

I have never been able to do a search for standard reservations (everything available in a particular local, 10 months out) I guess I have to do 10 searches, one for each month

Until I read this comment I had decided to just abandon my points account in protest

 

[ampaholic]

Well that explains a lot

I have never been able to do a search for standard reservations (everything available in a particular local, 10 months out) I guess I have to do 10 searches, one for each month

Until I read this comment I had decided to just abandon my points account in protest

I hope you'll give it another chance.

Another quirk you can exploit is what I call "fill in vacations" - an example to clarify:

Lets assume you want to go to resort 1909 in the first half of April 2012 (any 4 to 7 day block April 1 to April 14 will work) and you need a 2 bedroom.

Now suppose April is getting quite booked up at 1909, and you can't find a default 7 day vacation in that time frame.

I would do a search for April 1 to 10 start date - 2 bedroom - 6 days duration, then a search for 5 days then one for 4 days and even one for 3 days.

I have done this for late notice stays at our favorite resort and successfully built a "Frankenstein" vacation with 3 days in one unit and 2 days in another unit. This saved the vacation even though it cost a slight bit more than a solid 5 day block .

Why this works is at 10 months some people are reserving just weekends, leaving the 2,3,4 and 5 day "weekday" blocks to wither - until you find them and string them together.

Go points

 

[MichaelColey]

but I think it would slow the already slow search engine to a dismal crawl.

It's really not that complicated of a computer algorithm. When you consider that Google searches an index of well over a trillion web pages and finds the most relevant pages for any combinations of keywords in a small fraction of a second, and travel sites search millions of flights, piecing them together and factoring in complex fare rules, it's really not too much to expect RCI to be able to do more flexible searches in RCI Points.

 

[ampaholic]

It's really not that complicated of a computer algorithm. When you consider that Google searches an index of well over a trillion web pages and finds the most relevant pages for any combinations of keywords in a small fraction of a second, and travel sites search millions of flights, piecing them together and factoring in complex fare rules, it's really not too much to expect RCI to be able to do more flexible searches in RCI Points.

Spoken by a neophyte in Data Base topology I'm sure.

Comparing apples to brake rotors does no good. Google is an entirely different search - all the engine needs to do is rapidly match a string of words to the chosen string, it then lets the user decide relevance.

The RCI Points engine has to first match the bedrooms frame, then match the Region, State, Resort frame, then match the start time frame, then match ..... and on and on. It's like doing 15 Google searches in a row with the added fun of having to be "correct".

Google gives a rats rear if it is "correct".

And the RCI Start Date / End Date grid layer is more like 303 times 303 which is a gigantic number.

 

[ampaholic]

It's really not that complicated of a computer algorithm. When you consider that Google searches an index of well over a trillion web pages and finds the most relevant pages for any combinations of keywords in a small fraction of a second, and travel sites search millions of flights, piecing them together and factoring in complex fare rules, it's really not too much to expect RCI to be able to do more flexible searches in RCI Points.

This is loopy - it's like saying because "Joe" can swim the English channel and "Pete" can climb mt Everest - I should be able to fly to Oxnard.

What Google and a travel site do - has nothing, zero, zip, nada to do with what RCI's search engine can or should be able to do.

This is nothing but a red herring :annoyed:

If you don't like me sharing what I know here just say so - don't throw out some bizarre concept like "because we can put a man on the moon - we should be able to find Jimmy Hoffa."

 

[fishingguy]

well....

amphaolic wrote:

"I have done this for late notice stays at our favorite resort and successfully built a "Frankenstein" vacation with 3 days in one unit and 2 days in another unit. This saved the vacation even though it cost a slight bit more than a solid 5 day block .

Why this works is at 10 months some people are reserving just weekends, leaving the 2,3,4 and 5 day "weekday" blocks to wither - until you find them and string them together."

The secret is out now... I've done this a number of times, and it got me in the door for a week (or longer stay), at a resort that I otherwise couldn't have gotten into. Also done this with resorts that aren't too far apart; lets me fish different sections of a basin or river that way. Gatlinberg and Pigeon Forge, TN were the last areas where I did this.

 

[MichaelColey]

Spoken by a neophyte in Data Base topology I'm sure.

No, I build web sites built around databases for a living, I have a degree in computer science and one of my favorite classes in college was computer algorithms, so I understand the database and algorithmic complications. I'm just pointing out that CONSIDERABLY more complex things have been done with far more complicated data and inifitely larger data sets. There's no excuse for the RCI Points interface to be so limited.

And 303 x 303 is miniscule to a computer. Besides, it's really not that long. You specify a vacation length (like 7 days), so it's really 303 x 1. But even if you left it open-ended for something like any vacation length of 1-30 days, it's just 303 x 30, which is under 10k combinations.

 

[bnoble]

Google is an entirely different search - all the engine needs to do is rapidly match a string of words to the chosen string, it then lets the user decide relevance.

This is so incredibly wrong it's barely worth addressing. But, you can get an idea of the complexities of the early versions of Google's indexing/search system here:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Google gives a rats rear if it is "correct".

History disagrees with you. Google trounced AltaVista. Why? After all, AltaVista was *the* dominant search engine pre-google. AV lost because it did not order search results anywhere nearly as well as Google does---and "ordered well" here is a way to describe correctness, giving people relevant results in the first page of hits, and preferably *the* first hit. That's due directly to PageRank.

The Points interface is broken, pure and simple. It's nearly exactly the same as the Weeks interface was about 3-4 years ago. The Weeks interface is now much better. The Points interface should be too. I'm not sure why it isn't, but it absolutely could and should be. It's not as though Points has an order of magnitude more inventory or anything; there simply is no technical reason why Points should remain broken.

(And, lest you suggest I'm not qualified as a computer scientist to offer that comment, I think I am.)

 

[Elan]

No, I build web sites built around databases for a living, I have a degree in computer science and one of my favorite classes in college was computer algorithms, so I understand the database and algorithmic complications. I'm just pointing out that CONSIDERABLY more complex things have been done with far more complicated data and inifitely larger data sets. There's no excuse for the RCI Points interface to be so limited.

And 303 x 303 is miniscule to a computer. Besides, it's really not that long. You specify a vacation length (like 7 days), so it's really 303 x 1. But even if you left it open-ended for something like any vacation length of 1-30 days, it's just 303 x 30, which is under 10k combinations.

Agree completely. Any sortable database with so few elements should be easily searchable. If one wants a more germane example, look at Worldmark's resort database. Sure, far fewer total resorts than RCI, but Worldmark shows real time availability down to the room type (2BR queen, 2BR twin, 2 BR deluxe, 2BR special needs, 2 BR ocean view, etc). Oh, and it shows availability for the entire open booking period (13 months), including how many rooms of each type (range, not absolute) are available each day.

RCI's Points search is inexcusably weak, plain and simple.