At the "Owners Update" we did this week at Hyatt Sirena del Mar, they actually listened to what we wanted (Priority status and enough points to reserve a 2-bdrm at Sirena) and they offered us something they never have before - that we could purchase 180K Hyatt pts from them; they would then convert our 240K Welk pts to Hyatt pts, so we would have a total of 420K Hyatt points. This would make us Priority 5, so we could book 18 months out, rather than 15 months. They would then combine the two contracts into one contract to reduce the total maintenance fee to $3,300/yr (the MFs for two separate contracts would be over $4K).
I told the sales rep I'd do it for a price of $10K. However, the price was $29,700, and they said they couldn't come down even $1, so I declined. But, I have to say I was intrigued by the offer. They said this was a "one time" offer, something that Lawrence Welk's grandson (Welk Resorts President and CEO Jon Fredricks) insisted be offered to Walk members. They said our sales rep didn't offer it to us last year, so legally, they had to do it now, and it would never be offered to us again. I'm not sure any of that is true. I doubt they had any legal obligation to offer it to us, and who knows if they'll offer it again, but I haven't heard of it, and it certainly wasn't offered to us before.
Has anyone else been offered this in an owners update - conversion of Welk points to Hyatt and combining the old Welk and new Hyatt contract to reduce MFs?
And, I don't suppose I can accomplish this by purchasing additional Hyatt points re-sale, right?
In 2018, before the Welk family sold to Hyatt (or Marriott, depending on how you look at it), we combined three resale contracts into 780,000 Platinum Points. The three separate contracts were A)240,000 Platinum Points that I'd purchased from elderly relatives, B)a floating week, 2-bedroom lock-off at Villas on the Greens, and C)a fixed week, fixed unit for Thanksgiving week. Our maintenance fees decreased by $1,000 per year! Doing so cost us under $10,000—much less than the $29,700 you were offered. It took our resale contracts and turned us into Priority Level IV members; we no longer had any resale contract restrictions.
As for being able to purchase additional Hyatt points re-sale, you would not bump up to another level. Re-sale contracts do not count toward Priority memberships.
You are the first person I've seen since the family sold to Hyatt who was offered a combining. Interestingly enough, every time we go to an owner's update and we tell them our story, we hear this: "Oh, well, the Welk family always did nice things like that for their owners, but Hyatt will NEVER do anything like that." Your story proves that wrong, although the price has shot through the roof!
What confuses me is your first paragraph, when you say that they'd let you convert your Welk points to Hyatt points. Aren't your Welk points already Hyatt points?
As for the "this is a one time offer" statement, my opinion is that they'll come up with all sorts of "one time offers" to try to get you to buy something/anything. Each Owner's Update is a new-and-different offer. But $29,700 is a lot of money!
At our Owner's Update today, they wanted to sell us 60,000 additional points for roughly $13,000 with 0% interest for 12 months. What good is 60,000 points??? Quite frankly, whenever we go to one of these, I find that I w-a-n-t whatever they're offering. I don't know how they hypnotize me, but they always do. Fortunately we know this about me, and my husband is perfectly willing to pull me back to reality. In fact, before we walk into the Update, I remind him that it's his job to keep me sane. (They'd do better not insisting that both spouses must attend, but let's not tell them that.)
