I'm ready to purchase more points!

[dmenace71]

Hello, I'm ready to purchase more points for my Wyndham timeshare... I currently have 105,000 Access points through Panama City Beach. My main question is can I combine my current points with my points that I buy from a resale and does the current maintenance fee I pay now, gets added to the resale maintenance fee? I have other questions but if there is anything else that will help me with this process, I would like to hear them. Thank you!

 

[Jan M.]

If you buy resale make sure you give the closing company your Wyndham member number so the new deed/contract gets added to your account. In your financial information you will see the total amount owed for your maintenance fees and also a breakdown for each contract.

At 10 months or less points are points and they will combine to book reservations. When using your ARP, Advance Reservation Priority, you can only use the points deeded at that specific resort and cannot combine points that are deeded at a different resort to make ARP reservations. Club Wyndham Access points can however be combined because they are not deeded but instead are a contract.

 

[Herbaltees]

If you buy resale make sure you give the closing company your Wyndham member number so the new deed/contract gets added to your account. In your financial information you will see the total amount owed for your maintenance fees and also a breakdown for each contract.

At 10 months or less points are points and they will combine to book reservations. When using your ARP, Advance Reservation Priority, you can only use the points deeded at that specific resort and cannot combine points that are deeded at a different resort to make ARP reservations. Club Wyndham Access points can however be combined because they are not deeded but instead are a contract.

do you pay the program fee for both contracts?

 

[Jan M.]

do you pay the program fee for both contracts?

Yes. 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.

 

[Sandy VDH]

Make sure you purchase something with the same use year, so your years will get aligned correctly and you won't have to have an adjustment made.

All my contracts are the Jan - Dec use year, which makes it easy to remember deadlines.

You may want to consider purchasing more CWA points so you won't have to remember different rules for different points inventory types.

 

[Jan M.]

Make sure you purchase something with the same use year, so your years will get aligned correctly and you won't have to have an adjustment made.

All my contracts are the Jan - Dec use year, which makes it easy to remember deadlines.

You may want to consider purchasing more CWA points so you won't have to remember different rules for different points inventory types.

I agree that this person will save his or herself a lot of headache by only buying other deeds or contracts with the same use year. Because the 105,000 points they now have isn't that many if their use year isn't already January 1 I would probably look to buy something that is January 1 and get the use year alignment over. Wyndham's ideal scenario/goal? is for everyone to have a January 1 use year. The fewer points/contracts you have when they realign your use year seems to make it less complicated and easier to understand too.

Many people prefer to have a mix of deeded points and CWA points because it covers all the bases. Not every resort is in CWA and some have very limited inventory in CWA. However I agree with Sandy VDH until you become familiar the Wyndham system you may be better off to sticking to just CWA for the time being. It helps to have a good grasp of things like the booking windows, how the two different types of points work for making ARP Advance Reservation Priorty, reservations and whether or not you will even need or actually use the ARP.

It is very important to know what your needs are and buy accordingly. It also helps to be familiar with the typical availability at the resorts you would most frequently be staying at. For us owning at resorts that give us lower maintenance fees is my priority because in 18 years of owning I have never once booked an ARP reservation at any of the resorts we have ever owned at. In addition to the resorts we currently own at we have owned at Cypress Palms, Canterbury and Ocean Boulevard so a total of 7 resorts. But, and this but is important, we didn't need the 3 and 4 bedroom units, we weren't tied to the school schedule or needing to use a very limited number of vacation days that we had to have weeks like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, 4th of July weeks and we had some flexibility in being able to schedule our vacation time.

That doesn't mean we never got any stays during those peak weeks because we did, We only needed a one or two bedroom units and I found the stays within 60 days or less of the check in dates. We've stayed in a one bedroom deluxe at Old Town Alexandria, DC/Virginia, over the 4th of July. Another time a one bedroom deluxe La Cascada in San Antonio checking in on Easter Sunday. Just last year we had a two bedroom deluxe at Bonnet Creek in Orlando over the week leading into Easter and a few days after. We've stayed at Ocean Walk in Daytona over Thanksgiving several times. However except for San Antonio we weren't booking flights or rental cars for any of those other stays either. A few times I've booked our flights to Las Vegas without having our stays at Grand Desert booked. I've never not been able to find the stays I needed at that resort and depending on whether we were by ourselves or had other people with us was able to book a one or two bedroom deluxe. However that isn't something I would do at just any resort that I wasn't familiar with the typical availability at.

 

[dmenace71]

Good morning, thanks for replying to my question! I have another question about buying resale. What are the benefits that you don't get by buying resale? Also, does anyone know who has the lowest maintenance fees in the Wyndham Access system?

 

[Jan M.]

If you don't have a developer purchase you don't get Plus Partners and 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 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.

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 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 excellent 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 all of us can book everything so 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.

 

[chapjim]

I agree that this person will save his or herself a lot of headache by only buying other deeds or contracts with the same use year. Because the 105,000 points they now have isn't that many if their use year isn't already January 1 I would probably look to buy something that is January 1 and get the use year alignment over. Wyndham's ideal scenario/goal? is for everyone to have a January 1 use year. The fewer points/contracts you have when they realign your use year seems to make it less complicated and easier to understand too.

Many people prefer to have a mix of deeded points and CWA points because it covers all the bases. Not every resort is in CWA and some have very limited inventory in CWA. However I agree with Sandy VDH until you become familiar the Wyndham system you may be better off to sticking to just CWA for the time being. It helps to have a good grasp of things like the booking windows, how the two different types of points work for making ARP Advance Reservation Priorty, reservations and whether or not you will even need or actually use the ARP.

It is very important to know what your needs are and buy accordingly. It also helps to be familiar with the typical availability at the resorts you would most frequently be staying at. For us owning at resorts that give us lower maintenance fees is my priority because in 18 years of owning I have never once booked an ARP reservation at any of the resorts we have ever owned at. In addition to the resorts we currently own at we have owned at Cypress Palms, Canterbury and Ocean Boulevard so a total of 7 resorts. But, and this but is important, we didn't need the 3 and 4 bedroom units, we weren't tied to the school schedule or needing to use a very limited number of vacation days that we had to have weeks like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, 4th of July weeks and we had some flexibility in being able to schedule our vacation time.

That doesn't mean we never got any stays during those peak weeks because we did, We only needed a one or two bedroom units and I found the stays within 60 days or less of the check in dates. We've stayed in a one bedroom deluxe at Old Town Alexandria, DC/Virginia, over the 4th of July. Another time a one bedroom deluxe La Cascada in San Antonio checking in on Easter Sunday. Just last year we had a two bedroom deluxe at Bonnet Creek in Orlando over the week leading into Easter and a few days after. We've stayed at Ocean Walk in Daytona over Thanksgiving several times. However except for San Antonio we weren't booking flights or rental cars for any of those other stays either. A few times I've booked our flights to Las Vegas without having our stays at Grand Desert booked. I've never not been able to find the stays I needed at that resort and depending on whether we were by ourselves or had other people with us was able to book a one or two bedroom deluxe. However that isn't something I would do at just any resort that I wasn't familiar with the typical availability at.

Jan makes some important points here, although if OP is going to stick to CWA, the home resort thing doesn't matter.

I'm not a CWA owner so I'm very much in line with what Jan says. I own at Bonnet Creek, Ocean Walk, and Royal Vista with a few points at Cypress Palms and some converted fixed weeks at Santa Barbara and OIRC -- hardly low maintenance fee resorts but low maintenance fees are less important to me. We have only stayed at one of those in recent years (Royal Vista) and I don't recall if that was a full-price reservation -- probably not. (I looked it up -- 2BR Deluxe for 80,500 points, half price Value Season in 2015.)

I value ARP much more highly than does Jan because my usage is much different. I'll wipe out next year's points by July but, by year end, more of my reservations will have been those booked inside the discount/upgrade window. Many of the ARP reservations will get canceled during the course of the year to let me book bargains.