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Hankmoon

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Many Tuggers say buy where you will stay and I have also read some posts indicating it is getting harder to trade within II since Marriott is trying to save space for its DP owners.

We are trying to decide if we should buy a Marriott EOY 2 bedroom lockoff in Maui Ocean Club or Ko Olina or a 2 BR in Waiohai (Kaui). These are the three resorts we would be most likely to stay in most frequently should trading become difficult.

My question, though, is how much trading power do these resorts have right now? Can any owners of these resorts respond and report on what kinds of trades they have been able to get recently with these resorts?

Also, how much do you like owning and staying at these resorts? What view type would you recommend? Is it worth the extra money for an ocean view?
 

tschwa2

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They are going to have very good trading power but if your intention was to exchange, they wouldn't trade that much better than a platinum non ocean front Hawaii and the upfront costs would be much lower and the MF would be lower too elsewhere. Buy the view you want. II disregards view when determining trading power. If you were going to rent it out when not using view would be much important.

Whether using a platinum Orlando or a Hawaii Marriott, the impossible to nearly impossible trades will still be nearly impossible, the easy exchanges will still be easy and for the difficult you will still need to deposit early and put in an ongoing search 12-18 months in advance, you may either get confirmed a month or two earlier using Hawaii or may have your likelihood go up a few percentage points. If you don't plan that early your small trading power advantage will be even less powerful.
 

GregT

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Marriott: Maui Ocean Club Lahaina Villas (3BRx5), Ko Olina, Shadow Ridge II, Willow Ridge, Aruba Ocean Club, DC Points HGVC: Flamingo, Sea World, I-Drive, Starwood Bella (x4), SDO, TradeWinds, Worldmark
I know this doesn't answer your question about trade power, but when I have an "extra" Hawaii week, I rent it via redweek.com and then access my target vacation with cash. I've only traded my MOC -- and that was to trade back into MOC. I do have two dedicated traders -- Shadow Ridge and Willow Ridge and both have been effective, including trading into Hawaii (Ko Olina primarily).

Sorry for the non-answer, but I wouldn't buy a Hawaii Marriott and ever trade it.

Best,

Greg
 

Hankmoon

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I know this doesn't answer your question about trade power, but when I have an "extra" Hawaii week, I rent it via redweek.com and then access my target vacation with cash. I've only traded my MOC -- and that was to trade back into MOC. I do have two dedicated traders -- Shadow Ridge and Willow Ridge and both have been effective, including trading into Hawaii (Ko Olina primarily).

Sorry for the non-answer, but I wouldn't buy a Hawaii Marriott and ever trade it.

Best,

Greg


Hi Greg,

Thanks for your answer. It is helpful. Why would you not buy a Hawaii TS and trade it? Is it better to buy a cheaper Marriott TS for trading? I mainly want to be able to use the Marriott TS sometimes and trade into Hawaii and Caribbean at Marriott, Westin, Hilton and other equivalent brands in the summer time.

Thanks,
Hank
 

brianfox

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Hank,
Trading into Marriott HI is pretty difficult these days. With the weeks resales so low, it makes more sense to buy where you want to stay.
Back when Ko Olina and Waiohai commanded $18K resales, we bought a low MF Marriott and used it to trade into HI using II. While it usually worked, it kept us on the edge of our seat until well into Flexchange time. And we had to check every single morning on II to see if any Flexchanges were available. In short, it wasn't worth the stress. When you have your airline booked and no place to stay, it's stressful. We ended up renting from Redweek, where we discovered the rent was often not much more than the MF (and sometimes less). We haven't used II in five years (but we were dumb enough to buy the 5 year renewal back then).

Nowadays you can find a resale Waiohai for a song. We just purchased three Waiohai annual island view weeks for $5500, $5500, and $5000, respectively. Marriott declined ROFR. At that price, it makes a good deal of sense to just buy. We own at Ko Olina but have been renting out our MKO and renting into Waiohai the past few years. Why not put the MKO on II and trade into Waiohai? Because Waiohai has a very high owner occupancy. They do not have lockoffs, so there is little incentive for an owner to put their full 2BR on II. Waiohai owners either stay there or rent it out or take DC points. We've been able to rent our Ko Olina weeks for $400-$800 above MF every year. Now that we have more weeks than we need, we will probably hang onto the MKOs and offset some of the Waiohai MF with rent.

If you are a Marriott Hawaii owner, you will command trading power in II, and trading into those other locations might be pretty easy. However, the problem with owning Marriott HI is the MF. Just about anything you trade into, you could have rented for less than your MF. So check out what those other brands are renting for. See how it compares to $2100 Marriott MF. You might find it is more cost effective to rent out the Marriott and rent into where you want to stay.
 

GregT

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Marriott: Maui Ocean Club Lahaina Villas (3BRx5), Ko Olina, Shadow Ridge II, Willow Ridge, Aruba Ocean Club, DC Points HGVC: Flamingo, Sea World, I-Drive, Starwood Bella (x4), SDO, TradeWinds, Worldmark
Hank,

BrianFox answer is excellent. With respect to your question, yes my non-HI traders trade extremely well and i do not believe that a Hawaii week would trade better. I've not tried the experiment, but because I've not been disappointed by my traders, any potential incremental trade power wouldn't change the equation.

I hope that makes sense?

Best,

Greg
 

Hankmoon

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Hank,

BrianFox answer is excellent. With respect to your question, yes my non-HI traders trade extremely well and i do not believe that a Hawaii week would trade better. I've not tried the experiment, but because I've not been disappointed by my traders, any potential incremental trade power wouldn't change the equation.

I hope that makes sense?

Best,

Greg

Hi Greg,

Which traders do you own and where have you been able to trade into with each one? We might be interested in buying a 2 BR EOY lockout at Grand Chateau or one of the Palm Springs resorts in Platinum season if there was any chance of being able to get some trades into the II elite resorts in Hawaii and Caribbean, even in off season. Do you think those would be good traders and possibly meet those goals?

Thanks,
Hank
 

brianfox

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Keep in mind that II now charges a double lockoff fee if you are exchanging into a larger unit.
Used to be that an owner would split their 2BR into a 1BR+Studio, deposit both and try to exchange into, say, Waiohai which only has 2BR.
So many people gamed the system that II is charging extra for such a thing.

Bottom line is that while buying a low MF property for the purpose of exchanging up every year is great in theory, but the rules are always changing. That method will definitely not be sustainable going forward.

Back when I was doing that, we owned a Platinum Desert Springs Villas II. It had annual MF of about $1000. At the time it was considered to be a pretty powerful trader.
We then bought a Silver Willow Ridge, with MF of only about $570. This one commands ZERO power. For the DSV II, we always reserved President's week to increase the power.

Trades we got:
DSV II (2BR) --> Ko Olina (2 BR) in July (got trade 7 months out)
DSV II (1BR) --> Maui Ocean Club (1 BR) in July (got trade 5 months out)
DSV II (St) --> Maui Ocean Club (St) in July (got trade 3 months out)
Willow (2BR) --> Ko Olina (1 BR) in July (got trade 3 months out)
Willow (St) --> Ko Olina (St) in July (during Flexchange)
DSV II (1BR) --> Kauai Beach Club (1BR) in July (got trade 6 months out)
DSV II (St) --> Kona Coast Resort II (1BR) in July (got trade 6 months out)

If I stopped by just showing you the above exchanges (which LOOK GREAT), I'd be doing what a slimy salesperson does. Not telling you the rest of the story...

1. Trading into Hawaii in the summer is extremely difficult. All of the above requests were done as far in advance as II would allow.
The first few were "Request First", but as time went on, we Deposited our weeks, so they were "Deposit First" (which supposedly increases trading power).

2. Some of these trades we done by me waking at 5AM PST every day to get onto the site to see newly released inventory that was snatched up within 2 minutes. I snagged Maui that way. But it was an incredible PITA.

3. With the exception of Kona Coast, all of our requests were Marriott --> Marriott exchanges. Those have higher priority than Marriot --> non-Marriott. This means if you were looking to trade into non-Marriotts your results may be worse.

4. While waiting for all of these trades, we had to deal with frequent calls from II saying we were asking for unrealistic exchanges, or telling us they had this (really crappy) property to trade for if we wanted. So many false alarms when II would call.

5. One "perk" II has is that they offer you Accommodation Certificates when you deposit your week before a certain time. These are very restricted. Don't expect to see any HI availability, and no peak time availability anywhere else. They are basically a slightly cheaper version of Getaways, except they have an expiration date. We have about 6 expired ACs that we never found a use for.

5. MOST IMPORTANTLY - This is not showing all of the exchanges that we did NOT get. Only about 4 years are shown above. One year we stayed on Big Island, Maui, and Oahu simply because our exchanges forced us to island hop. That cost us a ton of money. Once you accept a trade, you can't give it back. So think about the arrival day for a two week stay somewhere. Let's say the first week you get has a Saturday arrival. Now you are waiting for a trade into the next week and all they have is a Friday arrival. That means you have two reservations overlapping. So now you get to change your airline return day or get a hotel room for a night. Exchanging is NOT a good way to get consecutive weeks. When you make a request, it will be for a bunch of different possible resorts. Ranging from most desirable to "well, I guess if we had to". When they call you and say they have the least desirable available, what do you do? Accept it and wonder if a better one would have come along? Or do you reject it and roll the dice? We had several years where we simply did not get any exchange offers and had to rent last minute. So what did we do with the weeks we deposited and couldn't exchange? Well, once you reach Flexchange time, your deposited week has pretty much ZERO power relative to anyone else's, because during Flex anything that is available can be pulled by anything (and the pickings are slim). Sure, you can pay to extend the deposit. It will still have ZERO power regardless of what you paid for the MF. You can't rent it anymore because you turned it over to II and they gave it to someone. I think I used one or two of those zero power weeks to trade to Orlando in the off season (easiest thing in the world to trade into). So I traded a week with $500 MF + an exchange fee for a week at a place I could have stayed at for $350 on a Getaway. Kinda sucks. But they don't tell you about that scenario in the sales pitch.


Look, I've been EXACTLY where you are now, asking the exact same questions. You can probably still search and find the threads I started. Almost same title as yours. Everyone told me the same reality I'm telling you. I didn't listen. I wish I had. But I sincerely wish you luck in what you choose.

We own at our dream destination. If we want to go elsewhere, we rent it out for a profit and rent into the place we want to go. We get to vacation on OUR terms, not II's
 
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Bill4728

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Again The key factor in trading really is not the trading power of the unit ( all "really good" Marriott TS weeks trade well) It is the availability of the weeks being deposited into II. People just don't deposit anywhere near enough weeks in the summer to even come close to filling the demand for Hawaii summer weeks.

Trading into Hawaii during the summer is really hard even with a super great trader. Trading into Hawaii, during the slower seasons, isn't that hard as long as you have a good trader.
 

DeniseM

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It's way over-kill to use a prime/expensive unit like this for trading. You will be depositing your Mercedes in a pool of Chevys.

In the years you can't use it, you will be able to rent it for a substantial profit, then turn around and rent exactly what you want with the funds.

If you exchange, you are unlikely to get a good view - the view does not carry over to a trade.

Another good option is just to buy an every-other year deed.
 
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