Does your pretty sure and not thinking you are wrong have any cite/support? Because you don't own any MVC resort property so how would you know? MRD's budget has no such line item.
I was always under the impression that website and technology costs associated with it were part of the "Owner Services" line item of the budget.
I agree. That and the mangement fees.
Does the management fee cover that though? I don't think we know. Just like we really don't know for sure that Owner Services fee covers it either. All resort operations are covered by some fee. Even the salary of the General Manager comes out of a line item on the budget. Marriott certainly makes profit on Management Fee. Otherwise there wouldn't be any profit in managing individual resorts. Just not sure what their margin is on the management fee.
I'm also not sure why you say that @daviator doesn't own any MVC resorts? They have "Marriott's MOC" listed in their profile.
All I know is that MRD has no line item "for IT and reservations services" that he noted. If he can post a line item from MOC then that would help. I cannot imagine that each individual resort has an expense item "a line item for IT and reservations services," but anything is possible. He just made an assertion with no support.
I certainly do own an MVC resort property. Kind of bold of you to decide what I do or don't own, though I think my ownership is spelled out in my profile and includes MOC.
The website potentially lowers the cost for the owner. Actual people are expensive. Marriott charges all these costs back to owners which translates into a 10% management fee on those costs. I think this is also why I see a huge abundance of employees, who all seem to have their own golf cart, all around all the timeshare resorts we visit.
I agree with this. Add an extra concierge to answer questions about activities, etc. if people need help.
Exactly. Because of the way they are compensated, Marriott is incentivized to always keep property operating costs and maintenance fees as high as possible, basically at whatever is the maximum they think the market can bear, to maximize their profits.
Yes. Cannot reach on the computer and just spinning on the phone
I don't see it in the drop down either.
Not only that but I think someone mentioned they were still using COBOL? If so, that's a seriously difficult programming language to find talent in considering how old it is.
I don't know that Marriott Vacations systems use COBOL, but they do have to integrate with the systems of Marriott International, the hotel company. Their legacy system is called MARSHA which is COBOL based. Marriott had an opportunity to upgrade from MARSHA when they acquired Starwood. Starwood had a new modern reservation system. The problem with Starwood is that they had just had a huge data breach. It would be hard to trust a system like that going forward. So they stuck with MARSHA.
My guess is it is much more than just a data breach. I used to work for AcuCOBOL, a company that migrated software from mainframes to minis. There are tremendous time and expense components to do these conversions, especially on giant legacy systems. Seeing the systems at various resorts and hotels they obviously have done some migration already, but this thread is really about the end-user web interface for reserving particular intervals (DE). MVC already has a working points reservation layer in place, should not be hard to expand this to DE reservations.