Our advice would be to not purchase anything. Especially from the developer. Timeshares are just not good value. Take the cost of your initial purchase, plus the annual maintenance fees, and then include the time you spend looking to find availability, your cost per night just isn't worth it. Unless.....you want to spend maybe the next 25 years at the same property with the same (or similar week). The math isn't pretty. There are certainly better offers on the secondary market. But you still have the issue of going where you want, when you want and the investment in time you need to spend searching. And of course the unknown annual maintenance fee increases.
Our most recent experience:
After much analysis and self reflection, we are "done" with MVC and time shares. Bear with me how we got to this point. We bought an event in Las Vegas using out Vistana Star Options. It made sense since we had friends and family in LV. The stay and the event was a great experience. As part of the event you are required to go to a sales presentation. The sales person was by FAR the most skilled and slickest we have ever encountered. And we have gone to our share of "owner updates". We wound up signing to make a purchase of MVC club points that all in all was $12.50 per point. Cheapest we have ever been offered with a one time bonus of 8000 points. Like I always do, I spent the next several days diving into the details. I hammered them to activate my MVC account and was given access. This was to at least test if the direct MVC access is any different that through the Abound portal. I spent many many hours the next few days searching ways to use the points and look for vacations to book. My conclusion....of the 20 resorts we were interested in, nearly all of them had essentially NO availability in any reasonable time of the year. Hilton Head? Dec-Feb (maybe first half of March), no problem. May through Oct? Forget it (Never mind there are only 2BR available. We are a couple). The exact same thing with ANY of the Spain properties. Costa Rica? Maybe one or two days here and there. Other than that? Booked solid for 13months. The only availability we found appealing was in a couple of the Thailand properties. Great! I checked and the same (to the best I could tell) accommodations were available using Bonvoy points...at a cheaper equivalent cost! I am sure if you develop the online search skills and invest the time to search and search and search....you could very well likely find some reasonable trips.
I was wondering if we were doing anything wrong in our search patterns..... We are not alone. See excerpt below from website called (
https://marriott-vacation-club.pissedconsumer.com/complaints/RT-P.html):
"Dont waste your hard earned money by purchasing a Marriott timeshare. The sales people will make false promises to get your money. We bought into the points system ten years ago & were finding that we were unable to book barely any of the resorts 13 months out. We went to a presentation in April 2023 & were told that we were unable to find any availability for bookings because we were at the executive level. Keep in mind that we had 7500 points at that time. We were told that if we bought more points then there would be more inventory available to us. The representative said, You have to pay more to get more. Thats how the world works. We went ahead & bought more points for a total of 11,500 points which moved us to the presidential level. After signing the contract, we knew that we only had ten days to cancel. So we logged onto the MVC site and were still finding that we were unable to book anything. Our representative said this was because we were in a reconciliation period and to trust him that everything would be okay. Of course, this supposed reconciliation period lasted way past the cancellation period. It is now about three months after our purchase and we are still in the same situation despite spending thousands of dollars later. For example, I went on the site at the 13 month mark & plugged in 26 resorts for May 2024 and only 2 were available and those were two of their least desirable properties. I did this for June 2024 & July 2024 & had the same results. Contacted our representative, who said this shouldnt be happening & *** look into it. No calls back despite us reaching out to him multiple times. Upon further research we found out that week owners get first priority & points owners do not. When you include maintenance fees & money we put in, we could stay at a 5 star resort every year until I die. Save your money & dont fall prey to this scam."
At the end of the day, these investments are NOT VALUE. Add your time you have to spend searching and searching for where and when you want to go. It is just not worth it. Why are you expected to make such a consequential and expensive decision in about 90 minutes. Let alone all the blatant falsehoods we were told through the years. It's because their business model can't stand the analysis once you have time to truly evaluate and understand what they are selling you.
We rescinded (again) and have since planned and are planning great trips where and when we want to go with all the money and resources we saved.
While I am sure there are a some here who disagree with us. Most will agree with us that given the opportunity to make their purchase decisions over again, they would decide to not buy!
