Winger,
Do you have a Marriott Rewards account? When you buy Marriott from Marriott you can trade your timeshare for points (instead of using it). When you have enough points, you can use them for trips, airfare, all kinds of stuff. If you go to the Marriott website, you can take the link to Marriott Rewards. A world trip is a package where you get points deposited into an airline reward program, and a Marriott hotel room for 7 nights. The package I got deposited 120,000 miles into my United account, and since I had enough MR points, I got 2 travel packages or 240,000 miles into my United account. We already had enough miles in our 5 different United accounts to add the additional 150,000 miles, plus you can buy miles from United. We would have been fine with coach tickets which would have been only 300,000 miles, but BC is well worth it on long flights. Yes, we were all on the same flight. I did not have a back-up plan for reward seats, I always planned on getting our seats with miles. I had additional flights, dates, etc. In fact, my son was waitlisted for a latter flight returning (2 hours later that ours), but about a month before our trip he was cleared to fly back with us. We could have split into 3 and 2, and all flown BC on different flights, but we decided to try and be on the same flights.
The main reason we used two World trip packages is because of the hotel. Hotels in Japan are very small, and only allow 2 adults/room, and 1 child at most. Our rooms had two twin beds, and a rollaway for my daughter.
