mig1
Guest
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2008
- Messages
- 49
- Reaction score
- 13
- Location
- Los Angeles
- Resorts Owned
- WKORV
DVC Animal Kingdom Lodge
Staying over the holiday weekend at Westin Desert Willow. As we haven't been at an Owner Update in awhile and with the forthcoming integration of Abound etc, we decided to waste 90 minutes and listen to the pitch.
We currently own at WKORV--have been owners for about 15 years. It's fully paid for etc etc. Our only financial responsibility is the yearly MF. I'm a firm believer that if something sounds like it's too good to be true, it usually is. I'm fairly well versed in the Vistana system and have been able to successfully navigate it to our needs. But after learning about the changes coming I wonder if this is too good to be true.
Admittedly in these presentations a lot of information is coming by you at a high rate of speed so I'm not sure I heard everything correctly but here is the topline: if we were to elect to deposit our ownership into this new "trust" that MVC has it gets us about 6,000 club points which is about 1000 shy of the Platinum level inside of Marriott. Of course all of these new "benefits" come with a cost. To buy an additional 1000 club points is about $15,000. The incentive is that they will "gift" me an additional 2,000 points that are good for an a year. (I may have heard that wrong but I'm assuming I could bank them; maybe not). 3,000 MVC points seem like they go a long way; potentially further than a similar threshold of StarOptions. Once inside the "trust" I could then opt in to put the small half, the large half or the entire 2 BD lockout into the trust and get the corresponding amount of club points to do whatever I wanted to do inside of Marriott. Outside of the obvious challenge/learning curve of managing 2 different systems it does seem like there are some benefits to the Marriott side of this. I was also led to believe that eventually the Vistana side would be converted to a similar structure although that seemed to be further down the road.
The benefit of platinum for life is kind of incremental for me....yes its nice but from time to time I hit it on my own anyway. I was told that the differences between Platinum, Titanium, and Chairmans are pretty slight and that the biggest leap is to Platinum from Gold or nothing. Obviously 15K is a good chunk of money, and of course the implied "prices are going to go up because we have 400,000 new owners from the Vistana system to integrate" was laid on the table. There are some things that seemed good--no conversion, banking fees, no name changes on the reservation fees, the ability to book at 13 months, perhaps some other perks like cruises, etc (although those never seem to be a particularly good rate of exchange).
So I'm throwing this out to the community here......for those of you who have placed your ownership into the trust....any regrets? Is there a downside to this (outside of the money). It seems to have a lot of versatility not to mention the ability to book into the Marriott system without any issues (which I can do now of course but this seems a bit less frictionless).
Please let me know your thoughts....we are onsite and have until we depart on Monday to make a final decision.
We currently own at WKORV--have been owners for about 15 years. It's fully paid for etc etc. Our only financial responsibility is the yearly MF. I'm a firm believer that if something sounds like it's too good to be true, it usually is. I'm fairly well versed in the Vistana system and have been able to successfully navigate it to our needs. But after learning about the changes coming I wonder if this is too good to be true.
Admittedly in these presentations a lot of information is coming by you at a high rate of speed so I'm not sure I heard everything correctly but here is the topline: if we were to elect to deposit our ownership into this new "trust" that MVC has it gets us about 6,000 club points which is about 1000 shy of the Platinum level inside of Marriott. Of course all of these new "benefits" come with a cost. To buy an additional 1000 club points is about $15,000. The incentive is that they will "gift" me an additional 2,000 points that are good for an a year. (I may have heard that wrong but I'm assuming I could bank them; maybe not). 3,000 MVC points seem like they go a long way; potentially further than a similar threshold of StarOptions. Once inside the "trust" I could then opt in to put the small half, the large half or the entire 2 BD lockout into the trust and get the corresponding amount of club points to do whatever I wanted to do inside of Marriott. Outside of the obvious challenge/learning curve of managing 2 different systems it does seem like there are some benefits to the Marriott side of this. I was also led to believe that eventually the Vistana side would be converted to a similar structure although that seemed to be further down the road.
The benefit of platinum for life is kind of incremental for me....yes its nice but from time to time I hit it on my own anyway. I was told that the differences between Platinum, Titanium, and Chairmans are pretty slight and that the biggest leap is to Platinum from Gold or nothing. Obviously 15K is a good chunk of money, and of course the implied "prices are going to go up because we have 400,000 new owners from the Vistana system to integrate" was laid on the table. There are some things that seemed good--no conversion, banking fees, no name changes on the reservation fees, the ability to book at 13 months, perhaps some other perks like cruises, etc (although those never seem to be a particularly good rate of exchange).
So I'm throwing this out to the community here......for those of you who have placed your ownership into the trust....any regrets? Is there a downside to this (outside of the money). It seems to have a lot of versatility not to mention the ability to book into the Marriott system without any issues (which I can do now of course but this seems a bit less frictionless).
Please let me know your thoughts....we are onsite and have until we depart on Monday to make a final decision.