- Joined
- Oct 27, 2005
- Messages
- 915
- Reaction score
- 122
- Location
- Maryland
- Resorts Owned
- Wyndham Long Wharf, Wyndham points, Vistana Westin Kierland
We are at Panama City Beach this week and attended an Owner's Update yesterday. We were interested to hear what the T&L (Travel+Leisure) spin would be, but also to see if they had any new programs that we could use to consolidate our ownership so that our kids would not need to manage two buckets of points (resale and retail). Many of their old programs (remember equity swaps?) have been discontinued and, as I suspected, they were not able to offer anything that made any financial sense to us. Right now, I use of resale weeks to book summer vacations for my kids with school-age children, since I know that these would not be available or upgradeable at the 60-day mark, and the developer points for other reservations.
He was very surprised to learn that we spent 6 nights the week before last at Clearwater, as he's had many owners (including CWA owners) who complained of being unable to book there even with 13-month booking priority.
In any events, these were our main take-aways from the offer:
Purchasing from Wyndham will get all of our contracts (including resale) under the T&L ROFR umbrella. If, at any point 12 months or more after purchasing from them, we decide to surrender any of our contracts, Wyndham would pay 30-50% of the prevailing “market” value for the points. By market value, they were really referring to developer pricing on the points, since I pointed out that the market value was really zero. When I asked if that would be in the contracts, they said the ROFR would be, but that the actual offer amount would be dictated by the actual contract itself, but that if Wyndham did not want it, they would refer us to a “certified” resale agent. I picked one of our resale contracts and asked if they could show us what was being offered today for a contract at that resort and, of course, they could not do it, although the sales person spent several minutes scrolling through what were presumably certified resale agent listings.
He said that Wyndham was currently accepting Presidential Reserve and Atlanta contracts. I mentioned the fact that I saw what I believe was a 1 million point PR contract for Great Smokies Lodge recently sell on ebay for $5. Why was the seller listing on ebay if Wyndham would offer him 30-50% of what he paid? The sales manager said that in these cases, it was just a matter of the owner being unaware of the Wyndham program.
Offsetting maintenance fees by turning excess points in any given year over to T&L for their use in putting together vacation packages. Told them we were not interested in that as we made good use of all of our points.
Offsetting maintenance fees by renting. When I mentioned that Wyndham is sending “cease and desist” letters to owners who are found to be renting their reservations, they claimed that this was no longer happening, and seemed skeptical that owner accounts were actually being “frozen” if they were found to be in violation of this policy.
Using T&L for booking vacations, cruises, hotels, rental cars. I told him that this did not seem to be anything different than what Expedia was able to offer, but he claimed that they had far superior discounts and cited an example of a $10K cruise he was able to book for $3K. I remained skeptical and tested this when we returned to the room by comparing rental car rates for a specific location and time period. The T&L rate for Budget was identical to what was offered through Costco but, in fact, Costco had a lower rate offered by Alamo for that same location and time period.
He was very surprised to learn that we spent 6 nights the week before last at Clearwater, as he's had many owners (including CWA owners) who complained of being unable to book there even with 13-month booking priority.
In any events, these were our main take-aways from the offer:
Purchasing from Wyndham will get all of our contracts (including resale) under the T&L ROFR umbrella. If, at any point 12 months or more after purchasing from them, we decide to surrender any of our contracts, Wyndham would pay 30-50% of the prevailing “market” value for the points. By market value, they were really referring to developer pricing on the points, since I pointed out that the market value was really zero. When I asked if that would be in the contracts, they said the ROFR would be, but that the actual offer amount would be dictated by the actual contract itself, but that if Wyndham did not want it, they would refer us to a “certified” resale agent. I picked one of our resale contracts and asked if they could show us what was being offered today for a contract at that resort and, of course, they could not do it, although the sales person spent several minutes scrolling through what were presumably certified resale agent listings.
He said that Wyndham was currently accepting Presidential Reserve and Atlanta contracts. I mentioned the fact that I saw what I believe was a 1 million point PR contract for Great Smokies Lodge recently sell on ebay for $5. Why was the seller listing on ebay if Wyndham would offer him 30-50% of what he paid? The sales manager said that in these cases, it was just a matter of the owner being unaware of the Wyndham program.
Offsetting maintenance fees by turning excess points in any given year over to T&L for their use in putting together vacation packages. Told them we were not interested in that as we made good use of all of our points.
Offsetting maintenance fees by renting. When I mentioned that Wyndham is sending “cease and desist” letters to owners who are found to be renting their reservations, they claimed that this was no longer happening, and seemed skeptical that owner accounts were actually being “frozen” if they were found to be in violation of this policy.
Using T&L for booking vacations, cruises, hotels, rental cars. I told him that this did not seem to be anything different than what Expedia was able to offer, but he claimed that they had far superior discounts and cited an example of a $10K cruise he was able to book for $3K. I remained skeptical and tested this when we returned to the room by comparing rental car rates for a specific location and time period. The T&L rate for Budget was identical to what was offered through Costco but, in fact, Costco had a lower rate offered by Alamo for that same location and time period.
