resale
The only thing you lose by buying resale is the ability to change your staroptions into starpoints (to be used at hotels if you don't want to use your timeshare week) They are not a very good exchange value, so most people never do that anyway. Not worth the thousands of dollars it will cost you to get that option from the developer.
Hawaii is platinum and therefore gets you lots of staroptions, however, if you don't plan on always going to Hawaii, it might be best to buy another location and trade into Hawaii. For instance if you want to go to Harborside at Atlantis or St. John..........you will have a hard time getting that trade from Hawaii. My friends bought Hawaii and still have not been able to trade into Harborside or St. Johns for any prime weeks. The owners at those two locations mostly rent the prime week if they are not going to use it b/c once you look at the staroption chart you will see they don't give you enough value to give them up. But if you own one of those you can trade to anywhere else easily as everyone wants to trade into those two locations.
But just to give you something else to think about the Westin Kierland villas in Arizona have the lowest maintance fees per staroption, so are the best value for some. And you can get into the other starwood locations but mostly off season weeks. So it really depends of when and where you want to travel as to which starwood to buy resale.
Make sure you pick a mandatory resort if you want to be able to trade it internally. The charts for starwood can be found here on TUG in the starwood section and on the starwood website (but you might have to be an owner already to axcess them there?)
So think about where you want to go the most often and buy there, or if you want to mostly try new places each time and are very flexible on the dates you travel buy where the MF's are lowest.
Keep in mind the MF's at starwood are some of the highest out there so you have to really like that quality and the locations offered to justify it. If you like lots of other places too and almost as good a quality then Marriott might be better. They have more locations, more reasonable MF's and happier owners. I own one starwood week at Harborside b/c we want to go there each year, and I own one Marriott week in Branson to trade with.
Good luck in your search, you have come to the right place and timeshare ownership is great fun and great value when you learn how to work the angles!
