Silverleaft/Orange Lake dues increase

[Steven Merrick]

Hi there! My wife and I have been fans of timesharing for quite awhile, and in fact own with Westin resorts as well as Silverleaf. Our Silverleaf Seaside (Galveston) timshares were recently purchased by Orange Lake Resorts, which also own Holiday Inn Vacation Club. We were recently enticed to purchase a small share in the Galveston, Texas Holiday Inn Vacation Club property ostensibly to increase the value of our weeks properties there. Well, we just received our 2017 maintenance dues statement, and see that our annual fees have increased from appx. $1800 a year for both properties, to almost $2500 for each of our 2 properties.... Has anyone else heard of such an increase? Is this legal? I am waiting for them to get back to me...I have already told them to come up with something more reasonabl. For the new amount of money we could stay at a luxery hotel in Galveston and still have funds left over....unacceptable!

 

[Tank]

I only own at HICV myself. My two (2 bedroom) units at Orange Lake 166,000 points each, cost $980 each
Can I ask how many points are you getting for each unit ? How big are they?

So $900 each before you converted to Holiday Inn, after you converted you found out they are $2500 each ?

I'd have to think that increase was coming if you converted or not. They sure play the lower MF game to get you to buy at other locations trading in what you have to get more money in sales

 

[dougp26364]

Hi there! My wife and I have been fans of timesharing for quite awhile, and in fact own with Westin resorts as well as Silverleaf. Our Silverleaf Seaside (Galveston) timshares were recently purchased by Orange Lake Resorts, which also own Holiday Inn Vacation Club. We were recently enticed to purchase a small share in the Galveston, Texas Holiday Inn Vacation Club property ostensibly to increase the value of our weeks properties there. Well, we just received our 2017 maintenance dues statement, and see that our annual fees have increased from appx. $1800 a year for both properties, to almost $2500 for each of our 2 properties.... Has anyone else heard of such an increase? Is this legal? I am waiting for them to get back to me...I have already told them to come up with something more reasonabl. For the new amount of money we could stay at a luxery hotel in Galveston and still have funds left over....unacceptable!

DRI has some significant increases over the last few years, mostly in the internal club dues, which went for $135/year 5 or 6 years ago to nearly $600 2 years ago when we bailed out. If you purchased into some sort of points or trust based ownership, the extra fee's they tack onto those clubs can be a killer IMHO. It's one of the reasons I stay as far away from trust based/points only ownership forms of timesharing unless the points program is tied to a deeded weeks such as HGVC's set up.

 

[Steven Merrick]

I only own at HICV myself. My two (2 bedroom) units at Orange Lake 166,000 points each, cost $980 each
Can I ask how many points are you getting for each unit ? How big are they?

So $900 each before you converted to Holiday Inn, after you converted you found out they are $2500 each ?

I'd have to think that increase was coming if you converted or not. They sure play the lower MF game to get you to buy at other locations trading in what you have to get more money in sales

So what happened, is that after Orange Lake purchased Silverleaf Resorts, they put a big push on buying in HICV to take advantage of HICV benefits. They also told us that our 2 old Silverleaf Ambassador penthouse units could either be kept as is (weeks) or as we wanted, converted to points. Obviously this sounded like a great idea. What they did not disclose, is the act of them allowing us the flexibility to convert weeks to points took away our grandfathered maintenance fees, and introduced a new fee structure. Each of our old units were worth over 300,000 points, and they wanted appx. $2500 each in fees for 2017.....as compared to a total of about 1800 for both in prior years. We just about fainted...and in fact I would have done whatever I had to do to dump them. We have significantly more points at our other time share (Westin) and payed less in annual fees. The story has a happy ending though (at least at this point). They called back and said they would reverse the points and put us back into our old weeks plan with an modest increase in fees from 2016.....much better. I am hoping that they realized they had not disclosed the fee increase to us during the new purchase of an HICV studio unit, but it could also be that I said I was going to give them bad reviews in every location I could find. I have always had a really good relationship with Silverleaf and hope that they were aware of our loyalty and made the changes based on that! Just goes to show that in any timeshare transaction, extreme care must be taken. You would think after almost 20 years of time-sharing we would know....but this just wasn't anything we saw coming. Happy New Year!

 

[Tank]

Wow ! they need to be upfront with this change in MF's. Not one of us old Orange Lake members would have been ok with this if it happened when we converted. It's not even a justified per point ratio increase and to be honest MF's should be the same if you are a week owner or a points owner, all mine are. They need to make the money when they get you to convert. Thats how it was when I went from a week owner to points at Orange Lake.
It is a shame that it did not work out for you. The HICV system is very nice, I love that I was a member from the beginning, and have enjoyed the growth over the years, excited to see what will be next. To bad they didn't think this out to be fare, I don't blame SL owners for being upset, they have every right to be.

Example would be 300,000 points (2 - 2 bedroom villa's at Myrtle beach prime season) MF's $870 each X 2 =$1750.00 as a comparison , cheaper MF's are available , but this is more the norm. Grant you you can buy the same 2 units with winter use, pay the same MF but only have 100,000 points to show for it.

Please follow up with your new MF's when you get them. Glad you were able to switch it back out for your lower MF. Let me know if you want to try out the other places HICV has to offer. You are going to reap some nice benefits by HICV takeover as far as upgrades and maintaining property.

Happy New Year!
Dave