What are your fees for 2024? I just saw someone post on Facebook, and the fees seemed extraordinarily high.
They are $3,670 / yr for 9325 pts. Or $0.39/point.
They are high and they have been growing substantially each year...this year was 11.5% increase. (
@TheHolleys87 I read your post about your experiences and that was helpful...thanks!)
After writing my question, I did an exercise to look at places we've booked in the last year and for the near future and the cost of these reservations versus what we would have paid if we had paid cash through extravacations.com and other travel sites. This is inexact because you really have to look at the comparison as you are booking a unit, but I found that in some cases like skiing locations and Hawaii, the savings was substantial over paying cash. In other cases, it was cheaper than paying cash. Using about two years worth of points in 2023, we stayed 29 nights in ski locations like Whistler, Beaver Creek (Avon) and Breckenridge plus the Big Island and San Clemente, San Diego (twice) and Scottsdale. Average cost per night was about $220 in maintenance fees. My inexact research suggests the per night cost would have been $376 per night because a couple of the ski locations and Hawaii were sky high. Again, I should reiterate that these numbers are probably inflated on the cash comparision because I'm not using a comparison of prices at the time of original booking. But still, I feel it's helpful in my decision process. I am going to continue to track again and find out for sure before next year comes around.
We've had the Shell points for probably 25 years and in the first 10 years or so I tracked these costs and found the savings made up for the price of the timeshare over that time. It seemed like that was not the case with escalating maintenance fees lately, but I think it may also be that during COVID, hotels were cheap. Now post-COVID, they are very expensive again. This examination was all precipitated by several Wyndham sales pitches over the last few months, with lots of mis-information and pressure tactics. The last one made us think that maybe we are just better off paying cash (as opposed to making us think we should buy more!). At this point, I feel like it's either a wash or a small advantage if we book the high value loacations, so we probably will continue to hang on with Shell.
