Updated Information on Festiva

[spthomas]

I've seen several threads about Festiva but nothing in a couple of years. We are weeks owners at Excapes in Hot Springs Village, and have been for 31 years. Festiva took over about 5 years ago. We've not seen much change, except that they are finally remodeling some units and fixing things up. It had been sort of dated for the last several years as Escapes had their financial issues. Festiva raised maintenance fees (from $525 to $570 in 2012), or about 8%. But it was desperately needed. Now in 2016 it's up another $25, or about 5%. so 13% increase over 4 years, and really that represents about 10 years since the prior owner should have raised fees and updated the resort and didn't. So not unhappy with our fees really. We have NOT converted to Festiva's club, we still own our original Escapes weeks.

We have had several opportunities to move to points with Festiva, but they want $6000 or so to upgrade us to more points than our resort is worth. They characterize it as an upgrade, and maybe so; the additional points would likely buy us another week or so of vacation time. But we haven't done so yet.

We went through a similar sit down with Wyndham last month, and they wanted a minimum of $10,000 plus our weeks to upgrade us to a zillion points, but we resisted.


Anyway, what is everyone's current thinking on Festiva? And plus/minuses on selling them our weeks and upgrading to Festiva Adventure Club?

 

[spthomas]

Just an update. Festiva still about the same for us. Still deeded weeks owners, and havent had more pressure to convert to points. The resort is Los Lagos (it reverted to this, its original name after Escapes went away)at Hot Springs Village. We were there last week, no major changes. I do worry that since the resort is 37 years old it might become expensive to maintain. But our maintenance fee is $629 for a two bedroom, up about 2.5% per year since Festiva has owned it. So all in all ok.