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Westin Flex offers May 2021

512damon

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Offers we declined yesterday at Sheraton Kauai are below. Last year they offered to take back my deeded week and credit the purchase amount to a Flex plan, not this year.

Interesting they were only selling Westin at a Sheraton.

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pacman777

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assuming VOA means annual maintenance fees then it’s basically double that of Westin Kierland Villas for the same amount of StarOptions. That’s not even factoring in the ridiculous upfront purchase price for the Westin Flex. I guess somebody needs to buy these to subsidize owners who have deeded mandatory properties with much lower maintenance fees.
 

512damon

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yes VOA = maintenance fees

I own a deeded week at WDW (voluntary) and am looking to expand my ownership probably next year. Looking at WKORV resales…
 

dioxide45

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I suspect they may only be approved to sell Westin because of the existing Westin property in Kauai. Thus they may have initially sought approval for Westin in order to sell at that property and the other Westins in Hawaii. The Sheraton conversion property came a little bit after that and may require new approvals from the state.
 

dioxide45

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Those are some high MFs! This looks like an every other year contract. So it works out to over $0.24 per 1,000 Options. You can get mandatory SVV in the $0.14 to $0.15 range and I think WKV is in the area of $0.11 per 1,000.
 

controller1

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Those are some high MFs! This looks like an every other year contract. So it works out to over $0.24 per 1,000 Options. You can get mandatory SVV in the $0.14 to $0.15 range and I think WKV is in the area of $0.11 per 1,000.

The MF on that 148,100 Annual purchase is 2.8% higher than what was billed per Home Option in August 2020.

Not sure about your math. On the EOY offer the MF runs $0.227 per 1,000 Home Options. On the Annual offer the MF runs $0.213 per 1,000 Home Options.
 

dioxide45

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The MF on that 148,100 Annual purchase is 2.8% higher than what was billed per Home Option in August 2020.

Not sure about your math. On the EOY offer the MF runs $0.227 per 1,000 Home Options. On the Annual offer the MF runs $0.213 per 1,000 Home Options.
I was looking at the third attachment and took $2000 (the VOA was $1000 a year) and divided it by 81,000 = 0.02469. Multiply that by 1000 and you get $0.247 per 1000.
 

dioxide45

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I also doubt that these VOA amounts include the VSN fee...
 

dioxide45

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Running the numbers, it looks like there is an annual $100 fee on EOY contracts.

148,100 Options
Annual: $3,156
EOY: $1,678 - $100 = $1,578
$1,578 x 2 = $3,156

In order to get the EOY 81,000 to come out to the same $0.02130993 per Option, the MF is only $863.052 per year. I don't get that. I thought the MF was the same regardless of the contract size.
 
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cubigbird

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Those maintenance fees are becoming pretty hefty. I wonder at what point it becomes cheaper to rent and not have the ownership obligation. The only thing that's more expensive is St. John. I'd rather own 12 months at STJ in high season at that MF price.
 

dioxide45

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Those maintenance fees are becoming pretty hefty. I wonder at what point it becomes cheaper to rent and not have the ownership obligation. The only thing that's more expensive is St. John. I'd rather own 12 months at STJ in high season at that MF price.
Since the MFs are an average of all the weeks in the Flex Trust, how can they be that high? WSJ isn't even in the Westin Flex trust. Do they have a bunch of mud weeks in there? Where at, in the mountains?
 

wjarcher

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The more low season weeks they put into the flex, the higher the mf per staroptions is going to be. The deed owners are incentivized to trade their low season weeks into flex, probably what the sales are pushing for

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dioxide45

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The more low season weeks they put into the flex, the higher the mf per staroptions is going to be. The deed owners are incentivized to trade their low season weeks into flex, probably what the sales are pushing for

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I didn't think they were taking direct trade ins anymore? I knew they were early on and also for Sheraton Flex. I suspect much of the weeks in the trust are Steamboat. Wasn't there an entire tower/building there that came after they stopped selling weeks and it all went into the trust?
 

rcv82

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Since the MFs are an average of all the weeks in the Flex Trust, how can they be that high? WSJ isn't even in the Westin Flex trust. Do they have a bunch of mud weeks in there? Where at, in the mountains?

To get an idea on this, I went to the January 2020 Westin Flex disclosures. As of that listing, here is the make-up of the weeks in Westin Flex:

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So Westin Flex is nearly half Hawaii, which all has fairly high maintenance fees, and 40% Palm Desert. The disclosures do not separate out by season, but if there is a substantial number of summer weeks at Palm Desert, that would contribute to the high maintenance fees. Likewise, I suspect the bulk of the WRF units are other than the high winter ski season, including mud weeks. But it is still small part of the overall trust.

Also note that for some reason the disclosures appear to count the large and small units at WRF and WKV as separate weeks, but the entire lock-off as one week at the other resorts. Perhaps this is related to how the properties are deeded. So this suggests that if WRF and WKV were converted to two-bedroom lock-off equivalents, they would have only about half the representation in Flex than the table above indicates. Nanea, since it does not have lock-offs, is a combination of one bedroom and two bedroom units. The non-lockoff one bedrooms at WKORV are counted as their own week. Using the above total of weeks, and their disclosure that there are 1,222,085,700 ownership points, it comes out to an average of 90,747 points per week.
 

DanCali

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This product is so not competitive with a mandatory resort that we almost never even got offered the option to buy Flex and I don't know much about it despite being an owner for 12+ years and a relatively well-informed owner. When they see we own multiple WKV resale weeks they probably realize we're a lost cause...

The one time it was offered to us the pitch was something like this (paraphrased) - "We'll take your WKV week, and give you 176,700 flex options instead. We're giving you a Rolls Royce and taking your Toyota, so of course you will have to add quite a bit of money and your annual maintenance fees for those flex options will be about 80% higher (per Staroption) . But you will be able to get an Oceanfront unit every time you go to Hawaii which you can never do with your lousy current ownership."

Good thing Hawaii too far for us to go often and that view is not something we prioritize too highly, or we may have been tempted to do something we'd regret...
 
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dioxide45

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This product is so not competitive with a mandatory resort that we almost never even got offered the option to buy Flex and I don't know much about it despite being an owner for 12+ years and a relatively well-informed owner. When they see we own multiple WKV resale weeks they probably realize we're a lost cause...

The one time it was offered to us the pitch was something like this (paraphrased) - "We'll take your WKV week, and give you 148,100 flex options instead. You will have to add quite a bit of money and your annual maintenance fees for those options will be about 80% higher. But you will be able to get an Oceanfront unit every time you go to Hawaii which you can never do with your lousy current ownership."

Good thing Hawaii too far for us to go often and that view is not something we prioritize too highly, or we may have been tempted to do something we'd regret...
The reality is that there aren't even any Oceanfront Hawaii weeks in the Westin Flex trust. So you have as good a chance to book Oceanfront there using StarOptions as a Flex owner does using their options at the eight month mark.

Vistana seriously botched their Flex products. They opted to keep the oceanfront weeks out of the trust so they could sell those at a premium. Thus it left the flex program weakened and with higher MFs per SO. I doubt there were enough oceanfront units available to make much of a difference, but the lower MF/SO of those would have helped push down the MFs of Westin Flex.

They also have Nanea Flex (which is subdivided into two separate pools; oceanfront and resort view), Sheraton Flex, Aventuras along with several smaller home option programs at WSJ. I suspect this is causing Marriott Vacation Club a lot of heartburn in trying to come up with a combined system.
 

DanCali

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The reality is that there aren't even any Oceanfront Hawaii weeks in the Westin Flex trust. So you have as good a chance to book Oceanfront there using StarOptions as a Flex owner does using their options at the eight month mark.

That's something you learn the hard way after you buy... I wouldn't have known that at the time.

I mistyped in my prior post (will edit) that they were actually going to sell us 176,700 staroptions so we can indeed have the booking power to easily reserve those Oceanfront weeks every year. So the out of pocket cost for this downgrade would have been quite substantial too.
 
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KeithR

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amazing how bad a deal this is compared to WKV
 

controller1

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That's something you learn the hard way after you buy... I wouldn't have known that at the time.

I'm surprised that wasn't communicated upfront. I was told upfront they were not included but I guess that may have been because I already owned WKORVN OF at the time. At least three sales people have told me during different presentations to "never trade in your OceanFront units for Westin Flex because Flex does not include OceanFront units."
 

DanCali

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I'm surprised that wasn't communicated upfront. I was told upfront they were not included but I guess that may have been because I already owned WKORVN OF at the time. At least three sales people have told me during different presentations to "never trade in your OceanFront units for Westin Flex because Flex does not include OceanFront units."


They probably look at what you own and figure out what buttons they can push.

When you can only reserve Hawaii at 8 months out it's probably a good sales pitch to push the "home resort" idea and (at least theoretical) access to the most desired units at that resort.
 

controller1

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Vistana seriously botched their Flex products. They opted to keep the oceanfront weeks out of the trust so they could sell those at a premium. Thus it left the flex program weakened and with higher MFs per SO. I doubt there were enough oceanfront units available to make much of a difference, but the lower MF/SO of those would have helped push down the MFs of Westin Flex.

That "premium" may have also made it difficult the way they were structuring those deals when they allowed trade-ins. We purchased OF, prior to discovering TUG, directly from the developer and IIRC the price difference between an OF 2-bedroom lockoff at WKORVN and a non-OF was around $15K-$20K. That would have been an additional amount to credit to the transaction when trading in for Westin Flex.
 

controller1

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They probably look at what you own and figure out what buttons they can push.

When you can only reserve Hawaii at 8 months out it's probably a good sales pitch to push the "home resort" idea and (at least theoretical) access to the most desired units at that resort.

So are you saying you were told you could reserve OF at 12 months if you purchased Westin Flex?
 

DanCali

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So are you saying you were told you could reserve OF at 12 months if you purchased Westin Flex?

Yes - at a presentation at SVV. That was the main reason we supposedly "needed" to give up our WKV week and get 176K flex points (and part with over $20K).

These types of offers is probably how they get Platinum WKV weeks to resell as weeks or put in the trust. WKV has no ROFR.
 

controller1

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Yes - at a presentation at SVV. That was the main reason we "needed" to give up our WKV week and get 176K flex points (and part with over $20K).

These types of offers is probably how they get Platinum WKV weeks to resell as weeks or put in the trust. WKV has no ROFR.

So the salesperson just lied to you.
 

DanCali

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So the salesperson just lied to you.

Probably misrepresented the complete truth if you want to put it politely. Technically, if there is even just one OF week in the trust he wasn't lying - I would have access to reserve an OF week at 12 months out...

But is it a new thing that timeshare salespeople tell you what they think you want to hear and don't tell you what they think you don't need to know (i.e., anything that hurts their chance to close)? These guys make a living from huge commissions.
 
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