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I own 7 Marriott's weeks. My first was purchased from Marriott(Oceanwatch platinum) & all others were resale weeks/most found on redweek. Last week my husband & I attended a sale presentation at the Marriott's Aruba Surfclub. ***We were told that Marriott's is no longer selling deeded property weeks in the USA ONLY (after June 20th) but they are still selling deeded property weeks overseas just has they always have. So for example if someone wanted to buy from Marriott's at the Aruba Surfclub, they still can! I asked him if Marriott would eventually stop selling deeded property weeks overseas like they did in the USA & he said that they never know ahead of time what Marriott's decides to do. Funny but I still remember an other sales person at Marriott's telling me over a year ago that bargain upgrades with II would be coming to an end in the near future. Did anyone else get the same info??? By the way that ingenious sales rep offered me a way to save tons on my maintenance fees. All I had to do was purchase extra Platinum Aruba weeks that (according to him) would easily rent for 7700$/week & more. And boy was he 100% confident that they would rent at that price. He said people often paid even 10000$/week for rental. This way my rental profit would easily off set my voluminous maintenance fees!! I told him that at that price (7700$/week) Marriott's should stop selling prime weeks & just simply rent them out! I also asked him why Marriott's barely covers my platinum maintenance fees if I elect to give it to them for rental? He said that it was because Marriott's took a risk in the sense that it might not rent..Not even at a decent 2000$? What happened to the 7700$ sure thing scenario ??? Anyway he made the used car sales dealers look like angels. I honestly was thinking of joining the new program just for savings because I often lock-off & usually trade within Marriott's. What bugs me is buying into it & then finding out later that I can no longer trade my studio and my 1bdr for a bigger unit. Then I will be stuck paying 200$ of fees every year whether I use it or not. Since most of my lock-off weeks are platinum Oceanfront weeks (Ocean Pointe) I am better off renting my units on red week & then rent myself whatever it is that I want on redweek. I am trying so hard to find something good about all this. If I book my owners week from Sunday to Sunday, I can then trade another one of my weeks for pts & stay from Sunday to Thursday (much discounted pts rate because it's midweek). But even if that would work out (availability) I'm concerned about what will happen to the remaining pts. I may not have enough for an other trade & then I will loose those pts because they will expire? I to in the beginning have called Marriott's so many times because I kept getting different answers to the exact same question. I finally complained & was transferred to the supervisor from hell. I was stunned and even angered by the very impolite and rude person bearing the title of “Supervisor” at the owners customer service department. I then proceeded to write my very first complaint letter to Marriott (they did answer back with an apology). All that being said my intentions are to join the program in December at the very last minute but I wont be using the pts option. I feel that Marriott's as come up with a way of making lots of money by selling "blank" points. Did you all know that Marriott's can change at any time the number of pts needed to obtain a week? Of course you did... They have a fixed total amount of points for a week all year round. For example if Ocean Pointe has a total of 1 000 000 pts for 52 weeks;(just an example) They can go ahead & simply increase the pts needed for those platinum weeks as often & as high as they want as long as the total of pts don't go aver 1 000 000 for those 52 weeks. Of course the other low seasons will decrease if they higher the pts for platinum weeks. But why trade for pts in the low season even for a 5 or a 6 day vacation when you can rent that same week for peanuts on various web sites? So basically if you are studying the pts grid in order determine how many pts you will need today or how many pts you should purchase today, keep in mind that it is reasonable to speculate that the platinum weeks will go up in pts! So whatever pts you have today may not be enough for those same weeks in the future. I guess you can then go ahead & just keep buying more pts!!!!!!!! That most likely is part of Marriott's money making plan. For me, deeded property weeks are the only sure thing. Buy where you want to go the most.