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Re: Are they worth it? (by Beck):

You're all making this sound a lot more complicated than it is, at least for the WVR points ownership. Simply, there are weeks owners and points owners at Wyndham resorts. Most everyone these days owns as a points owner. You know you are a points "owner" and not a "member" because the deed specifies how many points you have (such as the "105000 /119,514,500 undivided fee simple absolute interest in ...").

If your points were part of a membership you would know this in one of two ways.

First, your deed does not mention the points like 105,000, or use the word undivided. Thus, if the deed mentiones this you are a points "owner" and if not you are then a weeks owner possibly with a points membership.

Second, Points memberships require separate paperwork to be processed in addition to your deed (although DRI has Collections contracts which are never ending points memberships which you own. No deed is pocessed when the Collections contract is sold. This should not be confused with DRI's "Club" membership).

Back to WVR points. There are only three significant factors when deciding which WVR points ownership to buy.

1) The price to be paid for the amount of points you are buying. The points you buy have the same power when used to reserve unit regardless of where you own. The only difference between points is the quantity you have. Please take note however that newer resorts cost more points to stay than the older resorts. Over time, while your points will always enable you to stay at the current resorts just fine, ultimately they may not be effective in securing reservations at newer resorts. A 4BR Pres unit at Governor's Green is 203,000-300,000 pts (actualy this is a great deal) whereas the newer Glacier Canyon is 231,000-450,000 and La Cascada 375,000-650,000 and the recently opened National Harbor is 500,000-700,000.

2) The maintenance you will pay for those points. As has been mentioned, each resort can have different costs and while WVR does its best to keep the maint similar as a cost per point, there are certainly resorts with higher cost per point. In some states such as Florida, be careful. Someone might tell you how much the maintenance is but omit the fact that in that state the taxes are billed separately. Wyndham Ocean Walk in Daytona Beach is very expensive to own at when compared to other resorts while South Lake Tahoe is among the lowest.

3) There is one very important reason to own at a specific resort. If you want to have the home resort priority (the ability to reserve a unit more than 10 months in advance) you must own at the specific resort you intend to use. Thus, it's important to experiment to see how easy or difficult it is to reserve units you desire for dates you desire in the month 1 to 10 time period. If your travel plans are rarely impacted when reserving 10 months in advance, then you will not care about owning at a specific resort. But in some cases you will need the additional reservation priority to secure a high demand week or larger unit or presidential unit. Then you will need to own at the specific resort. - There are also a few rare but subtle reasons to own at a specific resort. For example, a number of resorts in HI and Australia are not available to Wyndham owners even though they are in the WVR list of resorts. I re-read the WVR 2009-2010 Directory which states the info differently than I am presenting it. But by practical experiance there are a good number of these resorts which you will have difficulty getting into if you don't own at them.

Just remember that people who buy direct receive a few perks you will not. Salespeople have been offering concierge servives to buyers. They claim they can improve your ability to secure units, as well as help you maximize your benefits. Officially this is not allowed per the WVR CSR desk. But it is being done on a large scale. Direct buyers also are eligible for VIP membership. I currently have 1.3 million points from two resale contracts. This would normally qualify me as a Platinum owner with free unlimited upgrades and 50% discounts on reservations less than 60 days in advance. But since I didn't buy direct I don't receive these benefits.

Wyndham also sold an elite membership/ownership to large point owners a couple of years ago called Presidential Reserve. A large number of Presidential units were removed from general availability and sold to owners where they have exclusive access to a large number of presidential units at all the resorts where presidential units are available. Large point members (both resale and direct purchase) who didn't pay more to join this select group now have fewer preseidential units at their disposal.