Original Message:
Re: Marriott Vacation Club "Destinations" - What I Like and What I've Done (by Elise F.):
Dennis, you wrote, "I believe existing owners were the major winners with the coming of Destinations. I believe those who don't enroll their owned weeks will be sorry."
I have a few comments and questions. It seemed most people who wrote on the other blog all had platinum weeks in prime locations that they paid a lot for in comparison to what my husband and I own. We are just average income people. We have 2 Gold weeks at Cyprus Harbour in FL that cost a grand total of $25,000. We went there twice when our kids were still living at home to go to Disney World, Sea World, etc. Now they are grown and we will never want to return to Orlando, except maybe many years down the line if our sons have kids, but they are not even married yet. We have traded over the years to go on some great vacations using one week for the trade and the other week for Marriott Rewards Points. We have used the MRPs for airfare and to add days to our vacation by staying in Marriott hotels.
We enrolled our weeks in the Destinations program simply because we thought that it would eventually pay for itself by the savings in fees. Our 2 weeks combined get us a total of 5,000 exchange points. To go anywhere that we feel would be a great vacation, I think we would have to use both our weeks' points to have one trip.
We can't afford to take more than one trip requiring airfare each year. We don't live close enough to any resort to consider a short trip that we could drive to and I'm not interested in that anyway. So I always felt that we would probably never use the exchange points - that instead we would just keep trying to trade one of our weeks for a week via II. So other than how the cost of enrolling ($695) will eventually pay for itself via saved fees, in my situation do you think there are any other benefits to our having enrolled in Destinations? I would love to know any other positives about the decision we made to enroll! Feel free to imagine some scenarios of what we might want to do - to give me some ideas.
If anyone else has anything positive to point out, please chime in. We made the decision to join just based on the savings of fees and don't really see how else it might benefit us.
Also, I don't understand enough about renting points. Is that only for Trust owners? We don't have sufficient funds available to buy into the Trust, so we'd like to know if renting points applies to boosting exchange points should we ever want to try to use them rather than trading a week in II. Thanks, Elise