Original Message:
Re: Wyndham's new "Ovation" program offers exit solutions for their owners... interested? (by Stu M.):
loriy40 wrote:We are unclear why anyone would just surrender their timeshare or points, but there may be situations where it makes sense.
Maybe it has to do with age. Our estate planning attorney admonished us more than once, "Don't die with all those @#$%& timeshares!"
We still have several timeshares, but we used to have a lot more. One by one we've sold several of our fixed week, deeded timeshares, sometimes for more than we paid -- thanks to the fact that we purchased most of them via Redweek, eBay, TimeSharing Today and other ads. (Sold 'em the same way.) But Wyndham points, even tho they were based in two of Wyndham's most popular resorts, were effectively worthless in the resale market (you can buy hundreds of thousands of Wyndham points for almost nothing). And they were increasingly hard to use except, of course, at our "home" resorts.
Long story short, it was cheaper to give the points back to Wyndham than to pay our attorney to dump them into our trust.
And in the meantime, we've picked up rental weeks through RCI and II at top locations and properties for hundreds less per week than we were paying Wyndham in maintenance fees. I guess we were slow learners.