Original Message:
Re: Ripoff - Marriott Vacation Club Destinations Program - New Point System (by Dan G.):
This is an extremely interesting thread, and somewhat helpful. I, unlike some of the other folks here, am not a previous owner. I purchased recently because friends of mine have a timeshare in Maui on the old system. They are fortunate in that they have the most in-demand timeshare Marriott has, so they have no difficulty trading out for points giving up their week in Maui. Since my purchase, I've done my research online. It's only been a few days, and after reading various comments and complaints throughout the social media space, am ready to cancel the whole thing. (Yes...I still have a few days on my seven day window to cancel it all.)
I'm a total newbie, but a few things seem to jump out at me:
1. The points system is definitely more flexible than the previous system set in place. It also gives you the opportunity to stay at a variety of resorts through the Marriott chain. At 2000 points (what I could afford to purchase), without doing some serious banking from year to year, my options are somewhat limited though. It would work well in the beginning, as you start out with a bonus points, and the ability to bank your first years points to feed off of. However, at some point after four or five years I'd likely have to purchase more points to keep up.
2. Marriott clearly wants to push people towards off-season schedules depending on location, and to leave Fridays and Saturdays open, as they double, triple and sometimes quadruple the points required to stay those days. This is definitely a way for them to control their most lucrative days and have a better grasp of their inventory.
3. Marriott does not supply you with any literature or paperwork stating how long the current points requirements for locations will remain intact past the year 2012. This is a bit of a red flag to me. They assign the point values based off of specific weeks of demand at a given resort. When I inquired from the salesperson as to what guarantee I have that Marriott wont increase the points at various locations as time goes on, and thus devaluing my timeshare purchase, her response was Marriott needs to have that flexibility to be able to control the supply should a new holiday or other demand arise. Also, the points being asked for in the various buckets would remain the same, but the weeks may change from bucket to bucket depending on demand. In other words, the range Marriott puts in is from a low to a high. There may be 26 weeks in the low-end and 26 in the high-end for points. This doesn't prevent them from in the future of making 2 weeks in the low-end and 50 in the high-end.
I get why they need to have this kind of flexibility. At the same time this is risky for the timeshare holder, as Marriott could easily choose to inflate point requirements at any time, at any resort. This doesn't sit well with me. (Kind of reminds of me of "Disney dollars.")
4. I also see a supply issue here. The "old-system" is based off of a physical location. In theory, if you have a unit, let's say in Maui, they can't sell (or shouldn't sell) that physical unit more than 52 times for a given year. (They probably oversell it a bit, but you get my point.) You can't sell more than the supply you have.
Points, however, are different. These are not tied to any physical locale in particular, nor do we know the size of the points pool itself. Am I purchasing 2,000 points from a pool of 1,000,000, or 5,000,000...or maybe 100,000,000? I don't know. The supply is technically limitless. What does this mean? It means when you go and try to book a higher demand location, you won't be able to because the pool of point holders (the demand) is so much larger than the supply (the physical locations.) Now this may not be the case, but again...there's no paperwork anywhere that identifies this and no one appears to know the answer. (This may explain some other folks complaints as to why everything seems to book up 12 months in advance.)
5. One of my chief concerns is how Marriott has handled their "old" system customers that have had issues with the new system, their outward communication about the new program, and their response in the social media space. This is not indicative of a company that has their act together, treats their current customers with value, or frankly, understands the importance of responding in a public forum. (See Marriott's own blog from June of 2010 where people complained, and got zero responses back for the rest of us to see.) There was a responder here that did a great job at answering people's questions, and they didn't even work for Marriott. Marriott should themselves be finding and responding to these complaints openly in a public forum. (It didn't take me all of about 20 minutes to find this, and I don't work for Marriott either.)
My fear here is though I'm not a dissatisfied customer, if I ever was, Marriott will not be there to take care of me. I don't know if I'm prepared to do business with a company that doesn't seem to back-up their valued customers of the past.
It does sound like other folks have a wonderful experience, and I would love to be one of those people. (So would my wife and kids.) Let me know if I sound like I'm off base here, or if someone would like to convince me to keep my points rather than cancel the whole thing. What should I do?