Marriott One Week Owners and the Destination Club

All,

The moderators may edit out the website name -- if they do, please Google "rent marriott points" and follow the link from TUG.

Best,

Greg

What's ROFR?

kathrynm139 wrote:

What's ROFR?

That means Right OF First Refusal. So If you have a buyer for your Marriott timeshare at a specific price, Marriott has the right to buy it first at the price the buyer offered. So if you had a buyer that was going to buy your Maui resort for $10,000 and you accepted this offer from the buyer, Marriott has the right to buy it first for that same $10,000. This has not been happening much over the last few years, but it Marriott will be exercising it more at their higher demand resorts in the future since they are charging so much for the points program.

Makes perfect sense. I wondered why Marriott hadn't been buying up properties--but now I think it's getting critical for them because of the Destinations Program....They need the inventory!

At the outset of the Destinations trust, the entire inventory of unsold properties was placed in the trust. Because of the bad economy at the time and a slowdown in development, I suspect that the unsold properties placed in the trust were not the "pick of the litter" and that Dest point buyers bought into a less than sterling portfolio. Of course, they would need to then sell Dest points sufficient to absorb the inventory. At some point, the trust will need to either buy inventory or develop new properties for the trust to resell as points. Now, two years later, Dest might be using the ROFR to acquire the better properties, considering both season and location. Certainly, they can buy (cherry pick) great properties at a lower cost than developing new properties (more profits).

I wonder if we will ever see the development of any great new properties. It may be that the concept of pre-packaged travel deals for points might displace the development of new properties (less capital investment and risk). We'll see.

Perhaps. But those "pre-packaged" travel deals aren't really great deals--especially when you still need to provide your own airfare! I think they will need to re-think those packages to make them more atractive than they currently are.