Originally Posted by
travelexpert
...New owners can buy into this new program or the old system.
As of June 21st you can only buy points, they will no longer be selling weeks.
Originally Posted by
rylan
I've been reading about it, and it appears to be a horrible system. With the current/old system, you get priority at your home resort if you want to exchange back in to a different time period. Not with the new points system. They also want more points to use my weeks than they say they are worth. What a crock. And if you want to exchange vacation points to MR points, you end up getting a LOT less than if you traded your week directly to MR points. They have weekend point rates jacked way up too.
Definitely will NOT be going into the new program. Also, they want to charge an outrageous fee just to join for the privilege to exchange my weeks for points and get less value out of them.
Time to send a nasty email complaining... boy I hope this new program really backfires and their sales drop down the crapper.
On the surface at the current time, I own three weeks and superficially it looks like my use of the program would have pluses and minuses...essentially a wash for me.
That being said,there are two very negative issues I can see with the program.
The first is the so called "breakage" tax whereby Mr. Marriott gets to extract his pound of flesh..simply because he can...in some cases, up to 20% but on average has been reported at 7%.
The second negative is that they are now selling arbitrary points that Mr. Marriott can, again, re-value to anything he feels like. Much like the MR hotel points system. The problem is the buyer buys a fixed # of points and when old Bill decides that his retirement fund is running low he simply re-values the points and viola he now has a nice cola(cost of living adjustment)--kind of like the government.
Given the sales tactics and the knowledge base of the general public, MVCI will get more then enough of the general public to 'drink the Kool Aid' and this program will be a success.