For those of us that are have no experience with II, what is the benefit of it over RCI. Of the 3 TS's I have owned, all have been associated with RCI. I agree that the selection seems to be limited in value from RCI but have always just attributed that to my inexperience in using their system and not planning far enough ahead.
A lot of it amounts to personal preference. My list of advantages would be
1. Better quality resorts in II with Starwood, Westin, Hyatt, And Marriott available.
2. Lower membership fee
3. Lower exchanges fee's.
4. Request first option where I don't give up my unit until an acceptable exchange is confirmed
5. I've never had an exchange confirmation cancelled by II but every year I read in the exchange forum where a high value resort week gets cancelled by RCI and RCI attempts to substitute something of lesser value.
Now having said all this I'll qualify these advantages by telling you I'm canceling our personal II membership when the bill comes due. II has been increasing its fees and I find less value with Interval than I have in the past. We dumped 3 resort weeks that we use to exchanging in II. The weeks we've kept are almost exclusively used within their system or for personal usage. We use to make 2 to 3 exchanges per year. Now we're down to making one exchange every other year outside of the Marriott system of resorts. We do use Marriotts corporate II account to exchange between Marriott resorts but, that's covered by Marriotts all inclusive Destintion Club membership fee. I recently removed my phone number from our II profile so we stopped receiving annoying calls from rude II employees. This because the last one told me I couldn't request no phone calls from II.
Honestly we've found decreasing value in both RCI and II over the last several years as each have added new fees to go along with increasing membership and exchange fees. At this point we could live without either one if push came to shove.
