Explaining Marriott's "Seasons" of the year

Marriott's calendar is divided into "seasons" for its resorts. Those seasons differ from those designated by Interval International ("II") and serve a different purpose.

II divides exchange seasons into Red (highest), Yellow and Green. The higher the season, the more demand there is for trading into those weeks and, generally, the more trading power weeks during that period have.

Marriott's "season" designations are used for sales purposes to set different sales prices, based on how much demand Marriott expects there will be for purchasing weeks during a particular season. At some resorts (e.g., Hawaii resorts and Grand Chateau in Las Vegas), Marriott believed there would be comparable demand throughout the year and designated the entire year, with the exception of a few holiday weeks, as a single Platinum season. At other resorts (e.g., ski resorts), there are typically very slow fall and late spring seasons, making it appropriate to sell those off-season weeks at lower prices and generating the need for different seasons for setting prices.

Marriott has used different names for the various seasons at various resorts. It uses several different families of names for resorts with floating weeks:

• Platinum Holiday, Platinum Plus, Platinum (sometimes divided into Platinum Summer and Platinum Ski), Gold Holiday, Gold, Silver, Bonus Time, Bronze
• Special, Summer, Sport, Value, Preferred
• Red, Pink, White, Blue
• Fixed weeks (e.g., Streamside and Maui Sequel). Most of the Platinum Plus and Platinum Holiday weeks are fixed weeks.

Not all resorts have all of the seasons indicated for a particular line. For example, Las Vegas has one basic season and Grande Ocean has four. But both use the "Platinum" season system.

(I will add a link to this post in the FAQs for this forum.)