Full response has been received from HGVC!!
"Thank you for your inquiry. As indicated, I have met with our Partners at RCI to review your feedback. I am very sorry the HGVC trained RCI Vacation Guides you spoke with were not able to explain this situation.
It is RCI’s goal to match our members with vacation experiences at RCI Affiliated Resorts that are similar to their ownership experiences. Since Hilton Grand Vacations offers its members a high quality vacation experience, RCI tries to serve up similar experiences at RCI Affiliated Resorts which may restrict the number of resorts initially offered up as potential exchange options. Since over 50% of HGVC member transactions with RCI are facilitated on-line, these initial quality filters are our best defense for a similar vacation experience match.
HGVC members are not excluded from confirming any of our 4,300 + RCI Affiliated Resorts via an HGVC trained RCI Vacation Guide. For this reason, different RCI members or Club accounts may initially be served up different availability at RCI Affiliated Resorts than what is initially offered to an HGV member. HGVC members are always welcome to speak with an HGVC trained RCI Vacation Guide for additional resort options that may suit their needs."
To follow up on the response from HGVC; HGVC made sure I was able to talk to a executive at RCI to be better informed for the remaining questions I had. I had a pretty lengthy phone discussion with the RCI executive about how the HGVC program works with RCI. The following points were confirmed:
- RCI does perform filtering of some resorts for the HGVC RCI program
- This filtering may sometimes be 'aggressive' and will sometimes filter out Gold Crown resorts (a definite flaw)
- Any resort, including the filtered resorts, are available to HGVC members by calling HGVC RCI and requesting availability
- The 'Last Call' vacations may also be filtered, but calling HGVC will provide full access
- Additionally, it was pointed out that 'vacation getaways' are also available to HGVC members! This is an option that does not show up on the HGVC RCI website, but is available by calling HGVC RCI.
- HGVC owners have full access to ALL of RCI's availability
I certainly felt much better about this whole problem after discussing this with the HGVC executive as well as the HGVC RCI executive. All of my question were answered and the whole thing was very professional. It restored my confidence in HGVC.
However, I would imagine by now everyone would have to be asking themselves; If all of the above bullets are true, why did this problem ever occur to begin with?? And that is exactly the question I posed to the HGVC RCI executive. Her answer; "Unfortunately, that is an additional training opportunity for us". We made 2 separate phone calls to HGVC RCI for this exact reason, trying to ensure what we were being told was correct. We considered it unlikely that two different people would be so uninformed. Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what happened. HGVC RCI has to better train their phone counselors about this filtering and how to respond to callers with this problem. This seems to be the root cause of the whole situation and something that HGVC and HGVC RCI have to address.
We have not made any follow up phone calls to HGVC RCI to see if any of this training has taken place. That will certainly be done in the future. However, at least at this point, if any problem is encountered, I know what is supposed to happen and will ensure that I press the counselor to find someone who is better trained!
I want to thank all of you for your support throughout this investigation, in particular; talent312 and alwaysonvac who provided the invaluable contact help.
And System issues do occur from time to time. 
