Disney does charge different MF for the different resorts. Also, Disney has an image to maintain, so does not have their sales force hammering people over the head, nor would they ever nickel and dime owners like Wyndham does.
My Wyndham TS cost me $100, so I didn't finance. I get my money's worth from it. But it doesn't mean that the level of service Wyndham offers its owners compares to what Disney does.
I agree the sales staff is the worst thing about Wyndham. I also agree that DVC does not have to resort to their tactics. But then again, they have the Disney name. People would buy dung, if you told them it was Disney dung. Not exactly a hard product to sell. As far as I know, every timeshare system that has points deeded to specific resorts, charges owners maintenance fee based on whatever rate the HOA sets. That’s the stuff that covers resort related expenses. It doesn’t cover the expenses of the program itself. Wyndham charges a program fee on those points. You have a small contract, so you pay $131 a year that gets lumped into your yearly or monthly payment. That cost goes to paying for things related to the program. Like the reservation transaction credits. If you only travel once a year, you never pay that fee because you get a certain number of free ones based on the amount of points you own.
I’ll repeat myself again. Disney’s business model for their timeshare will not work for Wyndham. Let’s say someone with 200,000 points, might get a week at one place. Another person might uses those 200,000 points to book three weekend trips. So they used the booking system three times , and they had three cleanings. They used three times the amount of resources as the first owner, but they both pay the same program. If we did Disney’s business model, we would have to charge a program fee, that would cover the costs of that person who is using it more. That means charging the first owner a higher fee to cover the extra costs. Not exactly fair, but for a small program like Disney, it’s not a huge impact to do it that way. You have fewer owners like that second owner, because you have fewer owners period. Wyndham has a lot more of those, because they have a lot more owners. So charging the same program fee to everyone, means they have to estimate the cost of hundreds of thousands of owners. I watched one of the annual owner meetings from webcast when they were talking about the budget. The executive (whose name escapes me) made a comment, that if they charge a fee to high, they would have excess money at the end of the year. That excess money would get taxed. So, they try it avoid that, by charging a rate that would cover the expenses for the majority of the cases and letting the owners who use more resources, pay for those extra resources they are using. That level of service Disney provides, doesn’t come free. You pay for it. Wyndham’s resorts are beautiful, all the staff have been friendly (not counting sales and marketing), and I’ve never be disappointed with the accommodations. I’ve also not been disappointed with the level of service either (again, sales and marketing not included).
If you’re thinking it’s crazy that Wyndham wouldn’t want to charge extra to pad their bottom line, I can see why you would think that. It has to do with complicated tax laws. If they make money in one area, it gets taxed at a higher rate then another area. So they do their best to make money in other places to limit their tax liability. It’s a balancing act. It’s not an easy one with a system as large as Wyndham.
Do I agree with everything they do? Absolutely not, but I’m on the outside looking in. I do my best to try to understand what they are doing, because the alternative is to be ticked off every time they make a change, or charge a fee.
Good job blowing off the sales people. I don’t know why they thought you would actually consider spending $100,000 when you own 49,000 points, and have done just fine with that. I doubt anyone here will say they met a smart Wyndham sales person. The tactics they used are shared among the various systems, because many of the timeshare sales people will jump to another timeshare system and sell there. They bring whatever tactics with them, that worked for them. It doesn’t take just intelligence to tell the same tales, and answer the same questions, Day in and day out.
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