Earlier in the month my partner and I were invited to stay at the Marriott Resort Surfers Paradise to attend a presentation/sales pitch for the Marriott Vacation Club.
We had previously sat through this 2 years earlier and were not impressed, a polite but firm no was offered at the end of the 2 hour session.
This time round I was curious to see what had changed if anything. They have added many more properties, however a property is listed if they have as little as 1 room/unit owned by the MVC.
The idea being similar to timeshare however that is a bad word, you buy points into a club which you can use to book hotels and other travel packages around the world. The base package you need is 1500 points, which at $19 a point plus fees comes to something $30k.
The salesperson asks how many weeks per year you would be on holiday/work and use that to manipulate numbers to trick you.
We said 3 weeks, which the salesman put into a calculator.
3 weeks per year, $200 per night, with taxes and inflation over 30 years popping out a number on the worse side of half a million dollars.
I asked him for a fair comparison to what 1500 points would get me, it turned out more like 7-8 nights, and lowered the ppn a little brang it down to $90K over 30 years.
This caught him off guard a little, anyway he went on to explain the yearly fees, and here is the alarming part of this - roughly $1.8K in maintenance and other fees annually, which is subject to change whenever they feel.
I had had enough and indicated my negative feeling to the offer, his manager came to explain perks of "Join Today", which were definitely not swaying. I explained to them that $1.8K pays most peoples accommodation for a week or 2, they scoffed but knew by now I wasn't interest and let us go but not before offering another try later in the future which I declined.
Points of interest being;
- To secure any bonuses/price freezes you must commit right there and then, with a 10% payment on the day.
- you must pay the annual fees regardless of whether you use the points or not.
- you cant sell points without paying ridiculous fees per point.
- There are 7k odd properties however you are competing with 420K members for these properties.
- They supplied us with the Product Disclosure Statement(dozens of pages)… 3 minutes before we began the presentation.
The annoying part is Marriott Resort is a fantastic place to stay, but they have become the host for MVC in Australia, and it has become a major turnoff for me to consider staying there in the future.
I advise anybody attending a pitch to research before arrival, ask many questions and go in defensive.
Ok