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Advice on exchanging BG for RCI Weeks

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  • Advice on exchanging BG for RCI Weeks

    Current situation is that my Mother-in-Law purchased 13,000 Bluegreen points per year in August of 2005. She originally purchased them because her parents live near Branson and she was planning to travel there twice yearly and help take care of them. Unfortunately, they both passed away and she now has no reason to go to Branson. She has 13k points left over from her original purchase (they were extended 12 months in August) and her 13k for this year have also recently been deposited. Unfortunately, we live in Southern California wih almost no reason to travel to the Bluegreen resorts (though the Vegas one could change that), so we might be exchanging on a yearly basis if it makes sense or looking to sell the points.

    She has asked me to help her figure out the best way to use her points because she and my wife (her daughter) are planning to travel to Europe at some point this year. They do have a lot of flexibility with the timing of their trip though they would prefer not to go in the summer. We will need to do an exchange through RCI but there is not a lot of clarity on the Bluegreen or RCI web-sites for the best way to do this.

    As I understand it, we need to reserve Bluegreen weeks and then transfer these to RCI for trading power. (I don't think Bluegreen points can be converted to RCI points, but let me know if I am incorrect about this.) I am curious what week/resort/unit size combo would give us the most trading power. I am tempted to call Bluegreen and ask their advice on this, but thought I'd post the question here first so I can have an idea of what to ask for before making the phone call. Also, I don't know if the Bluegreen customer service people are particularly helpful in situations like this since we won't be using the points at a Bluegreen resort.

    I believe that the 13k points from 2005 are only usable in certain seasons but the 13k points from 2006 should have a good amount of power. The ideal situation would allow me to convert all of the BG points to 2, 3 or 4 weeks, then I would deposit those into RCI. We could use the additional weeks for vacation(s) at other resorts out this way during the course of 2007.

    Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

  • #2
    Just one way

    There are many ways that you can do this and others I'm sure will chime in, but here's where I would start.

    You didn't say what size accomodations your MIL and wife were looking for, but I've been able to take one bedroom deposits and trade via RCI to a two bedrooms pretty easily. Therefore, I would stick to one bedroom or even studio deposits in order to stretch my points. You just need to understand that you might only end up with the size you deposited.

    The biggest factors for trading power via RCI are season and timing...the earlier the deposit, the better it trades. I will warn you about Europe, the quality of resorts are typically not up to par with the US, but there are plenty of resorts in the alps and Canary Islands that you should be able to pull. If you are looking for London, there is another exchange company called SFX that you should think of using...if that's the case, I'll tell you what I know about that

    I would use my "old" points to try and book Aruba or Hawaii...those are pretty good traders year round. If I couldn't do that, I'd try for any resort for Thanksgiving week. If I couldn't do either of those I would look at the points charts and focus on the resorts that only have red time...no "ultra red" and try and get any summer weeks with those. (You can't book "ultra red" with old points).

    For the new points, I'd look at beachfront in the summer just about anywhere...if you can get 4th of July all the better. Then any major holidays as a second. I would stay away from Orlando.

    If you deposit studios you should be able to get three or four weeks out of your points and you stand a good chance of trading into a part of Europe that has lots of timeshares.

    Hope that helps.

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    • #3
      one more thing

      You might also think about prepaying your 2008 maintenance fees...then you would have 26,000 "new" points to play with in addition to the 13K old points you have.

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      • #4
        Thank you Holly...

        Great advice and this gives me some great starting ideas.

        Thanks!

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