The Club - Should we do it? And how much will it cost?

[brisket lover Member Find all posts View Profile Close brisket lover]

Thanks, I remember Doug and other's helping me learn a lot over the past year. Then I didn't see the point of the Club but now I do. As for the Trust like others have said it only seems to benfit DRI.

I like the idea of the Club and know it would cost a bit more based on ability to take vacations but I still may join. I wish I had more than 3 weeks of vacation a year and then it would really make sense.

[dougp26364 Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close dougp26364]

As recently as last month DRI sales stated that the ability to hold on to your deed and join THE Club is still offered. If the price is still $2995 I don't know but haven't heard of any change in that. They do not sell deeded weeks anymore but you can easily get one resale.

We found the value of trades within II to be much better using the DRI priority than it had ever been as a mere paying II member. So much so that we dropped our paid II membership and only use the corporate one that DRI attaches to THE Club. That means we cannot put our non-DRI weeks into II but we really don't want to do that anyway as the value is far better on those with RCI or other non-II groups.

We also found no benefit to us to be a Trust member rather than holding our deeds and joining THE Club for additional trade options. We also like holding on to the voting rights deeded ownership gives us at the resort vs the far more limited value of a single member vote in the Trust. Overall our calculations also show that annual fees would be higher (by a considerable amount) if we were in the Trust vs the cost of our resort fees + annual Club fees.

The overhead of the Trust and the "blending" of fees from all the member resorts results in a higher fee than simply owning at our resort, holding the voting rights and then paying for the Club fees. We wish that the silly "Gold" II membership - which added $69 to the annual Club fees - would be dropped and return us to a regular II membership as the "Gold" stuff is basically worthless as most of those programs tend to be. It should be an option if you want it not forced on Club members if they want it or not. That type of one sided decision we cannot control is another reason we prefer to hold a vote in our own deeded ownership rather than one in a Trust. Unfortunately the Trust is so large that your vote will have virtually no chance of making any difference. While you still have to have a majority on your side at the deeded resort level your chances of success are far greater as the pool of votes is much smaller.

Overall we are happy with our decision in 1999 to join what was then the Sunterra points system while holding on to our deeded week. Looking at things today we would still consider joining Club but we would never give up our deed to do so.

Glad to hear that they still offer the deeded weeks conversion into THE Club. It's been an excellent value for us.

As to trade power, I guess it just depends on what where you owned. Polo Towers has about the same trade power as what I see with DRI points.

As to Interval Gold, I'm wondering if Interval put that in as a condition to allowing points to be used. They realigned the number of points used to exchange for weeks through interval based on the TDI and unit size. It makes me believe that the contract had run out and required re-negotiation and that resulted in the Gold membership.

Marriott is supposedly coming out with their own points based program in a few weeks. One of the things I'm very interested in will be how Interval memberships will be treated. I'm assuming it will be a corporate membership and that it will be Interval Gold. If that's the case I'm more inclined to believe it wasn't DRI selecting Gold but Interval which forced it upon us as a condition to the corporate account. Like you, Interval Gold is a waste of my money. I do not want and do not use the benefits it provides.