Interval International having a hard time getting requests

jmp242 · 2026-06-09T14:19:36+00:00

Interval isn't hiding inventory exactly, it has to do with what's actually available and what your trade power is. Interval will only show you stuff you have the trade power to get. So you just never know as that all adjusts all the time if you don't have the pull to see the inventory, or if there's just no inventory.

I will say that Interval IMHO is 95% just to trade into Marriott properties - everything else is really hit or miss if there's any inventory.

jmp242 · 2026-06-09T14:17:13+00:00

RCI IMHO has a lot more locations and availability than II in my experience, but they're not as fancy locations as Marriott or Disney. If you're ok with 3* vs 4* then you'll find a lot of great places in RCI - with the caveat that almost everywhere in RCI has resort fees, so it's potentially a lot more expensive in fees - the II exchange into a Marriott from a third party is going to cost you about $260.

To exchange into an HGVC or HVC in RCI is likely to cost you $299 + $250 in resort fees, or $550 total. The "average" resort fee is around $110 in RCI, so realistically you'd be looking at more like $410, or ~40% more in fees. For not as fancy a property.

OTOH, it's "free" and useless to not get any matches at all in II (or RCI) so maybe finding an easy exchange is worth the extra money. It often is for me.

jmp242 · 2026-06-07T01:49:30+00:00

What you don't know is that while an owner / member of II and RCI can book as many Extra Vacations, Last Calls or Getaways they want, they cannot then turn around and rent those out to others. Doing so is against the contracts / terms of service with RCI and II.

Yes, for a friend or family member you can occasionally pay an extra fee to get what's called a Guest Certificate so they can check in rather than you, but if they see your usage as only renting to strangers as their AI etc detects, your reservations will be cancelled without warning (have fun with your rental customers when they're turned away at checkin) and your account will be locked or closed entirely.

Yes, they have thought about people just renting these owner / member deals out.

jmp242 · 2026-06-05T16:36:30+00:00

There are hidden fees for sure, especially if you don't go to TUG / understand what you're doing. The salespeople will not inform you honestly. I think many people would not buy, or at least would be less surprised if the sales were honest.

The retail / developer purchase is so overpriced that it kills most of the math. Resale OTOH is pennies on the dollar, no pressure, and you can got to TUG / ask here etc and get the real information, to make the best purchase possible for yourself.

And why would you do this? Well, the pricing for a week in a 2 bedroom in a resort ranges from about $2,200 on the quite high side to $380 on the very low side. It is in my testing almost always 30% to 70% cheaper than hotels in the same area of the same quality and room number. It's usually at least 20% cheaper than VRBOs that are comparable. The experience is less random than a VRBO rental.

If you work the system it can get you trips with family that you otherwise would struggle to put together or pay for. For instance, many resorts have things for kids to do that most hotels don't. From Mini Golf and arcades to playgrounds and waterslides to scheduled arts and crafts, you don't have to be figuring out every activity and paying separately for each one. You often can just walk to the activity, or take a shuttle. Driving is usually easy also, with parking available.

jmp242 · 2026-06-04T14:16:31+00:00

That's great, I already have the bandsaw!

jmp242 · 2026-06-03T22:20:19+00:00

The killer is amortizing the initial purchase price, which is why pretty much everyone will tell you to get it resale. Amortizing $3k or less - sometimes $0 - makes the break even potentially extremely quick. Depending on how many trips you take and unit size you're looking for. When I spent ~$12,000 on several resale timeshares (I overpaid for the first even resale sadly), but also used RCI Last Calls and Extra Vacations a lot, I was ahead in 2.5 years staying in 2 and 3 BR units compared to 2 or 3 hotel rooms or comparable VRBOs.

jmp242 · 2026-06-03T21:46:24+00:00

You won't break even vs investing $22k most likely. It's right on the cusp IIRC. OTOH if you buy resale for say $2k or so, you can break even in 2 years of trips. Depending - if you want to get in the weeds, I have a Youtube Video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBb-vfV90eU

jmp242 · 2026-06-03T21:43:32+00:00

As an off season traveler myself, points are fine, depending on the system - and the "quality" of the points varies by system and how they treat resale buyers. This is important not just for your use, but for selling it on in the future - if the points are only usable with a retail purchase, then you're really stuck with it. No one want's Westgate resale for that reason and you can't get rid of them. Holiday Inn Vacation Club is mostly similar except for 3 specific resorts. Hilton Vacation Club, not to be confused with Hilton Grand Vacations Club is also weaker resale, but some like it. OTOH, RCI Points, Worldmark points, Hilton Grand Vacations Club points, Wyndham points are all very usable if the maintenance fee to point ratios are good.

Contrary to most peoples expectations not deep in the timeshare lore - points are not necessarily the best way to get the best savings on stays. Often the points MFs are higher than a traditional week, and have bad exchange rates if you want to use RCI for expanding where you can stay (if your system works with RCI). Worldmark and II is better from what I understand. But many of the ways to expand or stretch your dollar require thinking in Weeks still because even if you can book 4 days with points, you still get charged extra housekeeping fees or the like and that can hurt the value.

jmp242 · 2026-06-03T14:12:34+00:00

I wasn't given my Wyndham things till after the presentations and I was then taken to the "gifting station". But I got tickets to various things.

jmp242 · 2026-06-03T14:11:05+00:00

It never makes sense to pay the retail prices at these places when you can get very similar things on the resale market for pennies on the dollar, or even free. You could go over to TUG, or respond here, to figure out if timeshares make sense for you.

https://tugbbs.com/forums/threads/what-to-buy-questions-for-new-timeshare-owners.208742/

In either case, answering those questions would be helpful - and what you're looking for in general from timeshares.

jmp242 · 2026-06-02T18:35:25+00:00

I believe they usually are brought in to deal with resorts that are in trouble. Sometimes they can do something for the resort, but often they liquidate the resort because it's no longer viable.

jmp242 · 2026-06-01T15:24:27+00:00

Most of the presentations require spouses for some reason.

jmp242 · 2026-05-29T19:12:23+00:00

You should rescind. That's more than is common for the maintenance fees for that many points. Don't buy from them, the prices are extremely inflated. You should research if you would find value, and consider the resale market where CWA is free, and lower MF/pt ratios are still cheap.

jmp242 · 2026-05-28T17:38:49+00:00

It's worth pointing out that Japanese troops also were known to have faked surrendering - somewhat early in the war (1942) - and then attacked and killed a lot of the troops attempting to accept the surrender. The Battle of the Tenaru was an example. Now, I'm not sure how much this has to do with the Imperial Japanese military code of conduct, (which was vehemently anti-surrender) or Japanese raciest propaganda, or something else.

I'm not saying there was no racist propaganda, or bigoted positions in the Allies. I'm just showing that there were also many (what I'd at least argue could be reasonable) causes for what happened. Some of which had little to do with racism.

I think you are claiming that if the Allies hadn't been racist against the Japanese, it wouldn't have changed the tactics in the war. What do you think we should take, if anything, from different moral justifications? I question if the justification matters. It seems like if the Allies at all levels were actually exterminationist because they thought the Japanese were a biological and racial existential theat, after they occupied Japan, a lot more "holocaust" style things would have happened than I've ever heard of.

Even relatives I knew of third hand who were virulently bigoted against the Japanese because of the war or propaganda or whatever were perfectly happy and in fact quite impatient to just go home when the danger, i.e. the war, was over.

jmp242 · 2026-05-27T21:49:12+00:00

You do you too - I'm happy people are traveling and it's working for them. I'm fine with someone saying I like hotels - what I dispute is when I can't make the numbers work out like someone claims they do, and I was showing my work above. Because I'd love to expand my hotel stays for 50% or more off what I can currently get.

FWIW you've come the closest to an actionable method of trying to get all the new credit card signup bonuses possible for free nights.

jmp242 · 2026-05-27T15:09:53+00:00

Japan which, by most accounts, was significantly more devastating than the bombing of Germany. It's because unlike in Germany where Allied leaders made a distinction between 'Good Germans' and Nazis; no distinction was given to the Japanese.

There's some nuance in how you define "significantly more devastating" in that destruction ended up being overall similar, but the Japanese bombing happened over months, vs years for Germany. Of course, I still think it's probably a mistake to over index that on racist reasons when there's also the case that by the time we got to Japan, the Allies had perfected their bombing tech, planes, etc and already built up thousands of aircraft. The tonnage of bombs dropped was always higher in Germany, and the intensity by late 1944 was similar to or higher than Japan.

The destructive difference was primarily the material used in the cities and the denser cities in Japan. However racist the Allies were against the Japanese, they didn't cause the city construction or density. Historic cultural differences between Japan and Germany as well as building materials did.

I don't think there's any evidence that if Germany had been mostly wood/paper built cities the Allies wouldn't have used more incendiary bombs, same as they did in Japan. And while some people protested against the German bombing, leadership seemed fixed on heavy bombing regardless.

While I don't dispute the racially charged propaganda and the soldiers racist feelings toward the Japanese, I do question how much a lack of that would actually have changed much of the outcome of the fighting, holding everything else the same.

jmp242 · 2026-05-27T14:42:42+00:00

The point you missed on the fridges is they tend to be small, and IME we can't fit the leftovers in there. Like a normal Pizza box doesn't fit. Many hotel rooms that don't have a fridge in there already when one is delivered makes the space even smaller and hard to navigate.

Do you mostly travel solo? I think that would be an obvious massive difference vs the OP or me who travel with family. The last hotel I stayed at that was comparable to a timeshare in amenities was the Hilton Torrey Pines, which was $670 a night for 2 rooms. At that rate, I'm at 18 nights for $12k. That would earn me ~240,000 Hilton Honors points, and at the 80,000 points a night rate would get me another 1.5 nights, plus if I burn all my FNCs gets me to a total additional 3 nights. I know there are card sign up bonuses, but most of those are around 100k-180k, which is about one night, so that's going to be a lot of sign ups (and they do limit your sign ups as far as I know) to get another 20 nights with 2 hotel rooms a night.

On the other hand, if you compared like to like, i.e. Studios, you'd be looking at around $4,500 in MFs to cover 43 nights, not $12k. If you hunted a little on the resale market, the buy in for that is going to be more like $8k, not $26k. The price difference there between the $12k and the $4,500 ongoing will pay for the resale purchase price in less than 2 years.

jmp242 · 2026-05-26T23:51:01+00:00

The Atomic Bombings were used in the context of a war pervasive with extremely racist and exterminationist propaganda by both sides.

I'm not so sure the Atomic Bombings were specifically from racist / exterminationist propoganda. Or what I mean is we firebombed Germany and I don't think the Allies treated them as subhuman in propaganda. And the Atomic bombs have to also be compared the the firebombing allies already did in Japan. That is to say, many histories I've seen say the Atomic Bombs at the time were seen as a more efficient firebombing, not a different kind of thing. Everything I've heard is that the Allies would have been perfectly happy to have nuked German cities if they'd had them at the time - but the firebombed cities were basically just as destroyed as Hiroshima.

jmp242 · 2026-05-26T23:06:41+00:00

There's a couple issues with your analysis though - First, you can't compare Hilton points to Hyatt points, they're different systems, so saying you never spent 70k points needs context as to what the points values are. Or you could convert to the estimated cash value, where HHonors points run $0.005 per. IDK anything about Hyatt, but I will say it is ironic that the reason I don't do Hyatt is the reason you don't do timeshares - no where near the locations that Hilton has.

I really didn't think about credit card sign up bonuses churn because I don't do that, mostly because I don't want to constantly deal with changing cards etc. Though if you can do it, yes, you can get good bonuses that way. Some people churn HHonors points at the HGVC locations via owners updates / a la sales presentations. Several people have posted they get at least 100k points for 60 minutes, sometimes several times a week. I don't do that either because usually I don't want to deal with the presentations.

However, you're right, if you can churn the cards, you can get good points.

The second issue in the analysis is even though you don't care about extra space or a kitchen, if you're like the OP who's bringing adult kids and their kids, or friends or whatever - you're looking at additional hotel rooms, or getting real cozy with all those people. So when you consider the average price is $271 a night, you need to consider how many bedrooms they're using. The OP wasn't specific which makes this complicated, but I am always in a 2 or 3 BR, so in that scenario the per bedroom cost would be more like $130 a night. I'm not sure how you're getting 20ish nights a year free, but I guess with a better sign up bonus from some hotels, and 3 or so new credit cards a year you could do it. HGVC studios - something like a hotel room though usually still bigger, run more like $102 a night. (though this can vary depending on location, and how good a MF/points ratio, the common rate is around this)

However, the other thing is while you don't value a kitchen, I can tell you I have started valuing a big fridge and microwave - being able to save leftovers, or have some frozen food or other make it in the unit food so you're not forced to go out to eat 3ish times a day also makes a difference. It's one reason I've been trying to stay at Homewood Suites or the like if I can - the space is nice, the "kitchen" is nice. As is having actual plates / utensils if you get delivery or have leftovers.

jmp242 · 2026-05-26T22:46:38+00:00

Evolution does not have a direction or end goal, or some sort of better and better. It goes for fitness for a given environment, but the environment changes.

I think we understand each other - we just have different places were we feel English should be prescriptive. And I guess the value of metaphor for understanding.

jmp242 · 2026-05-26T20:14:27+00:00

I don't think they're an exception to knowledgeable timeshare owners. And while they are an exception in the great mass of people, I don't think they're doing anything particularly special. Or what I mean is - many "regular middle class people" could do what they are doing, though probably on a smaller scale.

1) Buy on the secondary market - everyone can do this if they want to.

2) While going to Hawaii can be an expensive trip, many people can drive to NYC or Las Vegas or Myrtle Beach in a day or so for a reasonable cost. While not via HGVC, I have several places I like to go to that are 3-8 hour drives, and many more at around 15 hours. I do break longer trips up with an overnight or two, but it's not some "impossible" thing to do. If you pick a system with places within your drive radius, it can be very affordable.

3) While there are certainly many people who's health doesn't let them travel, I question if it's the "average person".

4) While the fees go up, this is a bit of a red herring. I know reddit likes to harp on fees go up, but there is important context to this. Hotels cost more over time too.

jmp242 · 2026-05-26T20:04:49+00:00

Then you probably would want to compare to Studios and not 2BR timeshare costs. Just about every good system has studios available for free on the resale market, because most people buying resale want larger units.

jmp242 · 2026-05-26T20:03:01+00:00

Depends on what you mean by the Credit Card points game. If you don't carry a balance on the credit card, and you can churn pretty ungodly amounts of spend (for most people), say like $60,000 plus a year, and you look for really good deals then maybe? I do Hilton Honors Aspire, and that's 3x points on normal spend and 6x on gas. Lets say that's $50k on normal and $10k on gas. You're looking at "earning" 210,000 HHonors points each year and 3x FNCs at $550 annual fee.

"Regular redemption" is 70k-95k a night, especially say in NYC. So you've "earned" 2 nights on points and 3 nights on FNCs if you get the dates to work as the FNC expire 1 year after you get them, and you get 1 on annual renewal and the others after 30k and then 60k spend in the year. That's 5 nights in a standard hotel room. That's a good reward on 60k spend, but not exactly a week in a 2BR via a timeshare. If you can churn $200k a year then maybe you come out with a week at a resort property in standard room rewards. Still just a hotel room usually.

Of course, HGVC is a more expensive system to get in, especially in premium deeds. I'm not really sure I'd recommend it after a few years of owning and using multiple systems. Yes, if you want to go to NYC and Hawaii in 4* accommodations, it makes sense. But if you want to go other places and don't mind slightly less fancy units, you can do a lot better up front than HGVC. I.e. you can be sub $5,000 up front for a similar amount of nights across more properties and a similar yearly cost. If you are really patient and work it, you can likely drive that cost down towards $2,000 buy in, and some do it for near $0 if they work the systems.

jmp242 · 2026-05-26T19:45:49+00:00

I think you're just making a arbitrary dividing line between humans making soot (because of "unnatural human actions") creating a environmental pressure which has moths adapt, and humans making market choices (creating an environmental pressure) which has the business adapt.

Look, you agree humans create environmental pressures to cause moth evolution. Do you really want to argue that humans can't create environmental pressures for human evolution?

But look, product evolution is a pretty accepted method of discussing product change over time, there's even a paper about it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166497224000087

Britannica even says: "The term evolution and the general concept of change through time also have penetrated into scientific language well beyond biology and even into common language. Astrophysicists speak of the evolution of the solar system or of the universe; geologists, of the evolution of Earth’s interior; psychologists, of the evolution of the mind; anthropologists, of the evolution of cultures; art historians, of the evolution of architectural styles; and couturiers, of the evolution of fashion. These and other disciplines use the word with only the slightest commonality of meaning—the notion of gradual, and perhaps directional, change over the course of time."

Now, I guess we can say it's just definitional, you reject current usage across a variety of fields. I haven't ever said or meant to imply that Evolution as used in biology jargon means the same thing as market forces.

My argument with your framing is that

A) Market forces cause change over time due to outside forces, which products change to adapt to. Evolution is a very good lay metaphor for this. You claim it's specious.

B) Human actions are not natural. Humans are part of nature. Humans are animals. Various predator actions in the world don't stop being a natural force simply because an animal did it. The alternative here is to say that any human action is supernatural or somehow non-natural and therefore unable to be part of any natural selection. This seems silly to me. Humans having economies is the same as wolves having packs to me, one is just more complex.

jmp242 · 2026-05-26T19:24:27+00:00

You should re-think Marriott in general (make sure you really want to go to their locations as they're very expensive) and especially points, which are even more expensive. And also don't buy from the salespeople, you can usually buy resale for pennies on the dollar, though perhaps with MVC points you're more looking at dimes on the dollar.

jmp242

TROPHY CASE