This year RCI, the largest timeshare trading company, rolled out a new way to trade in the “weeks” system. We have heard a lot of questions from folks who are confused, and so we are going to try to bring people up to speed. Some like the new system, some don’t–and many don’t understand it.
We are still learning the system ourselves and also have some issues that we are not clear about, but we will do our best to help you to understand and better use the system. RCI has created a number of tutorials on their site which might be helpful for you to read and would be good for reinforcement of what we have outlined in this post.
Background:
When RCI first started as a trading company, you gave them your week and you could then trade for a week that somebody else had given them. It cost to join RCI, and you had to pay a fee to book a new week. Usually you could get a week similar to what you gave; for example, you could get a two bedroom red week if you deposited a two bedroom red week. What your week could pull was always a mystery. RCI would say it depended on the size of the unit, the time of the year, the location, gold or silver ranking, and how early you deposited that week. Also in the mix was the number of units that were available in the location you wanted to go, and how late or early you were trying to book a week.
Using the Wyndham system, where we own several weeks, we would ask them for a studio in off-season to deposit with RCI in the hopes of getting a two bedroom in prime time. We did this numerous times and have had great vacations while using a minimal amount of our Wyndham points.
Several years ago, in order to provide what they thought was a better and more flexible system, RCI created the RCI Points Program. This program has nothing to do with the trading power of your fixed weeks into RCI that we are currently discussing in this post. Apparently, RCI was in the hopes that everyone would jump on the points system, but many resorts and timeshare owners did not choose to join the RCI Points system. They wanted to stay in the week’s system, so in the hopes of making the system easier and better, RCI has come up with a new way of handling weeks resorts and trading power. One of our future posts will deal with the RCI Points Program.
New Trading Power-Weeks:
RCI has put into place a new trading power number system to use when you trade within the RCI Weeks’ system. What they have done is to take the resort, the week, and the unit, and assign a trading number to that week. They base that number, we think, on size of unit, location, gold and silver status, and time of year. The time of year does not necessarily line up with the red, white, and blue weeks system. You can go online into your weeks account, use the deposit calculator, and give it your resort, unit number and date of your week, and it will give you your trading power number.
For example, we own several weeks at a resort in northern Michigan, Pinestead Reef. When we give it some of those weeks, we get the following trading power numbers: red winter week (January), one bedroom=12 trading power, white spring week (May) one bedroom=15 trading power, early summer red week (June), one bedroom= 22 trading power, red early fall week (September) 2 bedroom=30 trading points. We also own a two bedroom summer unit in Gatlinburg, TN and that gets a 19 for trading power. So you can see some of the different amounts in trading power points that we would get if we would give one of our weeks to RCI to trade.
They also have a chart that shows you the reduction in trading power points if you give it to RCI less than a year ahead of your scheduled week. The chart shows that if you book from 14 days out you only get 45% of your trading power, 15 to 30 days is 60%, 31-90 days gives you 80%, 91-180 days you get 90%, and 275 or more days before your week begins you get the full 100% trading power.
If you trade your week with RCI, it will show up online along with the number of points they give you for trading– thus your trading power points. You then go online and look for a possible vacation, and it will tell you how many points you will need to book any given week, resort and date that they have in their inventory. If you have nothing currently deposited with RCI, you can go online and look at the Exchange Planner. Using that, you give it a location and time of year, and they will give you the average number of points needed to trade into that area, along with the high and low. For example, to go to the Big Island in Hawaii, the average is 20-22 trading power points with a range of 11 to 44 trading power points. Looking at Orlando in Florida, they say the average is 14-17 points needed.
When you book a resort, RCI takes the trading power points needed for that resort and you keep the balance of what you have from your week. It might be possible to take your week and book two weeks of vacations. You can also, for a fee of $99.00, combine any weeks you have to get more trading power points if you need them. For example: let’s say we want to trade our Gatlinburg week, worth 19 points, for a week in Orlando that only requires 14 points. We make the trade, and we have 5 trading power points left over. We then could take one of our Pinestead weeks (12 trading power) and for $99.00 combine it with our 5 leftover points, giving us a new total of 17. We can then use that to book another week in Florida.
To add some confusion to the trading power points system, some resort systems like Hilton and Wyndham do not use these trading power points. They have you go into their websites and link to an RCI section. You can then search for a vacation, and they will tell you how many of their points would be needed to book that vacation. I suggest that you look into the timeshares you own and work with those systems to better understand your trading power within RCI.
We hope that this post has given you a better understanding of the RCI trading power points. If you have questions, let us know and we will try to answer them. Also, if you have points of clarification on this post, let us know and we will share them with everyone.
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