I hit 500K+ points this week (all through 3rd party purchases at points resorts)! I called to make a reservation because I was getting an error booking online (I was told online booking could be down several more days), and I was informed that I had Premier status, which is interesting because nothing shows up on the website - when I hit 300K+, I had status online for a week or two and then lost it.
Anyway, I booked a reservation for next July and got my 15% discount, but there was no availability for upgrades and I checked a few dates for my free 4-night stay and there was nothing available.
This makes me think that you automatically get status if you purchase from a 3rd party and cross a points threshhold, but then they manually remove it when they do checks on a regular basis, but another possibility we should investigate further is whether it's only suppressed online?
Does anybody here have 300K+ points purchased from 3rd parties? If so, can you call HICV and see if you have status?
Regarding bulk conversion, I noticed the other day that if you click on special offers for NY and select Hertz, it shows timeshare prices starting at $5250 in the fine print, which is about $2K cheaper than the best offer I've received. "THE COMPLETE OFFERING TERMS ARE IN AN OFFERING PLAN AVAILABLE FROM SPONSOR." Anyone ever seen a HICV offering plan?
I'm currently considering purchasing 4 units and converting for $8K - if it was $6K, then I might consider converting only 3 units, since $2K per unit is about the most I want to pay. For a 200K unit, this works out to $10/1K points, which is only $1/1K points over 10 years. If you buy fixed weeks and convert them, it's pretty easy to save $1-$2/1K point in annual maintenance.
I would want to purchase all fixed weeks before doing a conversion - HICV told me you can only convert one you already own plus 3 new ones, so I would put the extra ones in my wife's name - once I have one in my wife's name, I'm thinking about experimenting with a pair of quit claim deeds to see if I can get the unit added to the main account in my name - that would be a template for doing the same thing with someone who already owns a unit that has been converted to points to try to transfer a units at a non-points resort but still keeping the points.
-Scott
